The Season of Flies

There is a phenomenon in the Arab political scene that deserves reflection. Some crises, it seems, are not complete until the name of the United Arab Emirates is mentioned. And when its name appears, the season of flies begins.

Flies have their seasons, though some of them seem to have decided to do without the calendar and work all year round.

This behaviour is not hard to notice; what is interesting is its timing. Whenever a domestic crisis deepens, or an authority stumbles in running its affairs, or the questions come close to places no one wants to go near, we find someone opening a window onto talk about the UAE, as if it had become the favourite headline for everyone who has run out of room in the headlines of their own country.

Suddenly, explaining Emirati policy becomes more important than explaining the crisis itself.

And because politics is never short of ironies, some of those who cannot manage their disagreements within their own borders find plenty of time to analyse the intentions of another state, interpret its decisions, and at times even speak on behalf of its people.

This is where the manufacture of disinformation begins.

Disinformation does not always need a big lie. Sometimes a truncated truth is enough, or an image torn from its context, or an old statement presented again as if it were a new event. Then repetition takes care of the rest.

Repetition, it seems, has become for some a substitute for proof.

You find the same narrative travelling between accounts and platforms, in almost the same words and with the same anger, until you might imagine that everyone reached the same conclusion at the same moment. It is a coincidence that deserves scientific study more than political debate.

Yet reducing the phenomenon to electronic flies alone hides its more dangerous side: for some parties, exporting crises has become a way of managing public opinion, and perhaps of managing failure as well.

When people are convinced that the source of their crises always lies outside their borders, the need to hold to account those inside them fades. And when the outside is responsible for everything, the inside can disown responsibility for anything.

It is that simple to turn failure into grievance, impotence into heroism, and accountability into treason.

The UAE, however, deals with this scene from an entirely different position.

A state that knows its interests, owns its decisions and understands its political and economic weight does not need to redefine itself with every accusation, nor to enter into a feud with everyone who has decided to make it the subject of their rhetoric.

The UAE's strength also lies in its ability to tell the difference between what deserves a response and what does not deserve a glance. Not every noise is a political event, and not every accusation deserves to become a battle.

This calm should not be confused with absence, just as refinement in discourse does not mean giving up firmness of position.

The UAE is clear about its interests, present in its international relations, and able to defend its sovereignty and positions with the tools it considers appropriate. It knows that the respect of states is built on what they do, and on their ability to keep their commitments and protect their interests, not on the number of verbal battles they fight.

The irony is that some hostile rhetoric, without meaning to, gives the UAE more space than the space it tries to take away from it.

When a single state becomes present in the explanation of every crisis, mentioned in every dispute and summoned at every failure, the question is no longer about the UAE alone, but about the nature of a political thinking that cannot understand its own reality without calling on its name.

That in itself is an unintended admission of the size of its presence.

But presence does not place any state above criticism, and the UAE is no exception. Differences of interest and position are part of the nature of international relations, and serious political debate is necessary to understand them.

The problem begins, rather, when criticism stops being an attempt to understand the facts and becomes a means of producing ready-made convictions; when evidence becomes a detail that can be done without, while the accusation is treated as a complete truth.

Stranger still, some of the narratives circulating about the UAE contradict one another to the point that it is hard to fit them into a single political position. It is accused of interfering when it acts and of abandoning when it does not; it is blamed for its relationships at one moment, and for the independence of its decisions at another.

It seems the problem for these people is not the nature of the Emirati decision, but the fact that the decision is Emirati in the first place.

Perhaps this explains part of the intensity that accompanies some campaigns. A state that exercises its sovereignty according to its own calculations may not please every party, but displeasure gives no one the right to invent facts or rewrite events to suit their hostility.

What deserves concern in this phenomenon is not so much what is said about the UAE as what these practices do to the awareness of the Arab public.

When disinformation becomes a daily practice, people gradually lose their ability to separate news from opinion, analysis from incitement, and political criticism from the settling of scores.

Crises then turn from issues that call for solutions into material for media consumption. Each time one crisis is used up, the search begins for another, while the real problems stay where they are.

I am not much concerned with how many people attack the UAE, so much as with the question of who benefits from keeping this attack going, from turning the name of a state into a way of explaining every failure, and from keeping people busy with feuds abroad while the questions at home pile up in front of them.

As for the UAE, it has more important things to do than to be constantly preoccupied with what others say about it. It has a state to run, interests to protect, partnerships to expand, and a future to work for.

There is a great difference between those who spend their time building their place in the world and those who spend their time objecting to the place of others.

In the end, the flies will keep looking for somewhere to land, and the noise will still be able to draw attention for a while.

But states are not measured by the amount of noise around them, but by what remains of their impact when it is over.

And perhaps what annoys the flies most about the UAE is that it does not need to chase them in order to carry on its way.