Posted on 08/14/2002 3:12:26 AM PDT by rdb3
A CENTURY AGO THEY WERE GOATHERDS, Bedouin Arabs struggling against a corrupt and decrepit Ottoman Empire eager to milk them for the benefit of Constantinople. The Saudi royal family remains colonial, although its appearance of wealth disguises this. But its relationship to the West is that of a colony, a provider of raw material – in this case light, sweet Saudi Arabian crude oil.
And the day this oil runs out, or can be bought cheaper elsewhere, or Western technology makes oil unnecessary, the House of Saud will again become the tent of Saud, a clan of desert warriors herding goats across baking sand dunes. That Arabian night might soon be falling and the Saudi crescent moon might be going into eclipse.
Luck and faith lifted this tribe to its 15 minutes of historic fame and prominence. The Saudis were lucky that Western technology turned the once-worthless goo oozing from beneath Arabian sands into black gold, the lifeblood of the industrial world’s machines. As the joke goes in Israel: “Darn it, Moses, if you’d just turned right instead of left, we’d have the oil.”
In the 1740s Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, the ancestor of today’s Saudi royal family, put his sword at the service of an Islamic scholar named Abd al-Wahhab. This religious revivalist urged the faithful to cast aside preacher dogmas and scholarly ulama interpretations that like weeds had obscured the truth. Muslims, al-Wahhab taught, should study the words of Allah by reading the Koran themselves and should engage in ijtihad, “independent reasoning.” His was a back-to-basics Puritanism intended to restore the freedom of thought that characterized Islam during the Golden Age of science and learning at its dawn.
As the sword of this religious revival, the Saud clan from its Dariyah homeland near today’s capital city Riyadh gained support and religious fervor. It won victories and territory from rivals and the Ottomans, capturing most of modern Saudi Arabia by 1843. But family feuds soon begat civil war and disintegration. By 1891 leading Saud family members were forced to flee for their lives to neighboring Kuwait, whence they fought back to regain territory, restore Wahhabism, and founded today’s Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, one year before development of its oil industry was begun by Standard Oil of California.
The symbiotic marriage between the Judeo-Christian West and Saudi Arabia, defender of the holy city of Mecca towards which 1.2 billion Muslims now bow in prayer five times daily, for decades seemed made in heaven. We needed oil. The Saudis wanted money. And however different our Abrahamic faiths, we both opposed godless Nazis and godless Communists. United against such foes, we could overlook our differences, even when the Saudis forged the OPEC oil cartel to squeeze us dry, or embargoed our oil, or used oil revenues to fund madrassahs (free Koranic schools) fomenting hatred against the West in general and Jews and Israel in particular across much of the Muslim world.
As history turns, the differences between ourselves and the Saudis are becoming stark – and so are Saudi Arabia’s own internal contradictions as its sunset nears. Oil will soon be unable to smooth over or lubricate the friction of Saudi Arabia’s inner contradictions – and the House of Saud will be unable to withstand the heat that is coming.
Imagine that you are one of the 7,000 Saudi princelings.Here’s how the world looks from your luxurious home:
The former Soviet Union whose mere presence once prompted the West to support you is now increasingly aligned with the West and providing it vast amounts of oil at free market, not OPEC monopoly, prices. This and many other new sources of energy in the West mean that Saudi oil revenues will keep dropping, and that any future embargo would damage Saudi Arabia more than the West. (Even after choosing to import oil rather than drill for more in Alaska, the United States imports only 15 percent of its crude oil from Saudi Arabia – but oil is fungible.)
Those oil revenues are desperately needed to prop up the House of Saud’s House of Cards. The “social contract” implicitly made with Saudi citizens has been that the government will provide jobs, low or no taxes, free medical care and other benefits.
But this land of no taxation, as Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria says, also has “no representation,” a monarchy that allows no democracy, no say for citizens in how society is run or how the oil-revenue pie gets divided, no freedom of press or speech.
Saudi citizens do not even have freedom of dress. A few months ago 14 school girls in Mecca burned to death after the Religious Police forced them back into a blazing building because the girls were not wearing clothing that sufficiently covered their bodies.
