10-26-2004, 11:48 PM
French Commentary: Al-Qa'ida's Program Reflects That of Saudi Royals
Paris Le Figaro (Internet Version-WWW) in French 06 Oct 04
[Commentary by Alexandre Adler: "Washington and Riyadh: Dangerous Loosening of
Ties"]
[Text] There are numerous foreign policy questions which, without being the subject of explicit disputes since they are no interest at all to US readers, could prompt considerably different answers depending on whether Bush or Kerry is elected at the beginning of November. In particular, it is clear that the management of the NATO crisis, of relations with Putin's Russia, policy toward Latin America, or relations with Beijing will give rise to alternative solutions that will be tried in turn (though not necessarily in the form of political rotation, since we have already seen during the past four years the Bush administration converted to multilateral approaches to Venezuela and North Korea.)
But one question already seems to have been decided, and it will be the subject of a consensus between both parties: this is the Saudi question. It is indeed clear that both Kerry and Bush will, starting in November 2004, unravel the United States' oldest post-war alliance: it was indeed at the same time as the Yalta Conference, in winter 1945, that Roosevelt gave his blessing to Ibn Saud and, in return, Saudi Arabia guaranteed the United States regular oil supplies, first to end the war and then to win the peace. There have of course been rifts in the alliance, at times of particular tension: the eccentric but intelligent King Saud toyed for a while with the idea of an alliance with al-Nasir, as well as with the toughest of oil policies toward the West.
After he was deposed in the late 1950s, his replacement by the Faysal-Yamani team restored great security to the oil markets and even, once the major oil crisis of 1973-74 was past, discreet Saudi support for a policy of US distancing from a very ambitious shah of Iran. It was always possible to criticize his policy on human rights, whereas the Wahhabi kingdom was beyond reproach in Washington. It would have been possible to imagine that the end of the Cold War would prompt a realignment of the two states. This did not happen, thanks to the capricious folly of Saddam Husayn who, by attacking Kuwait, forced the Saudi kingdom to appeal once more to the US shield, a good 30 years after the United States evacuated the base at Dahran.
One of the consequences of Saddam's decline having been Arafat's sudden but brief conversion to an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, the boost to the Middle East process deprived the Saudis of the essence of their anti-Semitic arguments (who could be more Sunni than Arafat?) It also forced them to support, albeit from afar, the real reorganization of the Middle East that began at that time and that culminated in 1997 with the election of a reformist president in Iran by universal suffrage, Hojetoleslam (an intermediate rank in the Shiite clergy) Khatami. Thus both sides deferred an examination of a situation whose ins and outs had indeed changed.
What were the United States' fundamental interests in the Middle East in 1945? To guarantee the security of oil and to defeat communism and its allies. In relation to these two objectives, Israel was an unwelcome distraction, and without the purely domestic concerns of a Harry Truman seeking reelection, Washington would have aligned with Britain's stance and obstructed the emergence of an independent Jewish state, as was untiringly advocated by Secretary of State George Marshall and his unofficial assistant, Dean Acheson. Task sharing between Britain and the United States then consisted of the former supporting the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq and then Jordan-Palestine, and the latter, the United States, keeping at arm's length the Wahhabi monarchy, whose barbaric fanaticism some official historians tried to disguise as a "Puritanism very similar to that of the Mayflower pilgrims."
And what did Saudi Arabia want in 1945? To be left in peace and free to administer itself as it wanted, euphorically distributing the growing benefits of oil exploitation, actually organized by the US engineers of Aramco, and carried out on the ground by Shiite workers of the Hassa from Bahrain or Iraq enjoying no rights and subject with royal approval to strict South African-type apartheid by their Western hierarchy. Things have changed a great deal, 60 years on. Israel is no longer an unwelcome distraction for the United States.
