Recent developments in Saudi Arabia, from the suspiciously timely unveiling of a plot against the royal family, oil wells and army bases, to a revived demand for constitutional monarchy and electoral democracy, suggest something is rotten in the desert kingdom. Some years ago, President George Bush trained his guns at a sitting duck called Afghanistan before nimbly shifting them to Iraq and helping fellow oilmen enrich themselves with its alluring oilfields. But given the Iraqi people’s legendary ingratitude for the Free World’s gift of democracy, and the stiffer resistance expected from a defiant Iran, one wonders if the rhetoric aimed at Teheran and the threat to Persian oilfields is not a decoy for the takeover of the Saudi Arabian oilfields that Uncle Sam once virtually owned for six long decades.
It makes sense because unlike Baghdad, where the US never found unconventional weapons but got bogged down in an unconventional war owing to lack of ground level human intelligence (humanint), the average American GI really knows Riyadh and the Arabian desert. For years the Saudi royals have depended upon America for security for the royal family, for running the oil rigs and flying their planes, manning the military installations et al.
Further, the social-diplomatic circuit has helped them enter the plusher residential precincts and identify the potential civilian collaborators they failed to find in Baghdad and are unlikely to discover in Teheran. The social-military costs of such a coup are certainly affordable, and Saudi oil is as good as Iranian.
In this context, it bears noting that the Muslim world is in agony. There is no truly powerful Islamic State in the world, Saudi wealth notwithstanding. Even Teheran does not manufacture its own military equipment; the Pakistani n-bomb is a Chinese gift and cannot be deployed against Islam’s Western tormentors. Libya has caved in, Syria is in crisis, Egypt and Jordan are US-client states, and no other Muslim state even enters the reckoning in the power stakes.
Jihadi rhetoric notwithstanding, Islam is pain; the inability to extract even token punishment for the offensive cartoons against Prophet Mohammad exemplifies this powerlessness. Islam’s successful and prolonged strikes in India should be viewed in the context of the West’s geo-strategic need to contain us, and I personally believe Indian Islam maybe entering a quiescent phase in order to ponder its attitude towards the West and the sponsored Shia-Sunni divide that is currently tearing Muslim society apart.
Developments in Saudi Arabia are interesting. The ‘discovery’ of an Al Qaeda plot against the royal family will naturally ensure the compliance of all friendly (puppet) regimes while putting Islam on the defensive. The supposed threat to the oil wells located in the Shia-dominated region is of ‘concern’ to Uncle Sam. As the West-inspired Shia-Sunni fratricide has failed to reach critical genocidal mass, Washington has no choice but to further humiliate its Sunni collaborator regimes.
The huge weapons haul has resulted in the arrest of 172 Al Qaeda terror suspects, including foreigners whose nationalities have not been disclosed. Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Mansour Al Turki said they intended to carry out “suicide attacks against public figures,” which suggests assassination and/or a coup against the royal family. It is intriguing that this should happen at a time when King Abdullah is distancing himself from Washington and the former Saudi envoy to President Bush, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, is said to be keen to become king of Arabia.
The timing of events is significant. The dimensions of the coup/terror plot suggest some weeks of planning, making it simultaneous with the February 2007 petition by 99 educated persons demanding King Abdullah introduce economic, social and political reforms in the kingdom.
The petitioners have called for an elected parliament instead of the appointed Shura Council, laws to reduce inequality, and a just distribution of resources. The insinuation that some persons are cornering a disproportionate share of national resources is a thinly veiled attack upon the royal family. The demand for freedom of opinion, expression and association, along with the legal formation of NGOs, is a Western Christian giveaway (consider what happened to the erstwhile Soviet Republics). Hence the Saudi King may do well to scrutinize the presence of covert Christians in his administration, else he may face a Nepal-like situation where social unrest brought down the monarchy, but the kingdom cannot survive without a monarch to unite it.
While putting some of the top signatories in jail may provide immediate relief, Riyadh will have to devise more efficient means of combating the threat to its independence. King Abdullah realizes that excessive dependence upon America could prove the proverbial kiss-of-death. In February, he sabotaged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s plans for a peace summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Abbas’s Fatah and the Hamas, wherein Hamas was not required to recognize Israel or give up violence. Washington was shocked that the Saudis were not for isolating Hamas. The king also ruled out direct engagement with Israel, which the White House wanted in order to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Worse, he recently told Arab Heads of State in Riyadh that the American invasion of Iraq was “an illegal foreign occupation”. Once, coaxed by Prince Bandar, the Saudis gave America the use of the Prince Sultan Air Base at Al Kharj, outside Riyadh, to attack Afghanistan and Iraq; they are now livid at the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
King Abdullah moved to restrict American influence in Riyadh by visiting India and China last year. He indicated a desire for peace inside India, whatever the state of Indo-Pak relations. In the long-term, however, he would do well to review Saudi adherence to the puritanical Wahhabi Islam that is increasingly finding disfavour with his own citizens and making them vulnerable to Western machinations against the kingdom. It is not enough for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to warn the West against identifying Islam with terrorism, especially in the wake of September 11, 2001; Muslims must demonstrate that the two are distinct entities. Otherwise, the lesson of history is that from the time of the Patriarch Abraham, the sons of Ishmael have been easily outwitted by the sons of Isaac.
The Pioneer, 1 May 2007
