As Trump
visits
The
Independent
Saudi Arabia’s dream of becoming the
dominant Arab and Muslim power in the world has gone down in flames
Saudi Arabia’s military pressure on
Assad served only to make him seek more help from Russia, precipitating
intervention which the US was not prepared to oppose
Patrick Cockburn @indyworld Friday 6 January 2017 16:27 GMT
Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Prince Mohammed bin
Salman is the most powerful figure in Saudi decision making Getty
As recently as two years ago, Saudi Arabia’s half century-long
effort to establish itself as the main power among Arab and Islamic states
looked as if it was succeeding. A US State Department paper sent by former
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in 2014 and published by Wikileaks spoke
of the Saudis and Qataris as rivals competing “to dominate the Sunni world”.
A year later in December 2015, the German foreign
intelligence service BND was so worried about the growing influence of Saudi
Arabia that it took the extraordinary step of producing a memo, saying that
“the previous cautious diplomatic stance of older leading members of the royal
family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention”.
An embarrassed German government forced the BND to recant,
but over the last year its fears about the destabilising impact of more
aggressive Saudi policies were more than fulfilled. What it did not foresee was
the speed with which Saudi Arabia would see its high ambitions defeated or
frustrated on almost every front. But in the last year Saudi Arabia has seen
its allies in Syrian civil war lose their last big urban centre in east Aleppo.
Here, at least, Saudi intervention was indirect but in Yemen direct engagement
of the vastly expensive Saudi military machine has failed to produce a victory.
Instead of Iranian influence being curtailed by a more energetic Saudi policy,
the exact opposite has happened. In the last OPEC meeting, the Saudis agreed to
cut crude production while Iran raised output, something Riyadh had said it
would always reject.
Turkey releases video of air strikes on more than 100 Isis
targets in Syria after Istanbul nightclub attack
In the US, the final guarantor of the continued rule of the
House of Saud, President Obama allowed himself to be quoted as complaining
about the convention in Washington of treating Saudi Arabia as a friend and
ally. At a popular level, there is growing hostility to Saudi Arabia reflected
in the near unanimous vote in Congress to allow families of 9/11 victims to sue
the Saudi government as bearing responsibility for the attack.
Under the mercurial guidance of Deputy Crown Prince and
Defence Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the most powerful figure in Saudi
decision making, Saudi foreign policy became more militaristic and
nationalistic after his 80 year old father Salman became king on 23 January
2015. Saudi military intervention in Yemen followed, as did increased Saudi
assistance to a rebel alliance in Syria in which the most powerful fighting
force was Jabhat al-Nusra, formerly the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda.
Nothing has gone well for the Saudis in Yemen and Syria. The
Saudis apparently expected the Houthis to be defeated swiftly by pro-Saudi
forces, but after fifteen months of bombing they and their ally, former
President Saleh, still hold the capital Sanaa and northern Yemen. The prolonged
bombardment of the Arab world’s poorest country by the richest has produced a
humanitarian catastrophe in which at least 60 per cent of the 25 million Yemeni
population do not get enough to eat or drink.
The enhanced Saudi involvement in Syria in 2015 on the side
of the insurgents had similarly damaging and unexpected consequences. The
Saudis had succeeded Qatar as the main Arab supporter of the Syrian insurgency
in 2013 in the belief that their Syrian allies could defeat President Bashar
al-Assad or lure the US into doing so for them. In the event, greater military
pressure on Assad served only to make him seek more help from Russia and Iran
and precipitated Russian military intervention in September 2015 which the US
was not prepared to oppose.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman is being blamed inside and
outside the Kingdom for impulsive misjudgments that have brought failure or
stalemate. On the economic front, his Vision 2030 project whereby Saudi Arabia
is to become less wholly dependent on oil revenues and more like a normal
non-oil state attracted scepticism mixed with derision from the beginning. It
is doubtful if there will be much change in the patronage system whereby a high
proportion of oil revenues are spent on employing Saudis regardless of their
qualifications or willingness to work.
