Gulf Leaders Back Out of Camp David Summit in 'Snub' to Obama

President Obama had planned to meet with the Saudi
King Salman on Wednesday

BBC AMERICA: Many Gulf heads of state have said they will not attend the summit of US and allied Arab leaders at Camp David later this week.

Their substitution with more junior leaders is being seen as a rebuff to President Obama's negotiations with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia announced on Sunday that he would not attend.

The White House, which has not publicly commented, previewed the king's visit as recently as Friday.

The talks, which will now be largely attended by leaders at the ministerial level, were designed to reassure the Arab allies of US support on a number of issues including talks with Iran and instability in several Arab states. » | Monday, May 11, 2015

Gulf Leaders React to Mubarak Exit
Saudi King wanted ‘dignified’ exit

Arab Despots Should Heed Events in Tunisia
THE OBSERVER – EDITORIAL: Presidents-for-life offering bogus protection against phantom terrorists are not reliable friends

…the US and Europe have propped up blinkered, failing Arab regimes, judging them to be bulwarks against Islamist radicalism. It is a terribly misguided strategy, not least because it conforms to the jihadi narrative of a west hostile to the interests of ordinary Muslims. – The Editor
The fall from power of Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine ben Ali is one of those widely unpredicted turns of events that hindsight quickly labels inevitable.

Corrupt authoritarian regimes are generally brittle and Mr Ben Ali's was no exception. But few anticipated how quickly a spate of angry demonstrations could become a regime-changing rebellion. Other governments across the region, with populations hardly less repressed than Tunisia's, will look on in fear.

Mr Ben Ali was considered by western diplomats to be a relatively reliable fixture. Under his 23-year rule, the country had the status of a minor player in North Africa – avoiding involvement in wider Middle East disputes and carving out an economic niche as a Mediterranean holiday destination.

Meanwhile, the president, his wife and their extended family built a lucrative commercial empire. Political dissent has been crushed and media stifled. In a dispatch sent in July 2009 – one of the secret cables published earlier this year by WikiLeaks – the US ambassador to Tunis described rising frustration among ordinary Tunisians as a result of "First Family corruption, high unemployment and regional inequities". He also noted that major change would "have to wait for Ben Ali's departure".

Tunisians clearly shared that view. >>> Editor | Sunday, January 16, 2011

Globaloney
DEFENDING AMERICA FOR KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION (DAFKA): There is something surreal about the spectacle of President Bush touring the Persian Gulf. It calls to mind the signature line of Mad Magazine's mascot, Alfred E. Neuman: "What, me worry?"

Mr. Bush's trip is, after all, premised on the notion that the Arab leaders he is courting there are reliable allies. Such a proposition should be subjected to the closest of critical scrutiny by Congress, the press and the American electorate since a number of highly debatable, and increasingly portentous, policies are predicated on this assumption. These include:

--Saudi Arabia and the other, smaller desert principalities are "moderates" who are as opposed as we to the totalitarian political agenda of fanatical ideologues such as Osama bin Laden.

--The Gulfies share our concern about the rising power of Iran and therefore can be counted upon to join us in countering that region's would-be Islamofascist superpower. It follows not only that we can safely provide these autocracies with an array of advanced weapons, but we must do so.

--The Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf will help broker a peace between Palestinians and Israelis — if only the United States pressures the Jewish State to make territorial and other concessions that may imperil the latter.

--And the willingness of the Gulf's potentates to recycle the immense wealth they have accumulated in recent years — primarily through oil sales at exorbitantly inflated prices — to purchase big stakes in U.S. companies and capital markets is a welcome development. Such investment is to be encouraged, and those who say otherwise should be condemned as "Chicken Little xenophobes" in the words of former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch and his wife, Suzy.

In fact, the Welch tag-team used a Jan. 21 Business Week column to admonish a letter-writer worried about Arab and other sovereign wealth funds buying up American corporations: "In trying times, U.S. companies always attract opportunistic, activist shareholders. Sometimes they look like Carl Icahn or Nelson Peltz. Sometimes they look like shiny-faced hedge fund managers just out of Wharton or Harvard Business School. And sometimes — like now — they look Chinese or Saudi or whatever. It doesn't matter. They're all after the same thing: the opportunities in America's capitalistic market."

Unfortunately, this confidence in the inexorable forces of "globalization" is as misplaced in the case of the so-called "pro-Western" Arab states as are the other assumptions driving American policy towards the region at the moment. Globaloney >>> By Frank Gaffney (from The Washington Times)

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