Is the GCC in Trouble? If Iraq Defeats IS (1)
The Battle of Tikrit—capital of the
Saladin Governorate and the birthplace of former President Saddam Hussein—is
emerging as a defining watershed moment in the contemporary history of the
Middle East. This critical turning point sees the Iraqi federal army joining
forces with powerful Shiite militias under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in a massive,
coordinated military offensive to dislodge and reclaim this strategic
stronghold from the Islamic State (IS/ISIL/ISIS).
In hindsight, looking back to the zenith of IS’s power, it is an
undeniable historical reality that certain Iraqi Sunni tribes and local
factions within the "Sunni Triangle" actively facilitated the group's
meteoric rise. Driven by deep-seated resentment against the overtly sectarian
policies of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government in Baghdad,
these marginalized communities created a security and political vacuum. IS
exploited this societal fracture perfectly, swallowing key cities like Mosul
and Tikrit with terrifying speed.
Now, however, the pendulum of war is swinging back. The Iraqi
government and its aligned Shiite militias have seized the initiative, securing
the upper hand on the battlefield. This shift prompts a critical question among
global defense analysts:
If IS is successfully dismantled and purged from Iraq, how will
the fallout reshape the strategic calculus of surrounding regional
heavyweights?
Chief among the frontline actors caught in this geopolitical
crossfire is the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Comprising six monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman,
the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain—the bloc’s immediate geographical
proximity to Iraq means its security is inextricably linked to Baghdad’s
stability. The collapse of IS introduces a highly volatile, complex, and
multifaceted strategic equation for the Gulf capitals.
Understanding the GCC: The Shield and Balance of Power in the Gulf
The GCC was forged in 1981 against the backdrop of the Cold War
and mounting regional instability. While its founding charter emphasizes
economic, political, and cultural integration, through a Realist lens, its true raison d'être was
the creation of a collective security shield. This was a direct, defensive
response to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, which established a hostile
Shiite theocracy intent on exporting its revolutionary ideology. The Sunni
monarchies felt an urgent imperative to consolidate power to counterbalance and
contain Tehran’s revisionist ambitions.
Over the past three decades, economic integration has proven to
be the bloc's most triumphant and tangible milestone, backed by their colossal
leverage as global energy powerhouses.
The Gulf's Energy Clout (Data as of 2014): Together, the GCC nations command
approximately 40% of the world's proven oil reserves and 25% of its natural gas reserves. This massive
hydrocarbon wealth has allowed them to project outsized diplomatic influence
and build some of the largest Sovereign Wealth Funds on the planet.
Conversely, collective defense cooperation has historically
lagged. Guarded over their individual military sovereignty, member states
treated the Peninsula Shield Force (established in 1984) as a
largely symbolic rapid-deployment unit. It was only the recent onslaught of
asymmetric warfare, violent non-state actors, and bruising regional proxy
conflicts that forced the Gulf monarchies to urgently operationalize and upgrade
their collective defense architecture.
The Security Equation: A Complex Calculation of Gains and Losses for the GCC
Evaluating what an IS collapse in Iraq means for the GCC
requires looking past a simple binary. To map out this intricate landscape,
Part 1 explores the positive strategic dividends and
proactive countermeasures adopted by the bloc.
Tangible Benefits: Crushing an Existential Threat to the Crowns
From an internal security standpoint, IS is far more dangerous
than a conventional insurgent group—it represents an existential
ideological threat to the very survival of the Gulf monarchies. The
foundational objective of IS is the total eradication of modern Middle Eastern
borders, which it decries as artificial relics of Western imperial cartography,
to be replaced by a transnational Caliphate. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
declared himself "Caliph"—a title that, under their hyper-radicalized
theology, demands the absolute, uncompromised allegiance of every Muslim
worldwide across both spiritual and political domains.
The Threat to the Crowns: Within Baghdadi’s extremist framework, the ruling royal
families of the GCC are viewed as apostate regimes devoid of Islamic
legitimacy. Their overthrow is considered a religious necessity to bring the
holy lands of Arabia under the Caliphate’s black banner. For the Gulf capitals,
this is an existential red line.
In Sunni political thought, the Caliphate is a complex, deeply
revered historical institution. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire stood
as its last grand manifestation, operating with the Quran as its ultimate
constitutional anchor and a sovereign validated by the Shura (a consultative council of Islamic scholars and
jurists).
Historically, however, the institution of the Caliphate ebbed
and flowed, frequently clashing with dynastic kingdoms and modern monarchies
where rulers held absolute territorial power separate from institutional
religious frameworks. Following World War I and the disintegration of the
Ottoman state, the last universally recognized Caliph, Abdulmejid II, was
deposed, and the institution was formally abolished by the nascent Turkish
Republic.
Baghdadi’s self-proclamation positioned him as the 32nd Caliph
in this historic lineage. While the international community and the
overwhelming majority of mainstream Muslims immediately dismissed his claim as
fraudulent, the underlying ideology possessed a potent, virulent capacity for
individual radicalization. It successfully ensnared extremist sympathizers
within the GCC borders, prompting some to covertly funnel financial capital or
slip across frontiers to join the battlefield.
