“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Literally it means that the Al-Saud family owns the country and its residents are their vassals. The Royal Saud family rules “Saudi Arabia” mostly by force.
Nevertheless its ministry of communications attempts to present the kingdom as a country of peace and harmony. If this were true, how could 15 of the 19 terrorists of the 9/11 attack come from the kingdom?
After World War I, at the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British rewarded Sherif Hussein, naming one of his sons, Faisal, king of Iraq, and another, Abdullah, ruler of modern-day Jordan—both countries, like most in the Middle East, were imperial inventions whose borders were sketched in the sand. The winners of WWI carved up the Ottoman Empire into the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today and they assigned rulers who seemed cooperative.
The British also backed Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers because he seemed most capable to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, especially since he had already regained control of Riyadh after a final power struggle against Al Rashid in 1902. Thus the Saud family gained royal power to rule what became the Saudi Arabia we know today.
In 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to negotiate an important oil deal in which the US would back the Saud dynasty by providing military support in exchange for a reliable supply of crude. It seemed like a good deal at the time.
Shady Partners
To this day, the US continues a similar policy in the Middle East: support a ruler in order to maintain a dependable trading partner, regardless of how that leader rules his country—monarch, tyrant, dictator, or popular nice guy. Few, if any, beloved leaders have yet to arise in the oil rich land of the Levant. Thrust into Iraqi power mainly by the US in the early 1970’s, Saddam Hussein eventually turned his back on his Yankee supporters and nationalized the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company. Well, you know what happened to him—the good’ol boy gone maverick finished at the end of a rope.
Only in the post-9/11 period do we begin to question this sordid history of propping up compliant governments to satisfy our needs for petroleum and its profits. Eventually we, Western oil consumers, will have to admit at least partial blame for the terrorism that now plagues us.
The imperial support we provide to dictators, tyrants, and kings contradicts our own ideals of free trade democracy. Now, as we miserably attempt to reclaim control of Iraq, we find that our own freewheeling democracy comes under question, what with our undeniable oil interests in the country we invaded for all the most ridiculous reasons.
As far as our oil supplying countries go, we only play lip service to democracy as a marketing ploy to justify our on-going neo-colonial holds on reliable oil traders. This has been our implicit policy since 1945.
When Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, this “scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” policy made sense. Back then, the Levant was a tribal frontier and the United States a new born industrial powerhouse. Things changed in the half century since then.
The United States grew into a global empire. Its strongest power brokers became the international petroleum oligarchs we know today; these few companies enjoy the highest levels of profits in all of human history and are fully entrenched in the status quo of oil as our source of energy, albeit an obsolete technology considering Global Warming and the current Petroleum conflicts.
Thus the West became blindly addicted to fossil fuels and never bothered to develop alternative fuels over the decades. This poses a huge pressure on the oil suppliers of the Levant.
In many ways similar to Iran and Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, the Saud Royal family garnered enormous wealth over the decades while all but ignoring the development of the people in their tribal frontiers. This imbalance intensified resentment between the Royalty and the various tribes, the vassals of the kingdom.
Theocratic Tyrants
The Royal family owns the powerful army and Crown Prince Abdullah heads the elite National Guard, made up of young men drawn from the various ranks of the Bedu (Bedouin), tribes, and official Wahhabi establishment. The Wahhabists, the extremely conservative, fundamentalist Islamic sect, owns the moral and judicial power to control the people’s behavior, how they think, dress, eat, drink, and, well, every other detail.
To this day, the Al-Saud family rules in partnership with the direct descendants of Abdul Wahhab, known as the Al-Asheikh family.
“The Al-Saud princes hold all the key government posts. Members of the Al-Asheikh family hold the key positions in the religious establishment and are responsible for enforcing Islamic orthodoxy on the streets by intimidating people by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” says John R. Bradley in his book Saudi Arabia Exposed.
People fear and revile this “religious police” for its Stasi style of wide reaching and nefarious attacks, its members drawn from lower classes who resent the freedoms and ease of the wealthy.