Indeed, following the collapse of Vietnam, or rather during it, at the time of the 1973 crisis, the United States realized that it could not permit an Israeli military defeat that would have had disastrous consequences worldwide. This feeling was soon reinforced by the Israel's very active involvement in the space war project, and more generally in the development of an Israeli advanced technology industry closely allied to the US cybernetic war machine. But, even regionally, following the collapse of Christian Lebanon and the weakening of the entire Persian Gulf as a result of a still possible conjunction between the enemy brothers of Syria and Iraq, Israel remained, together with the Turkish Army, the only stable fixed point with a view to regaining control of a tumultuous region.
By that time, to the Saudi monarchy's great displeasure, the security of energy supplies to the West depended on Jerusalem, thus completely overturning the equations and the perspective of 1948. At the same time, the domestic policy launched by al-Faysal and pursued by his successors, of democratic expansion and Saud-ization of officialdom, eventually yielded fruit. Since the year 2000 the Saudi population have become larger than Iraq's, but this pressure
from a youth that are experiencing unemployment or at least economic uncertainty for the first time, makes the Saudi kingdom, structurally, a champion of high fossil fuel prices.
If Yamani was OPEC's real dove, his successor, Naimi -- entirely obedient to the seven Saudi brothers who systematically bleed the country -- is obviously a hawk. Thus we saw Saudi Arabia's hand in the aggressive OPEC strategy loudly adopted by Chavez's Venezuela (bound to Syria) and observed more or less by the declining Iraq of Saddam Husayn.
Thus the fundamental equation could be read very simply: Saudi Arabia, which no longer fears the communist and al-Nasir threat, no longer tolerates the growing engagement of the United States and particularly its oil lobby alongside Israel; the United States, and especially its oil lobby, formerly entirely committed to the Saudi cause, no longer tolerates the Wahhabi kingdom's energy policy. This is where Usama Bin Ladin comes in, in an ambiguous and complex manner. Indeed there can be no doubt that, by openly declaring war on the monarchy, and particularly on the reformist crown prince Abdallah, Usama Bin Ladin has for the time being succeeded in reconciling Washington with Riyadh.
Confronted with this common enemy, Abdallah, famously pro-European, a militant anti-Zionist and impenitent Artab nationalist, has agreed to set his complaints aside, because he simply still needs the United States in order to salvage his kingdom. Similarly, the United States now has nothing better to do than to highlight his attempts at reform. But this reparation is only temporary. And this is where the fundamental ambiguity of Usama's blueprint becomes fully apparent: in fact, by sacrificing his person and his life, the Al-Qa'ida leader was merely expressing in an extreme manner the real program of the majority tendency within the royal family, itself favorably regarded by a public increasingly won over to fundamentalism.
Set out explicitly, and without all the anti-Western and anti-Semitic claptrap, this program can be summed up in five points:
1. To reduce the US Government's arrogance by subjecting it to an outright economic decline by means of an offensive oil policy;
2. Promptly to equip Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons;
3. To wage an apparently anti-US and anti-Israeli jihad, whose sharpest point will be brandished against the Shiite menace, first in Iraq, then in Pakistan, and last in Saudi Arabia itself;
4. To make Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Cairo's Al-Azhar Theology Faculty the intellectual and political center of the Muslim world;
5. To prevent any even temporary compromise in Palestine and Kashmir in order to maintain Muslim militant combativeness, to destabilize the military leaderships of Syria and Pakistan in order to make them serve the worldwide jihad.
This five-part program is now taking place before our eyes. It would be very naive to attribute it to Al-Qa'ida alone, or, rather, its mere formulation makes us realize why, despite his powerful extremism, Bin Ladin enjoys so much approval, proceeding from within the black heart of Saudi fundamentalism, whose arteries unfortunately supply an entire region, from Marrakech to Djakarta.
Of course it is the new US president that will draw the necessary conclusions from this situation. He could adopt a defensive strategy based solely on an Israeli-Turkish-Jordanian alliance, or he could -- and this is to be hoped for -- go onto the most logical kind of offensive by finding common ground for an understanding with a New Iran.
