John Duke Anthony — Arabia, the Gulf, and the GCC Blog

Author Archives: John Duke Anthony

Dr. John Duke Anthony is the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. On June 21, 2000, H.M. King Muhammad VI of Morocco knighted Dr. Anthony, bestowing upon him the Medal of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite, the nation of Morocco's highest award for excellence. His most recent involvement in America's policies toward the Arab region, the Middle East, and the Islamic world was to serve as a Member of the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy's 12-person Subcommittee on Sanctions (with special reference to Iran).

Dr. Anthony is the only American to have been invited to each of the Gulf Cooperation Council's Ministerial and Heads of State Summits since the GCC's inception in 1981. (The GCC is comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). His firsthand reports of the summits exceed those of any other scholar.

For the past 50 years, Dr. Anthony has been a consultant and regular lecturer on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf for the Departments of Defense and State. He has served as an Associate Professor, Visiting Professor, and/or Adjunct Professor at the American University in Cairo; Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service; the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies; the Universities of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Texas; the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School; the U.S. Joint Intelligence College; and the Virginia Military Institute. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dr. Anthony continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor at the Defense Institute of Security Cooperation Studies (formerly known as the Defense Institute of Security Assistance Management).

Dr. Anthony's best-known works are Arab States of The Lower Gulf: People, Politics, Petroleum; The Middle East: Oil, Politics, and Development (editor and co-author); and, together with J. E. Peterson, Historical and Cultural Dictionary of The Sultanate of Oman and The Emirates of Eastern Arabia. He has published more than 200 articles, essays, and monographs on a variety of topics related to the Arab region and specific Arab countries as well as America's interests and involvement in the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Islamic world. For sixteen years, Dr. Anthony was the annual author of the essays on "Oman" and "Qatar" for the Encyclopedia Britannica Year in Review.

Dr. Anthony's full biography is available at: https://ncusar.org/board-and-staff/john-duke-anthony

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The events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Oman and elsewhere have been beyond riveting. In determining how best to navigate the turbulence, the United States government is placed in a bind. Among its core dilemmas are longstanding, built-in contradictions. On one hand, the contradictions are rooted in our vital strategic, national security, and economic interests as well as key foreign policy objectives. On the other, they are also rooted in interests that are often at cross-purposes.

This second set of interests includes values, moral principles, and ethical postulates that pertain to transactional transparency in government, accountability, adherence to constitutional obligations, the rule of law, political pluralism, governmental, economic, and social reforms, and expanded popular participation in countries’ national development processes. As we and other countries consider responses to the uprisings, it is essential not to lump any two countries and/or governments together. Like fingerprints, snowflakes, and human beings, no two are the same.

To avoid eliciting any further misgivings or antipathy towards the U.S. from emerging new governments, American leaders would do well to keep the following suggestions in mind.

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TODAY marks the anniversary of a momentous event: the reversal of Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait from August 2, 1990 to February 28, 1991. For Kuwaitis, the citizenry of their fellow GCC members, and people from many other countries, including the United States and other Allied Coalition members, the multifaceted damage inflicted by Iraq in the course of its invasion and occupation of Kuwait unleashed changes from which the world has yet to fully recover.

Kuwait The most comprehensive and rigorously applied international and political sanctions against any country in the last century, and the impact of the sanctions’ applicability and enforcement, remain a source of ongoing controversy in terms of their differing impact on Iraqis and Kuwaitis. Even now, two decades later, important postwar facets of what Iraq did to Kuwait remain elusive of closure. Certainly, the international legal dictum of an aggressor providing prompt, adequate, and effective compensation for the war’s victims has yet to be honored.

MIAs and Context

A full accounting of the fate of all of the Kuwaiti and other countries’ missing citizens — swept up and carted off to Iraq in the war’s waning hours — remains incomplete. At a recent gathering of diplomats, scholars, media representatives, and individuals who fought to liberate Kuwait and American armed forces’ civil affairs personnel who participated in the country’s reconstruction at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, it was noted that more than 500 of the missing Kuwaitis have died since their capture, but the fate of more than 200 of those missing remains unknown.

The more than 700 Kuwaitis who were and remain missing may seem small to some. However, they are more than 700 too many if viewed from the perspective of the victims and their loved ones who continue to await and pray for their return.

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