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Daily News Analysis

Decaying Persian Gulf Regimes: Where is Thomas Friedman now?

Crescent International

On August 20 Kuwait’s Finance Minister Barak Al-Sheetan warned the Kuwaiti parliament that the regime will not have sufficient funds to cover public servants’ salaries after November.

According to Bloomberg, Al-Sheetan confirmed that his government is withdrawing from its General Reserve Fund at a rate of 1.7 billion dinars a month.

News from Kuwait was not the only one highlighting the trouble US-backed autocracies faced in the Persian Gulf.

On August 25, the Washington based al-monitor.com reported that “two prominent Gulf airlines are encouraging their employees to take unpaid leave as the airlines continue to grapple with the crisis in global travel. The Dubai-based airline Emirates told cabin crew they could take one to three months of unpaid leave between September and the end of November. Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi told crew they could take 10 days to six months of unpaid leave starting in mid-September, Reuters reported on Tuesday [August 25], citing internal memos.”

The latest bad news from the shaikhdoms should be viewed as part of the broader strategic failure of the political and economic architecture imposed on the region by colonial powers.

When the Islamic Awakening process (aka Arab Spring) began to rattle the US-backed order, Thomas Friedman, a vocal pundit of US imperialism was all over the media trying to convince Muslims that they should aim for adopting the archaic political order of the shaikhdoms.

Friedman and his ilk argued that Muslims should pay attention to glitzy malls and restaurants of Dubai and Doha.

Muslims were being urged to ditch self-determination and aim for sheepish existence under Western guidance and the shaikhdoms were touted as models of “success”.

Why wouldn’t NATO pundits advocate this? When Washington says jump, these regimes say, “How high, sir!”

With all the financial resources, military and political backing of powerful countries, the shaikhdoms failed to develop a sustainable economy, military or a political system.

The Western model shoved down people’s throat in the region is a complete failure and lacks indigenous support.

Wester media and academics love to constantly repeat that the Islamic socio-political program in the Muslim world has failed.

To support their claim they constantly talk about the “failure” of Islamic movements in Egypt and Algeria, two locales where Islamic movements were overthrown after winning legitimate elections, by autocrats with full Western backing.

The fact that Persian Gulf’s Arabian regimes are crumbling on their own without any direct external interference, while their masters in Washington, Tel Aviv and London keep all the doors of international finance, global trade and military aid open to them, shows what a dismal failure these Shaikhdoms have been.


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