Protests by Saudi Arabia’s ten million-strong foreign work
force, a third of the 30 million population, because they have not been paid
can be ignored or crushed by floggings and imprisonment. The security of the
Saudi state is not threatened.
The danger for the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the
other Gulf states is rather that hubris and wishful thinking have tempted them
to try to do things well beyond their strength. None of this is new and the
Gulf oil states have been increasing their power in the Arab and Muslim worlds
since the nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Jordan were defeated by
Israel in 1967. They found – and Saudi Arabia is now finding the same thing –
that militaristic nationalism works well to foster support for rulers under
pressure so long as they can promise victory, but delegitimises them when they
suffered defeat.
Previously Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states had worked
through allies and proxies but this restraint ended with the popular uprisings
of 2011. Qatar and later Saudi Arabia shifted towards supporting regime change.
Revolutions transmuted into counter-revolutions with a strong sectarian cutting
edge in countries like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain where there were Sunni
and non-Sunni populations.
Critics of Saudi and Qatari policies often demonise them as
cunning and effective, but their most striking characteristic is their extreme
messiness and ignorance of real conditions on the ground. In 2011, Qatar
believed that Assad could be quickly driven from power just like Muamar Gaddafi
in Libya. When this did not happen they pumped in money and weapons willy-nilly
while hoping that the US could be persuaded to intervene militarily to
overthrow Assad as Nato had done in Libya.
Experts on in Syria argue about the extent to which the
Saudis and the Qataris knowingly funded Islamic State and various al-Qaeda
clones. The answer seems to be that they did not know, and often did not care,
exactly who they were funding and that, in any case, it often came from wealthy
individuals and not from the Saudi government or intelligence services.
The mechanism whereby Saudi money finances extreme jihadi
groups was explained in an article by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times in
December on how the Saudis had bankrolled the Taliban after their defeat in
2001. The article cites the former Taliban Finance Minister, Agha Jan Motasim,
as explaining in an interview how he would travel to Saudi Arabia to raise
large sums of money from private individuals which was then covertly
transferred to Afghanistan. Afghan officials are quoted as saying that a recent
offensive by 40,000 Taliban cost foreign donors $1 billion.
The attempt by Saudi Arabia and Gulf oil states to achieve
hegemony in the Arab and Sunni Muslim worlds has proved disastrous for almost
everybody. The capture of east Aleppo by the Syrian Army and the likely fall of
Mosul to the Iraqi Army means defeat for that the Sunni Arabs in a great swathe
of territory stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. Largely thanks to their
Gulf benefactors, they are facing permanent subjection to hostile governments.
As Trump
visits
The
Independent
The evil empire of Saudi Arabia is
the West’s real enemy
Saudis are active at every level of
the terror chain: planners to financiers, cadres to foot soldiers, ideologists
to cheerleaders
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Sunday 27 September 2015 19:36 BST
Iran is seriously mistrusted by Israel and America. North
Korea protects its nuclear secrets and is ruled by an erratic, vicious man.
Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions alarm democratic nations. The newest
peril, Isis, the wild child of Islamists, has shocked the whole world. But top
of this list should be Saudi Arabia – degenerate, malignant, pitiless, powerful
and as dangerous as any of those listed above.
The state systematically transmits its sick form of Islam
across the globe, instigates and funds hatreds, while crushing human freedoms
and aspiration. But the West genuflects to its rulers. Last week Saudi Arabia
was appointed chair of the UN Human Rights Council, a choice welcomed by
Washington. Mark Toner, a spokesperson for the State Department, said: “We talk
about human rights concerns with them. As to this leadership role, we hope that
it is an occasion for them to look into human rights around the world and also
within their own borders.”
The jaw simply drops. Saudi Arabia executes one person every
two days. Ali Mohammed al-Nimr is soon to be beheaded then crucified for taking
part in pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring. He was a teenager then.
