Last weekend I found myself on a Qatar Airways flight crossing the Saudi desert not far, according to the real time map displayed in front of me, from the Iraqi border. I was flying to Doha on an invitation from the World Economic Forum (the people who created the Davos summit, the Sundance of the global capitalism/Economist reading jet set) to attend something called the Arab World Competitiveness Roundtable.
Between moments of dread and a deep sense of being an odd-person out, I found myself comforted—if that’s the word—by flashbacks to scenes from the movie Syriana.
I often felt like the naïve, Swiss-based American energy analyst who finds himself calling his wife to tell her about the ultra-luxury hotel and who later senses he might have a front row seat watching major geopolitical shifts driven by the possibilities created by Gulf oil wealth. My hotel was not Dubai’s seven star (!) sail-shaped Burj al Arab, but the ziggurat-like Doha Sheraton.
The conference took place at the next hotel along the coast, the Four Seasons. The chain is owned by the Saudi-Lebanese Prince Al Walid and they tend to outdo themselves with gold plated...no, solid gold opulence. Think Rococo and use your imagination.
After being given my name tag (aka security badge) I was faced with the daunting challenge of entering the opening reception of hobnobbing CEOs and government ministers being maybe the only one who did not know a single person present. I was one of the few, actually the only plain academic there. The two other professors are the sort involved with private sector financed-WEF studies. I, on the other hand, happened to have once written a paper on tourism for an Arab League meeting that is easy to find via Google. I’m proud of the paper and I often meet people who have read it, but I suppose getting an invitation to be on a tourism panel here was the real payoff for drafting an unpublished essay.
Back to the daunting challenge of the reception. Wandering around, I wondered how I might find myself not just standing alone like it was some high school dance. I was lucky enough to notice a younger participant nearly doing the same, but not looking anxious like me. He turned out to be a publisher of The Middle East news monthly, with whom I talked for the 30 minutes or so before we were ushered into the dining tent.
A few minutes later I noticed the name badge of an official for the World Tourism Organization who was the only other non-tourism minister on the panel with me. After introductions we sat at an empty table. Moments later a women came up to my dinner partner informing him that he (and “his guest”) were requested to join the CEO of Qatar Airways who was at the head table and is also the head of the national tourism authority. I had read about him since he was on the tourism panel as well as being a host for the dinner and the whole event.
After the flashing of the local media photographers subsided, it turned out that our only other dinner guest was Lord David Owen (you might recall him from the Dayton Accords, or if old enough, a thing called the Cold War when he was once the British Foreign Secretary). He was in Doha to appear on a panel with a Saudi and two Iranian officials discussing the role of Iran in the Gulf. The topic of Iran dominated the dinner conversation. Lord Owen gave us a preview of the remarks he would offer the next day during what was billed as a debate to be telecast on Al Jazeera. A self-described Cold Warrior in a previous era, Owen’s big theme was the need for accommodation with Iran. He suggested the West drop sanctions and open a dialogue. Coming just days after the end of Iran’s holding of the British Marines, this seemed an approach that only a former politician could advocate. Owen noted he supported the Iraq war, and if it was successful we would not be discussing the need to contain expanding Iranian power, but with the failure of the war (which he blames on the utter incompetence of Bush and Blair) we need to deal with the mess.
This view struck me as a basic realist approach, that regional and global powers needed to adjust to the distribution of power in the Gulf, allow Iran its due but then establish a balance of power that contains Iranian expansion. In short, a new bi-polar order is needed to stabilize the new Middle East Cold War.
Al-Baker, the Qatar Airways CEO, also suggested the need for accommodation, noting that as the director of an airline he does business with Iranians (he, as well as the state of Qatar, also does business with the Israelis who have an economic affairs office in Doha which tells you something about the role they seek to play in regional geopolitics).
The next morning, at breakfast, I discovered on the cover of the business pages the following:
“Call for boosting ties among gas giants”, The Peninsula (Doha, Qatar), April 10, 2007
(Caption: Akbar Al Baker, CEO Qatar Airways, Lord David Owen, Former Foreign Secretary of UK, Geoffery Lipman, World Tourism Organisation, Waleed Hazbun, American University of Beirut at World Economic Forum during a reception at the Four Seasons Hotel yesterday.)
Throughout the conference, which really focused on economic and business issues, the theme of Gulf-Iranian ties emerged as a major topic of discussion and concern. These conversations always seemed to take place in the idiom of accommodation within a range of strategic postures.
At one end were the Saudis who made the integration of Iran into the Gulf contingent on Iran meeting IAEA demands first. Other Khaleejis (people from the Gulf) emphasized the existing business and social ties that exist across the Gulf. The Qatari Foreign Minister specifically noted they would not support a US attack on Iran (the US has a large base in the country). The Iranians themselves, including a security adviser (with turban in photo) and Mohammed Larijani, a physicist and the brother of Iran’s top nuclear affairs negotiator, spoke of peaceful cooperation within the context of a region in which Iran is a major player.
The strategic studies official passed out a “Ten Point Plan for Changing the Environment of the Persian Gulf to an Environment of Cooperation, Security and Development.” On the face of it, it’s the ideal sort of cooperative security community all parties should be seeking. The Iranians would not stop with their language of “our brothers on the other side of the Persian Gulf…” Taking a page, it almost seemed, from Shimon Peres, one Iranian responded to an Emirati who noted the Iranian occupation of some small Islands in the Gulf claimed by the UAE by pleading that small territorial issues should not prevent brotherly relations. Emiratis, he said, should invest in those islands so that soon they will own them! Then we can discuss territorial issues. Together with this brother-speak the Iranians were firm to repeat they will not negotiate about their rights to nuclear energy, calling efforts to prevent it neo-imperialism (or something like that).
My tourism panel took place right before the Iran panel and it was cut short as the debate had to begin on time, while our panel was delayed due to the previous session going over. Two themes were striking. One of the concerns was about job creation, which all noted is needed, and the other was that tourism is a growth sector in the region that could help provide jobs. But some pointed out (not, however, the ministers) that a visitor to Doha might meet a lot of nice South Asians and never get to know a local Arab.
A related question was that of regionalism. Some asked why the Gulf states did not hire staff from other Arab states, especially when there is so much talk of inter-Arab tourism as a growing trend. I will leave my thoughts on this topic to my academic papers.
Here is the photo from that session, moderated by a presenter from the Saudi-owned Al Arabiyah satellite television channel:
“Mideast states told to tap tourism market,” Gulf Times, April 11, 2007
(Caption: Al-Baker speaks as Garranah, Lipman, Hazbun and Cyba Audi-Daya look on during the session yesterday.)
In the end there was no dramatic conclusion or climax. I kept hearing the same Syriana theme song again and again in my head. We will have to wait for the plot to play itself out, for which Beirut is a front row seat for the action on the ground. There was something missing, however, from the discussions... it was the same something that made the film (Syriana) move forward. There were really no Americans at the conference. At dinner the first night after Lord Owen presented his ideas, I asked the group if a new regional Gulf order was possible considering the American position in the Gulf and its regime change posture towards Iran. As one of the few Americans and a scholar of US policy I found myself asking the same question in other contexts during the conference. It seems that any Arab Gulf willingness to accommodate Iran is contingent on (or made possible by) the American security umbrella in the Gulf, while Iran, on the other hand, seeks the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the region and wants to project its influence into spaces filled currently by the US. As an American official once stated, “We are not going halfsies with the Iranians.”
writing from Beirut...
(thanks to michelle for editing this post)