This is part of a devil’s bargain struck almost three decades ago between the Saudi royal family and the nation’s Wahhabist religious leaders. In exchange for stifling criticism of the House of Saud, these religious zealots would be given huge amounts of money to spread their sect worldwide and vast new powers to impose their dogmas on the ordinary citizens of Saudi Arabia.
One irony is that if al-Wahhab and the Prophet Muhammad were to return to Saudi Arabia today, both would be outraged by the insanity perpetrated in their names. For example, the daughter of famed Saudi Sheikh Zaki Yamani, Mai Yamani (who now lives in London), wrote last October 7 in The Times (London) that the Koran nowhere requires women to cover their heads or faces - but only to dress “modestly.”
The present Saudi denial of women’s rights, including the Religious Police incineration of 14 schoolgirls, violates the Prophet’s example of his own strong, outspoken wives and daughters, as well as al-Wahhab’s teaching that unscriptural dogma should be replaced by independent reasoning. In this and many other realms of human rights, today’s Saudi Arabia has become the very thing al-Wahhab wanted to replace.
Having blocked other freedoms, the Saudi regime has driven many of its own frustrated children – such as Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 September 11 skyjackers – into religious fanaticism. And it continues to sow dragon’s teeth that become zealots who denounce as illegitimate any Islamic rulers who cooperate with the West.
Meanwhile, Saudi oil revenues keep declining while its population grows by 4 percent per year. As political analyst Borut Grgic notes, “today’s Saudi Arabia looks a little ragged…. Saudi per capita income plummeted from a staggering $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 last year. Even within OPEC, writes Grgic, Saudi power and influence has declined drastically.
“King Fahd’s health is failing,” according to the BBC, and “there is a hidden power struggle going on between the senior ruling princes.” Like most Iranians, many Saudis want a freer, more democratic government like those of the West. Many other Saudis, however, want a pure theocratic regime with no decadent princes and no friendship with Infidel Western governments. And Saudi royals would rather have their frustrated citizens’ anger turned outward at Israel and the West than inward at themselves.
Next door, meanwhile, the aggressive Saddam Hussein a decade ago could have rolled over Saudi Arabia almost as easily as he did Kuwait – except for the continuing military and technological might of the United States and its allies.
And yet the Saudis days ago said they would not permit U.S. forces based on their soil to attack Hussein’s Iraq.
Consider their alternatives: face Saddam Hussein with U.S. forces ready to defend you – along with U.S. weapons systems that cost a significant part of your oil revenue – or risk Iraq being liberated and becoming a democratic, free society bordering your monarchy, envied by your own unhappy citizens and providing millions of barrels of cheap oil to the West every day. Saudi rulers doubtless prefer to keep Saddam in power.
No wonder, then, that President George Bush’s administration is reportedly rethinking our once-vital friendship with the House of Saud. Our long-term interest is in seeing the emergence of free, democratic nations like our own in the Middle East, not in propping up unstable monarchies based on a combustible mixture of nepotistic greed and religious fanaticism. As discussed here before, the chess game President Bush is playing aims to bring democracy to both the Palestinians and the rest of the region.
If the House of Saud is willing to help us midwife the birth of a free, democratic, constitutional monarchy in their nation, they can survive. If they instead resist becoming a modern nation, then they have numbered their own days.
A good place for the Saudi royal family to begin would be the firing of foreign policy advisor and highly educated spokesman Adel Al-Jubeir. As discussed Sunday on my national radio show, that day on NBC’s “Meet the Press” he spoke of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and told Andrea Mitchell: “There will be violence as we go through the process…. We have to redouble our efforts in spite of it in order to find a final solution. We all agree what the final solution looks like….” Indeed we do, and that is why the civilized world says with one voice: “Never Again!”
I caught that slimy weasel's quote as it was re-played on the radio last night. "Final Solution" -- chilling.
From sand did they arise, and to sand will they return.
Indeed. So let's get this party started!
We already have!
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