Act will hurt US: Bahrain … Gulf stands with Riyadh

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DUBAI, Sept 29, (Agencies): Bahrain warned Thursday that the United States would be the loser from Congress’s vote to override President Barack Obama’s veto of a bill allowing 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. “The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act is an arrow launched by the US Congress at its own country,” Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed al-Khalifa said on Twitter. “Are there no rational people among you?” he asked.

Bahrain is a staunch Western ally and is home to the US Fifth Fleet. But it is an even stauncher ally of neighbouring Saudi Arabia whose policies it closely follows. Despite furious lobbying by both Riyadh and the Obama administration, Congress voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to override the president’s veto. Families of 9/11 victims had campaigned vigorously for the law, convinced the Saudi government had a hand in the Sept 11, 2001 attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States.

Fifteen of the 19 attackers were Saudis. Documents declassified in July showed US intelligence had multiple suspicions about links between the Saudi government and the attackers, but no link has definitively been proven.

The release of the documents further damaged relations between Washington and Riyadh, which had already been strained by Obama’s engagement with Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran. Saudi Arabia and its allies are warning that US legislation allowing the kingdom to be sued for the 9/11 attacks will have negative repercussions.

The kingdom maintains an arsenal of tools to retaliate with, including curtailing official contacts, pulling billions of dollars from the US economy, and persuading its close allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council to scale back counterterrorism cooperation, investments and US access to important regional air bases. “This should be clear to America and to the rest of the world: When one GCC state is targeted unfairly, the others stand around it,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, an Emirati Gulf specialist and professor of political science at United Arab Emirates University.

“All the states will stand by Saudi Arabia in every way possible,” he said. When Saudi Arabia wanted to pressure Qatar to limit its support for the Muslim Brotherhood group in Egypt, it spearheaded an unprecedented withdrawal of Gulf Arab ambassadors from Doha in 2014 and essentially isolated the tiny gas-rich nation within the GCC.

When Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom strongly criticized Saudi Arabia’s human rights record last year, the kingdom unleashed a fierce diplomatic salvo that jolted Stockholm’s standing in the Arab world and threatened Swedish business interests in the Gulf. Sweden eventually backpedaled.

On Wednesday, the Senate and House voted to override President Barack Obama’s veto of the Sept 11 legislation, with lawmakers saying their priority wasn’t Saudi Arabia, but the 9/11 victims and their families. Chas Freeman, former US assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and ambassador to Saudi Arabia during operation Desert Storm, said the Saudis could respond in ways that risk US strategic interests like permissive rules for overflight between Europe and Asia and the Qatari air base from which US military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are directed and supported.

“The souring of relations and curtailing of official contacts that this legislation would inevitably produce could also jeopardize Saudi cooperation against anti-American terrorism,” he said. Fahad Nazer, an analyst at intelligence consultancy JTG and a former political analyst at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said he’d be surprised if Saudi Arabia cut back counterterrorism cooperation since it’s been beneficial for both countries. Still, relations with Washington had already cooled well before the 9/11 bill sailed through both chambers of Congress. The Saudis perceived the Obama Administration’s securing of a nuclear deal with Iran as a pivot toward its regional nemesis.

There was also Obama’s criticism of Gulf countries in an interview earlier this year, despite their support for the US-led fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. Obama had vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, arguing that allowing US courts to waive foreign sovereign immunity could lead other foreign governments to act “reciprocally” by giving their courts the right to exercise jurisdiction over the US and its employees for overseas actions.

These could include deadly US drone strikes and abuses committed by US-trained police units or US-backed militias. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in June that the US has the most to lose if JASTA is enacted. Despite reports that Riyadh threatened to pull billions of dollars from the US economy if the bill becomes law, al-Jubeir says Saudi Arabia has only warned that investor confidence in the US could decline. Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said estimates put the figure of official Saudi assets in the government at somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion when considering potential foreign bank deposits and offshore accounts.

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