Paris Le Figaro (Internet Version-WWW) in French 06 Oct 04
[Commentary by Alexandre Adler: "Washington and Riyadh: Dangerous Loosening of
Ties"]
[Text] There are numerous foreign policy questions which, without being the subject of explicit disputes since they are no interest at all to US readers, could prompt considerably different answers depending on whether Bush or Kerry is elected at the beginning of November. In particular, it is clear that the management of the NATO crisis, of relations with Putin's Russia, policy toward Latin America, or relations with Beijing will give rise to alternative solutions that will be tried in turn (though not necessarily in the form of political rotation, since we have already seen during the past four years the Bush administration converted to multilateral approaches to Venezuela and North Korea.)
But one question already seems to have been decided, and it will be the subject of a consensus between both parties: this is the Saudi question. It is indeed clear that both Kerry and Bush will, starting in November 2004, unravel the United States' oldest post-war alliance: it was indeed at the same time as the Yalta Conference, in winter 1945, that Roosevelt gave his blessing to Ibn Saud and, in return, Saudi Arabia guaranteed the United States regular oil supplies, first to end the war and then to win the peace. There have of course been rifts in the alliance, at times of particular tension: the eccentric but intelligent King Saud toyed for a while with the idea of an alliance with al-Nasir, as well as with the toughest of oil policies toward the West.
After he was deposed in the late 1950s, his replacement by the Faysal-Yamani team restored great security to the oil markets and even, once the major oil crisis of 1973-74 was past, discreet Saudi support for a policy of US distancing from a very ambitious shah of Iran. It was always possible to criticize his policy on human rights, whereas the Wahhabi kingdom was beyond reproach in Washington. It would have been possible to imagine that the end of the Cold War would prompt a realignment of the two states. This did not happen, thanks to the capricious folly of Saddam Husayn who, by attacking Kuwait, forced the Saudi kingdom to appeal once more to the US shield, a good 30 years after the United States evacuated the base at Dahran.
One of the consequences of Saddam's decline having been Arafat's sudden but brief conversion to an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, the boost to the Middle East process deprived the Saudis of the essence of their anti-Semitic arguments (who could be more Sunni than Arafat?) It also forced them to support, albeit from afar, the real reorganization of the Middle East that began at that time and that culminated in 1997 with the election of a reformist president in Iran by universal suffrage, Hojetoleslam (an intermediate rank in the Shiite clergy) Khatami. Thus both sides deferred an examination of a situation whose ins and outs had indeed changed.
What were the United States' fundamental interests in the Middle East in 1945? To guarantee the security of oil and to defeat communism and its allies. In relation to these two objectives, Israel was an unwelcome distraction, and without the purely domestic concerns of a Harry Truman seeking reelection, Washington would have aligned with Britain's stance and obstructed the emergence of an independent Jewish state, as was untiringly advocated by Secretary of State George Marshall and his unofficial assistant, Dean Acheson. Task sharing between Britain and the United States then consisted of the former supporting the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq and then Jordan-Palestine, and the latter, the United States, keeping at arm's length the Wahhabi monarchy, whose barbaric fanaticism some official historians tried to disguise as a "Puritanism very similar to that of the Mayflower pilgrims."
And what did Saudi Arabia want in 1945? To be left in peace and free to administer itself as it wanted, euphorically distributing the growing benefits of oil exploitation, actually organized by the US engineers of Aramco, and carried out on the ground by Shiite workers of the Hassa from Bahrain or Iraq enjoying no rights and subject with royal approval to strict South African-type apartheid by their Western hierarchy. Things have changed a great deal, 60 years on. Israel is no longer an unwelcome distraction for the United States.
