Tinderbox

Whenever the Palace says it is “monitoring” a situation, I imagine the President and his courtiers huddled around a television set, watching the news.

Months ago, OFW advocate Susan “Toots” Ople called on government to convene a multi-agency task force to study the implications of substantially lower crude oil prices on our migrant workers. The call fell on deaf ears.

At the moment, we have no significant economic reintegration program in place. The economic policies we have in place produced jobless growth.

Should a full-scale war break out between Iran and Saudi Arabia, we have no means to quickly pull our workers to safety. If they return en masse, the domestic economy cannot absorb them.

We have about 2.2 million migrant workers in the oil-dependent Middle Eastern countries. Their jobs are reliant on public spending fueled by oil exports. Over the past year, as oil prices slid to historically low levels, exporting countries like Saudi Arabia announced dramatic spending cutbacks. Subsidies were cut across the board in economies that run, well, basically on state subsidies.

The cutbacks in state spending will, no doubt, have an impact on our migrant workers. It is easy to imagine a proportional cutback in jobs will follow the cutbacks in state spending. At best, our migrant worker population in the Middle East will remain constant. At worse, we could be experiencing a steady increase in labor repatriation.

Economic reintegration is not the only problem here. Our growth pattern is not only characterized by jobless growth. It is, as bad as ever, dependent on OFW remittances. This is the reason our growth is demand-driven and our domestic economy has an overblown services sector.

Starved for direct investment, our manufacturing sector is miniscule. Completely mismanaged, our agricultural sector is weak. Should the flow of remittances diminish, we are headed for trouble.

The “task force” Toots Ople asks for is probably an understatement. In an era of cheap oil, we will need to renovate our entire economic policy architecture.

But will this indolent and visionless administration be up to the task?

Discontent

Imaginably, social and not just sectarian tensions are aggravated by the new age of austerity descending upon societies once awash with oil money. Heightened social tensions could, in fact, manifest through sectarian language.

On first blush, it might seem pretty stupid for Saudi authorities to execute firebrand cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

First, the cleric is a relatively unimportant one, administering to some distant village in the less-privileged (because predominantly Shia) Eastern Province. The more senior Shiite clerics have long ago distanced themselves from the firebrand. There are only about two million Shiite Muslims among Saudi Arabia’s 18 million citizens.

What grates among the Saudi authorities is Sheikh Nimr’s ceaseless criticism of the Saudi monarchist. It seems he was perceived dangerous not because he was Shia but because he was anti-monarchist. He is known to have given long sermons denouncing how Saudi citizens are owned pretty much like sheep by the House of Saud.

As such, the cleric could become the lightning rod for the social discontent among Saudi citizens – not so much for Shia sectarianism.

The conservative Saudi monarchy, legitimizing itself through the language of a strain of Shiite Islam, is an oppressive state. It keeps women in bondage. It allows few civil liberties. It has First World infrastructure used to maintain a Fourth World mindset.

It is tough for Saudi citizens to grumble too openly. All the power of the police state will bear down upon them. The “crime” Sheikh Nimr committed was to be the mouthpiece for all the grumbling going on beneath the surface of civil society.

The poor outspoken cleric was likely executed for national security reasons. But the backlash followed sectarian lines, with the Shiite majority in Iran most vocal in condemning the death as an attack against the entire sect.

In any society, the withdrawal of habitual subsidies invites surges of social discontent. Saudi Arabia could not possibly be an exception – except that a lid is maintained over the population by a brutal police state. It is a police state disguised as enforcing religious norms.

Saudi Arabia, with its modern sectors and youthful population chafing under the medieval rule of old and sickly leaders, is probably ripe for a social revolution. That same conditions hold true for Iran.

In order to avert that, it seems more convenient for the theocracy in Iran and the monarchy in Saudi Arabia to wage war against each other. For oppressive regimes, war is always more preferable to social revolution.

Victims

There will be many victims as Saudi Arabia and Iran posture along sectarian lines in a vain effort to maintain obsolete regimes.

In response to the torching of its embassy in Tehran, Saudi Arabia cut all air traffic and blocked off all commerce to the Islamic Republic. The flunkey states of Bahrain (with its own problems with rising Shia dissent), Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates soon followed suit.

Meanwhile, the comprehensive international effort to restore peace in Syria suffers. This is an effort that requires the cooperation of the three regional powers: Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The three regional powers have deep historical distrust for each other.

As the Saudis and the Iranians rattled their sabers, the UN-brokered ceasefire in Yemen ended. Fighting has resumed between Saudi forces and Houthi rebels (supported by Iran).

The Middle East is a mad tapestry of clans, tribes and pseudo-nations. Sectarian and ethnic fissures run deep. This is a tinderbox that could easily be set off by the self-serving posturing of unpopular regimes.