Raif Badawi, a blogger who dared to call for democracy, was sentenced to 10
years and 1,000 lashes. Last week, 769 faithful Muslim believers were killed in
Mecca where they had gone on the Hajj. Initially, the rulers said it was “God’s
will” and then they blamed the dead. Mecca was once a place of simplicity and
spirituality. Today the avaricious Saudis have bulldozed historical sites and turned
it into the Las Vegas of Islam – with hotels, skyscrapers and malls to spend,
spend, spend. The poor can no longer afford to go there. Numbers should be
controlled to ensure safety – but that would be ruinous for profits. Ziauddin
Sardar’s poignant book Mecca: The Sacred City, describes the desecration of
Islam’s holiest site.
Even more seriously, the pernicious Saudi influence is
spreading fast and freely. King Salman has offered to build 200 mosques in
Germany for recently arrived refugees, many of whom are Muslims. He offered no
money for resettlement or basic needs, but Wahhabi mosques, the Trojan horses
of the secret Saudi crusade. Several Islamic schools are also sites of
Wahhabism, now a global brand. It makes hearts and minds small and suspicious,
turns Muslim against Muslim, and undermines modernists.
The late Laurent Murawiec, a French neocon, wrote this in
2002: “The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners
to financiers, from cadres to foot soldiers, from ideologists to cheerleaders.”
Murawiec’s politics were odious, but his observations were spot on. Remember
that most of the 9/11 killers were Saudi; so was the al-Qaeda hierarchy.
In the 14 years that have followed 9/11, the Saudis have
become more aggressive, more determined to win the culture wars. They pour
money into Islamist organisations and operations, promote punishing doctrines
that subjugate women and children, and damn liberal values and democracy. They
are pursuing a cruel bombing campaign in Yemen that has left thousands of
civilians dead and many more in dire straits.
So, what does our ruling establishment do to stop the
invisible hand of this Satan? Zilch. The Royal Family, successive governments,
parliamentarians, a good number of institutions and people with clout
collectively suck up to the Saudi ruling clan. I have not seen any incisive TV
investigation of this regime. We know it is up to no good, but evidence is
suppressed. Some writers have tried to break this conspiracy of obsequiousness.
Craig Unger’s book, House of Bush, House of Saud was published in 2004. It established
beyond reasonable doubt that Saudi Arabia was the nerve-centre of international
terrorism. And that the Bush family was unduly close to the regime. Many of us
believed the revelations were even more explosive than those by the journalists
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who exposed the lies told by Richard Nixon.
This deadly enemy will not be cowed or stopped by Trident.
Our leaders know what is going on. So what do they do? They pick on the small
people. The Government’s Prevent programme now imposes a duty on educators to
watch out for young “radicals” and nip them in the bud. Older dissenters, too.
To date, 4,000 young Muslims have been referred for reprogramming. One was
three years old. In May, a young Muslim schoolboy talked about “eco-terrorists”
and was taken away to be interrogated about whether he supported Isis.
Academics, lawyers, doctors and nurses are also expected to become the nation’s
spies. Mohammed Umar Farooq, a student at Staffordshire University, was accused
last week of being a terrorist because he was reading a book entitled Terrorism
Studies in the library.
In the US, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested because he
took a home-made clock to school. (Richard Dawkins, these days a manic tweet
preacher, questioned whether the clock was part of a “hoax” designed to get
Mohamed arrested, before backtracking.) The West, it seems, is free only for
some. And to be a Muslim is a crime.
Extremism is a serious problem. Westernised, liberal Muslims
do try to influence feverish, hostile young Muslim minds, but we are largely
powerless. Our leaders will not confront Saudi Arabia, the source of Islamist
brainwashing and infection. They won’t because of oil and the profits made by
arms sales. Political cowards and immoral profiteers are the traitors, the real
threat to national security, patriotism and cohesion. How do they answer the
charge?
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