Exorcising the 'Saudi Spell'

By David Nordell

Rachel Ehrenfeld is completely right to point out in her article just published here, ’The Saudi Spell,’ the risks attached to the newly-announced policy of the Bush Administration to promote nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia. However much the United States (and European countries, led by Britain) try to pretend that Saudi Arabia is a friend and ally of the democratic West, the Saudis are fair-weather friends at the very best, and for the foreseeable future, the onus should be entirely on them to prove the extent and strength of their friendship with the democratic world.

To be fair, as I have tried to point in previous articles here, the Saudis suffer from a split personality in everything to do with their political position and especially their role in international terrorism. On the one hand, the Saudi economy depends to a great extent on the continued revenue from oil exports, which depends almost entirely on the health of the US and other Western economies: although the main pressure on oil prices today is indeed the growing demand for energy of the Chinese economy, as many analysts have pointed out, China’s economic boom -- and therefore its massive consumption of oil and other commodities -- is in itself fuelled by exports to the USA and other wealthy countries that consume Chinese products. If, therefore, the USA enters a genuine recession, whether for purely economic reasons or, say, as the economic expression of future terror attacks, China will be the second country to suffer, and Saudi Arabia the third. Moreover, Saudi Arabia, and indeed the rest of the oil-producing states of the Gulf, is basically defenceless without the US military umbrella. However much money has been spent on buying expensive American and British aircraft and other military hardware and on training the Saudi armed forces, sources familiar with the Saudi military say that these are basically useless: indeed, during one crisis a few years ago, the Saudis imported large numbers of Jordanian troops, basically as mercenaries, to bolster the regime’s defences.

But at the same time, Saudi Arabia is at the very heart of the jihadi movement. It’s not only a question of Saudi skyjackers being at the heart of the 9/11 terrorist outrages. Nor is it only a question of the very large sums of money that Saudi backers have pumped into other terrorist activities, whether via the funds transferred via Arab Bank in New York to the families of Palestinian ’martyrs’ or the very significant support reportedly given by Saudi billionaires to various terrorist groups. Most of all, it is the billions that the Saudi royal family -- and let’s remember that Saudi Arabia to all intents and purposes belongs to the royal family and its oil revenues flow mostly to this huge family and its flunkies -- has over the year donated to Islamic organisations all over the world in order to promote the fundamentalist Salafi ideology within Islam, not only to bring errant Muslims back to the ’true faith’ but also to convert as many non-Muslims as possible to the umma. Islamic schools and colleges, endowed chairs and research centres at universities, have sprung up all over the West thanks to the boundless generosity of the al-Saud family and others (not least the world’s hundreds of millions of car drivers); and while I certainly believe that Muslims have just as much right as Jews, Catholics or Hindus to educate their children in their religion and culture, and that non-Muslims should have the chance to learn about Islam, the problem is that this vast ’education’ network is actually pumping out propaganda aimed at colonising dar al-harb, the non-Muslim free world.

This propaganda takes many forms. One is simply brainwashing millions of Muslim children and adults worldwide into a fundamentalist view of Islam according to which Jews and Christians are pigs and apes, to be slaughtered or at least enslaved: perhaps worse in terms of the Muslim world’s own interests, a view according to which the word Islam, submission, is to be understood literally as a pretext for total, uncritical submission to authority. A second form, basically a corollary of the first, is the view that any means are legitimate to fight to infidels (including the Western states in which so many Muslims live today), including the murder of civilians, and any form of crime against these host societies is justified by the will of Allah. These two forms together are what enable the jihadi movement to recruit both passive supporters and active participants in terrorist acts, from accomplices to the actual suicide bombers; and they also provide the justification for members of Muslim communities worldwide to raise even more money for terrorist activities, provide safe houses, and other resources. A third, even more insidious, form of propaganda is that aimed at the majority populations in the free world: here, the message, partly pumped out by ’research centres’ funded by wealthy Arab donors, basically exploits the political correctness and worship of bogus human rights that have deadened all political discourse: it is no longer legitimate to criticise Islam and the Arab world, even in their most extreme manifestations, in most universities around the world; and Islamic political violence is condoned or ignored by the police and politicians of the West, most of all in Britain. In all of this frightening picture, Saudi Arabia is the master painter directing a larger studio of apprentices: even though the Saudi kingdom as such has only existed since 1926, its basic ideology, at least since its stupendous oil wealth has made this possible, has been to revive the Muslim conquest of the world started by Muhammed and his immediate successors, and interrupted variously by the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the defeat of the Ottoman army at Vienna in 1683. To be fair, King Abdallah is relatively pragmatic and understands that his regime may actually collapse if the USA is not there, or too weak, to support it; but the most likely successor, Prince Nayef, is much more extreme in his views.