Indeed, following the collapse of Vietnam, or rather during it, at the time of the 1973 crisis, the United States realized that it could not permit an Israeli military defeat that would have had disastrous consequences worldwide. This feeling was soon reinforced by the Israel's very active involvement in the space war project, and more generally in the development of an Israeli advanced technology industry closely allied to the US cybernetic war machine. But, even regionally, following the collapse of Christian Lebanon and the weakening of the entire Persian Gulf as a result of a still possible conjunction between the enemy brothers of Syria and Iraq, Israel remained, together with the Turkish Army, the only stable fixed point with a view to regaining control of a tumultuous region.
By that time, to the Saudi monarchy's great displeasure, the security of energy supplies to the West depended on Jerusalem, thus completely overturning the equations and the perspective of 1948. At the same time, the domestic policy launched by al-Faysal and pursued by his successors, of democratic expansion and Saud-ization of officialdom, eventually yielded fruit. Since the year 2000 the Saudi population have become larger than Iraq's, but this pressure
from a youth that are experiencing unemployment or at least economic uncertainty for the first time, makes the Saudi kingdom, structurally, a champion of high fossil fuel prices.
If Yamani was OPEC's real dove, his successor, Naimi -- entirely obedient to the seven Saudi brothers who systematically bleed the country -- is obviously a hawk. Thus we saw Saudi Arabia's hand in the aggressive OPEC strategy loudly adopted by Chavez's Venezuela (bound to Syria) and observed more or less by the declining Iraq of Saddam Husayn.
Thus the fundamental equation could be read very simply: Saudi Arabia, which no longer fears the communist and al-Nasir threat, no longer tolerates the growing engagement of the United States and particularly its oil lobby alongside Israel; the United States, and especially its oil lobby, formerly entirely committed to the Saudi cause, no longer tolerates the Wahhabi kingdom's energy policy. This is where Usama Bin Ladin comes in, in an ambiguous and complex manner. Indeed there can be no doubt that, by openly declaring war on the monarchy, and particularly on the reformist crown prince Abdallah, Usama Bin Ladin has for the time being succeeded in reconciling Washington with Riyadh.
Confronted with this common enemy, Abdallah, famously pro-European, a militant anti-Zionist and impenitent Artab nationalist, has agreed to set his complaints aside, because he simply still needs the United States in order to salvage his kingdom. Similarly, the United States now has nothing better to do than to highlight his attempts at reform. But this reparation is only temporary. And this is where the fundamental ambiguity of Usama's blueprint becomes fully apparent: in fact, by sacrificing his person and his life, the Al-Qa'ida leader was merely expressing in an extreme manner the real program of the majority tendency within the royal family, itself favorably regarded by a public increasingly won over to fundamentalism.
Set out explicitly, and without all the anti-Western and anti-Semitic claptrap, this program can be summed up in five points:
1. To reduce the US Government's arrogance by subjecting it to an outright economic decline by means of an offensive oil policy;
2. Promptly to equip Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons;
3. To wage an apparently anti-US and anti-Israeli jihad, whose sharpest point will be brandished against the Shiite menace, first in Iraq, then in Pakistan, and last in Saudi Arabia itself;
4. To make Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Cairo's Al-Azhar Theology Faculty the intellectual and political center of the Muslim world;
5. To prevent any even temporary compromise in Palestine and Kashmir in order to maintain Muslim militant combativeness, to destabilize the military leaderships of Syria and Pakistan in order to make them serve the worldwide jihad.
This five-part program is now taking place before our eyes. It would be very naive to attribute it to Al-Qa'ida alone, or, rather, its mere formulation makes us realize why, despite his powerful extremism, Bin Ladin enjoys so much approval, proceeding from within the black heart of Saudi fundamentalism, whose arteries unfortunately supply an entire region, from Marrakech to Djakarta.
Of course it is the new US president that will draw the necessary conclusions from this situation. He could adopt a defensive strategy based solely on an Israeli-Turkish-Jordanian alliance, or he could -- and this is to be hoped for -- go onto the most logical kind of offensive by finding common ground for an understanding with a New Iran.