Things that us westerners consider a birthright such as dissent on the issues of religious belief, are out of the question and punishable by public beheading. For this reason, “chop-chop square” in Riyadh is often a busy place.
Like the Al-Rashid, several tribes, their cultures, and their religious variations struggle to survive under the US backed Saudi regime.
Restless Natives
Before the Ottoman Empire fell (WWI), several ancient tribes called the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia) their home. “But the Hijazis in the West, the Asiris in the south, and the Shiites in the east did all suffer massacres, witness their Islamic monuments destroyed, and have their various Islamic beliefs damned as apostacy by the new official ideology: Wahhabism,” says John R. Bradley in his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed.
Although all were eventually cowered into submission, many of these diverse people Ibn Saud finally ruled over were not originally Wahhabis. Indeed, many members of these tribes still resent and resist Wahhabism, while Al-Saud bought or promised or compelled the loyalty of others under threat of beheading. These tribes have always fiercely resisted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny which arose from the central region of Al-Najd.
Shiites make a majority in the Eastern Province on the oil rich Gulf. The Saudi regime has impoverished, often harshly oppressed, and at times massacred them (not unlike Saddam Hussein’s Kurd massacres using gas and helicopters supplied by the US).
The Hijaz is home of the House of Hashem, or the Hashemite tribe, descendants from the Prophet. They enjoyed considerable autonomy and a belief in Sufism, the mystical Islamic belief system based on the idea that love is projection of the essence of God to the universe. This greatly contrasts from the Wahhabi’s strict literalistic and legalistic approach to religion.
The Asir tribes, like the liberal Hijaz and the Shiites, have always been reluctant vassals to the Al-Saud Royalty. Like the many other tribes, the Asir have never fully adopted the Wahhabi doctrine. The Asirs carry out periodic rebellions and low-level struggles to keep their regional identity alive.
The Asirs view the Al-Saud family as outsiders imposing their rule, backed by the West. They call both hypocritical: the Al-Saud Royalty for preaching piety and purity while living in opulence and the West for espousing human rights and democracy while supporting a tyrannical regime that disrespects the rights and customs of others. The hypocrisy fuels hatred for the West and local alienation from Al-Najd, the region of Wahhabism.
The governor of the Asir region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, surprisingly admits to the crisis that the Wahhabi influence has created.
Who teaches children in orphanages and schools that Saudi Arabia is not their home, that their only home is Islam? That their future vocation is jihad?...Who convinced Saudi youth that the surest path to Heaven is to blow themselves up and take citizens, foreign residents and security officers with them? Who did this to us?Quoted from John R. Bradley’s Saudi Arabia Exposed.
Why Terrorism?
Asir was where the 15 Saudi hijackers lived when the 9/11 attack took place. Several of the hijackers came from the same tribe and bonded there in the late 1990’s. They listened to the same radical Wahhabi sermons at the Seqeley mosque in the region’s capital. Shortly before they left Saudi Arabia for Afghan training camps, they pledged to join jihad.
At least 12 of the hijackers came from the impoverished, highly tribal parts of Hijaz and Asir. Like most young Saudis, well educated or not, but almost all unemployed, oppressed, and impoverished, they imbued the anit-West and anti-Saudi sentiment. Like them and other hard-line Islamic dissenters in the past, Osama bin Laden was always a harsh critic of the official Wahhabi religious establishment that joins forces with the Al-Saud Royalty.
The hijackers also shared bin Laden’s tribal roots. Like him, they resented the Saud Royal clan that ruled them while living a double standard and they hated the religious sheiks from the Al-Najd region who legitimatize Al-Saud while “issuing fatwas for money” as the dissident saying goes.
By attacking the US--supporters of Saud--these tribal hard-line Islamist Saudis targeted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny. The Saudi-U.S. alliance motivates the
otherwise powerless, disinherited tribe members to attack their source of disinheritance and resentment.
Since Al-Saud remains a reliable oil partner, unlike Saddam Hussein, need we wonder why the US invaded Iraq instead of the real source of the 9/11 attack?
Main Source for this article: John R. Bradley's Saudi Arabia Exposed.
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