So, what of the nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia? I’m not too concerned that Saudi Arabia will be able to develop nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future if this agreement actually turns into something tangible (and this is by no means certain: Saudi capacity for absorbing and exploiting this level of technology is not so high, and the whole agreement may mainly be window-dressing on the part of the regime to gain prestige internally). In any case, the West’s attention and efforts must remain focussed on the much more tangible Iranian nuclear threat; and if an American or Israeli military strike takes place against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which I believe is the only practical scenario for removing this threat decisively, I suspect that Saudi Arabia’s appetite for a real nuclear capability, however ostensibly peaceful, may suddenly vanish.

What does concern me far more is another set of scenarios if Saudi Arabia is allowed to build any kind of nuclear plants (which they obviously don’t need in order to generate energy, unless they really have taken a long view of their economic survival). One scenario is that, given the security problems that are bound to afflict Saudi nuclear plants, radioactive material will be stolen with relative ease (or even taken with the collusion of the regime itself), and used by terrorist groups to carry out outrages in the USA or Europe: even if only a handful of people were killed by the radiation, the trauma and dislocation would be far greater than 9/11. The other is that a terrorist group acting within Saudi Arabia itself -- it could be a Salafist group that sees the regime as too pro-Western, or one sponsored by Iran -- would carry out an attack on a reactor that would release sufficient fallout to threaten the oil fields and downstream production facilities. This would of course cause a panic in the oil market, no less than if Iran mined the Arabian Gulf, with knock-on effects for the global economy that would dwarf those of 9/11 or those of the current crisis atmosphere surrounding the rise in both energy and food prices. If the aim of the jihadi movement is indeed to destabilise the world, nuclear installations in Saudi Arabia would be an ideal place to start.

What should be done about this situation? Clearly, the Bush Administration isn’t going to do anything: even were Bush’s own leadership more credible, he only has seven months left in office, and so it’s unlikely that the White House’s announcement will be followed by any action at all until the next president is sworn in and starts organising his government. I somehow can’t imagine Obama Barack taking a very determined position against Saudi Arabia if, as seems likely, he takes the Democratic nomination, and as seems much less likely, he gets elected in November. But if John McCain is elected, something I personally hope will happen, I would humbly suggest that he calls Saudi Arabia’s bluff -- and it is in many ways a bluff, because for all the oil and the apparent wealth, Saudi Arabia is a weak state with vast political and economic problems that can’t ensure its own survival. He should basically present an ultimatum: legal and even constitutional action to prevent Saudi funding of education and propaganda in the USA and its allies, unless Saudi Arabia agrees to allow open non-Muslim worship for the many Christians and others working and living in Saudi Arabia (a condition that the Saudis are almost certain to reject out of hand); and unless the Saudis agree to and actually implement a much stronger regime of monitoring terror financing and money laundering. The implementation of any nuclear cooperation, however festively announced, would only start to take form after the fulfilment of these and other conditions, including the adoption of genuinely stringent security arrangements monitored and controlled by the USA. Is all of this feasible? Yes: Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most autocratic countries, with levels of state control that most dictators can only dream of, and if its leaders were to focus their attention on moving out of the 18th century and developing a genuine partnership with the West, they could succeed without totally destablising their country. When there’s a will, there’s a way.