By enforcing a brutal, puritanical strand of Salafi-Jihadism
that labels Shiites and non-Muslims as heretics marked for subjugation or
death, IS alienated the Islamic establishment. Mainstream clerical bodies
across the globe—most notably the senior religious authorities in Saudi
Arabia—swiftly weaponized theological counters, issuing Fatwas (religious edicts) excommunicating IS from the
fold of true Islam.
Deep Dive: The GCC's Two Core Policies on the Iraq Crisis
To insulate themselves from the geopolitical fallout, the GCC
states harmonized their foreign policies around two main strategic pillars:
|
Strategic Policy |
Implementation and Operational Measures |
|
1. Military & Ideological Eradication |
• Integrated into the US-led global coalition against IS.
• Deployed air wings (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar) to strike deep into IS strongholds.
• Enacted sweeping domestic counter-terror financing laws and
travel bans on foreign fighters. |
|
2. Preservation of the Iraqi Status Quo |
• Reaffirmed a strict diplomatic stance upholding Iraq's unity and territorial integrity.
• Opposed unilateral foreign interventions that bypass Baghdad's sovereign authority.
• Advocated for a centralized, cohesive Iraqi state to prevent
catastrophic ethnic or sectarian partition. |
Policy Pillar 1: Military and Ideological Containment
This iron-fist strategy was championed aggressively by the
regional heavyweight, Saudi Arabia. The late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz (who
passed away in early 2015) delivered a scathing indictment of the group: "These terrorists use religion as a facade to conceal their
personal interests, aiming to attack our homelands and our children, with the
ultimate goal of sowing division among Muslims." Similarly,
Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister at the time, explicitly
branded IS as "an evil that tarnishes the true image of Islam."
The GCC's military contributions mirrored the US-led coalition's
playbook: utilizing tactical airpower to blunt IS's territorial expansion while
deploying financial blockades and intelligence networks to choke off their
capital streams. Security assessments confirmed that these synchronized
pressures successfully degraded IS’s frontline manpower and pulverized its
heavy military hardware.
Policy Pillar 2: Upholding Iraq's Territorial Integrity
In March 2015, a joint GCC declaration strongly backed Iraq’s
total sovereignty. Yet, this diplomatic posture harbored a glaring geopolitical paradox. On the ground, Iraq’s map had
already fractured into three de facto fiefdoms:
1.
The
Southern and Central Belts:
Governed by the Shiite-led central administration and its allied militias.
2.
The
Northern Tier: The autonomous
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), defended by its own battle-hardened Peshmerga forces.
3.
The
Western and North-Central Core: The volatile, Sunni-dominated heartlands that became the
primary engine and theater for IS operations.
Consequently, preserving Iraq as a unified, cohesive state
remains an elusive ambition so long as the deep-seated structural power
imbalances and sectarian grievances of the Sunni population are left
unaddressed.
Comprehensive Analysis: A New Balance of Power and the Pursuit of Strategic Autonomy
Broadly speaking, the rise and subsequent containment of IS
acted as a powerful catalyst, structurally elevating the GCC's geopolitical
agency in two profound ways:
1. International Politics and Diplomacy
The vacuum forced the GCC—spearheaded by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi—to
pivot toward a highly proactive, interventionist leadership role in the Arab
world. Since 1945, Gulf security policy operated under a dependent US defensive
umbrella, a transactional arrangement famously dubbed the
"oil-for-security" paradigm.
In recent years, however, regional shifts have driven the GCC to
pursue Strategic Autonomy. Shaken by anxieties that Washington
would abandon them during an existential crisis—a fear validated by the US
willingness to negotiate the JCPOA nuclear pact with Iran—the Gulf monarchies
began diversifying their strategic portfolios. They opened new geopolitical
lanes, aggressively expanding economic, diplomatic, and defense ties eastward,
particularly with Beijing and Moscow.
Simultaneously, member states have attempted to accelerate
internal integration, floating the concept of a tightly knit "Gulf Union" to align foreign policy and
defense architectures. The crown jewel of this push is the ongoing negotiation
for a "Joint Arab Force" engineered to combat
asymmetric, non-state threats. Should this unified military command fully
materialize, it will permanently redraw the security architecture of the Middle
East.
2. Religious Authority and Ideology
By taking the vanguard against IS, the GCC successfully
positioned itself as the preeminent institutional authority within Sunni Islam
capable of delegitimizing theological extremism. Projecting themselves as the
global guardians of moderate Islam has yielded immense
diplomatic currency, validating the ruling establishments on the world stage
and signaling that mainstream Islam unconditionally rejects religious
barbarism.
In the short term, a definitive defeat of IS on the Tikrit
battlefield and across Iraq hands the GCC a massive tactical victory,
neutralizing a virulent ideological contagion designed to topple their thrones.
But in the unforgiving theater of Middle Eastern geopolitics,
"when one fear recedes, a far more formidable adversary rushes into the
vacuum."
The impending collapse of the Caliphate is not being achieved by
the raw power of the conventional Iraqi army alone. Instead, it is being
propelled by battle-tested, highly radicalized Shiite militias—covertly
bankrolled, strategically directed, and logistically sustained by the security
apparatus and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of
Iran, the absolute number-one strategic nemesis of the Gulf states.
In the next installment, we will delve deeply into the looming "negative impacts and silent strategic threats" that are bound to cause severe headaches for the GCC if IS is completely crushed, yet Iraq falls entirely under the shadow of Iranian hegemony.
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