Is the GCC dead?
The Gulf Cooperation Council is broken and may not be fixable.
A year after the start of the Saudi-led siege of Qatar, the Gulf Cooperation Council is all but dead. The GCC was created by Saudi King Khalid in May 1981 during the Iran-Iraq War to provide strength through unity for the gulf monarchies; the United States was its midwife. Never a tight union, the GCC nonetheless was a useful means to coordinate policy and enhance the influence of Saudi Arabia and the other five monarchies.
The decision announced on June 5, 2017, by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to break relations with Qatar and impose a blockade on trade on the emirate came shortly after President Donald Trump’s visit to Riyadh last year, his first foreign stop as president. It remains unclear today how much the Saudis told the Americans about the plan to attack Qatar and how much Trump’s team understood what they were told. Confusion was the hallmark of the American response to the blockade. It still is.
The Saudis did tip their hand in one way. On May 28, 2017, the 200 surviving male descendants of Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab, the founder of the Islamic sect named for him, published an open letter in the Saudi newspaper Okaz. The front-page letter was addressed to the emir of an unnamed Gulf state. It accused him of failing to follow the truth path of Wahhab and of deviant behavior and demanded that the name of the chief mosque in his emirate be changed from its current name, the Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab Mosque. Only one Gulf state has such a mosque, Qatar, the only other Wahhabi country in the world.
It was in effect the excommunication of Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani from the faithful. This religious expulsion preceded the political breakup by a week. It is always far more difficult to resolve a matter of faith and religion than a political dispute. Politics are malleable, religion is doctrine.
