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by David Leigh and
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian Unlimited, November
21, 2001
House of Saud Looks Close to
Collapse. Modern Saudi Arabia is Supported by the U.S. and Britain in
Order to Guarantee a Steady Flow of Oil. Their War on Terrorism Could
Destroy It.
While tabloid cheerleaders and spin
doctors have been celebrating the fall of Kabul and the retreat of Taliban
and al-Qaida fighters, the mood in other parts of Whitehall is much more
sombre. For senior ministerial advisers know that the real cancer in the
Middle East is not Afghanistan, but Saudi Arabia.
Fears are growing that the
important but anachronistic country which spawned Osama bin Laden and many
of the September 11 hijackers faces the real prospect of a coup. "The
Saudi royals have been paying off the terrorists with danegeld for a long
while," says one well-placed source. "There is a danger that well-educated
returnees from US colleges who cannot get work will make common cause with
the people of the souks and overthrow them."
This week, newspapers, including
the Economist and Time magazine, published extensive and flattering
advertisements placed by the Saudi regime - a clear indication of its
concern about the future, as well as the bad publicity seeping out about
its past links with Bin Laden and the Taliban.
Modern Saudi Arabia is to an extent
a perverted creation of America and its British ally. Henry Kissinger, the
former US secretary of state, spelled out in his recent book on American
foreign policy its essentially manipulative approach to such Middle East
states as Saudi Arabia. The US, he says, cannot afford the region to be
"dominated by countries whose purposes are inimical to ours". Their
economic "purposes" have been to prop up a regime which would guarantee a
stable flow of petrol and oil to the US at relatively low prices and
recycle its petrodollars back to the west in the shape of construction
projects and arms purchases.
The Saudis control 25% of world oil
reserves. The US has paid the royal family up to $100bn a year for it.
The first bomb attack on the World
Trade Centre in New York took place in 1993: Osama bin Laden was in exile
in Khartoum, nursing his rage against the Saudi royal family and the US
bases they permit on Saudi soil. In Britain, the then government was more
interested in money-making opportunities than in registering these
sinister signs and re-evaluating their relationships with a frustrated
Muslim world.
British MI6 intelligence about
Iranian military planning was being circulated by John Major to the ailing
King Fahd in Riyadh, to help keep him on his throne in return for more
lucrative arms sales: the notorious Al Yamamah weapons deal was already
transferring £1.5bn a year into British pockets.
The Saud clan - now estimated to
number more than 7,000 privileged tribesmen - are still clinging to
absolute power. However, much of their oil wealth has been frittered away,
and unemployment among young Saudis is rising. Per capita income in the
early 1980s was $28,000. It is now below $10,000.
The dictatorial Saud clan describe
themselves as "guardians of the two holy places" and preside over the vast
annual pilgrimages to Mecca. They poured cash into the Islamic University
at Medina and similar schools across the Muslim world, from Cairo to
Peshawar.
The anti-modernist religion they
promoted became a focus for guilt and anger among young men frustrated at
modern "corruption" and deprived not only of normal social lives, but of
all democratic political outlets.
In 1979, 200 armed fundamentalists,
many of whom had studied Islam at Medina, took over the grand mosque at
Mecca. But 63 of the ringleaders were publicly beheaded in selected town
squares all over the country, and the seeds of rebellion quickly led to
repression. Shaheed Coovadia, who now teaches in the US, studied at
Medina. He says: "That incident was a turning point. When I was there you
couldn't move without permission. It was like living in a police state.
People even came to check your bed to see if you'd risen for the morning
prayer."
Providentially that same year,
Soviet troops rumbled over the mountain roads into Afghanistan to shore up
a tottering pro-communist regime. The CIA had been covertly undermining
the Afghan government by arming fundamentalist rebels - the mojahedin. In
Washington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security
adviser, was **** -a-hoop that the Russians had been drawn into what he
saw as his cleverly baited trap. The day Soviet forces crossed the border,
he wrote to Carter, saying: "We now have the opportunity to give the USSR
their Vietnam war."
Young Bin Laden, son of a wealthy
construction magnate, joined the anti-Soviet campaign. He set off for
Peshawar, as the most prominent of a Saudi contingent of poor citizens,
students, taxi-drivers and Bedouin tribesmen.
For the Saudi regime it was an
outlet for an otherwise dangerous fanaticism. For the US, the Afghan Arabs
were useful proxy troops in the cold war. As Bin Laden himself later
described it: "The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by
the Saudis."
Did the Saudi royals or the US have
any qualms about arming and brutalising these frustrated young
fundamentalists? Brzezinski had his response to that question ready: "What
is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse
of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central
Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Nowadays, the west is less smug
about its interference. It is beginning to realise that the "stirred-up
Muslims" may not have finished their upheavals.
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