BLOWBACK IN RIYADH: Iraq war sows seeds of Saudi revolution
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Behind the Headlines by Justin Raimundo | May 16, 2003
I knew there was something awfully suspicious about the announcement,
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a few weeks ago, that most U.S. troops were going to be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia.
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After all, since when does the Empire hail a major retreat?
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And now my suspicions have been confirmed....
The close, almost symbiotic U.S.-Saudi relationship dates back to the World War II era: FDR was the first American Arabist. American troops have been stationed in the Kingdom since Gulf War I, and the numbers were doubled during Gulf War II. Although the visibility of the U.S. garrison has always been kept low, its presence hardly ever acknowledged, the announcement of the Americans' imminent departure was carried by Saudi television,
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an obvious gesture meant to appease
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Saudi public opinion.
The Americans, for their part, depicted it as a triumph: "It is now a safer region because of the change of regime in Iraq," averred Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Saudis denied asking the Americans to hit the road. The troops' mission, declared Prince Sultan,
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had been accomplished: "There is no need for them to remain. This does not mean that we requested them to leave."
Nor does it mean they won't be asked to return – a distinct possibility in light of what is portended by the recent attack on an American compound in Riyadh.
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In retrospect, the alleged American withdrawal seems to have been a tactical retreat – and also an ominous indicator of just how unstable Saudi rule has become.
The presence of the American "infidels" in the sacred land of Mecca and Medina has been the main complaint of the radicals, and Osama bin Laden's rallying cry: this, above all, justified an anti-American jihad in Islamist eyes. The trumpeting of the American faux-withdrawal on state-controlled television was anti-Ladenite propaganda aimed at the hearts and minds of Saudis, but it's not as if the GIs were going all that far – they're headed to Qatar,
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a small sheikdom on the Persian Gulf. As the International Herald Tribune reported:
"Saudi and American officials said security cooperation would continue, and they noted that American forces and warplanes could return someday if future Saudi rulers faced a new threat. In the huge, air-conditioned hangar at Prince Sultan Air Base, where Rumsfeld thanked several hundred American and allied forces for the efforts in the war, Admiral Nichols said the Pentagon has not decided whether to keep a skeletal crew at the installation to restart it quickly in an emergency. The air command center will be mothballed. 'Nothing's going to be torn down,' Admiral Nichols said. 'It'll remain wired, but most of the computers and what not will be taken out.'"
As the consequences of the Iraq war ripple outward from Baghdad, and the swelling ranks of Al Qaeda's terrorist armies seek vengeance on pro-U.S. rulers throughout the region, the projected "emergency" may already be upon us.
Less than 500 bought-and-paid for Iraqi exiles
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flown in by the Pentagon for the occasion toppled a statue of Saddam, amid the cheers of our laptop bombardiers: the "Three Week War,"
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as the more deluded of them dubbed it, had been a "cakewalk," just as the neocons had said it would be. The antiwar crowd had been wrong, wrong, wrong, they jeered. Consequences? What consequences?
The answer was not long in coming.
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You didn't have to be Nostradamus to predict a direct threat to Saudi rule as one result of the Iraq invasion: the Riyadh blast was the first manifestation of what neocon ideologue Michael Ledeen gloatingly referred to as "creative destruction."
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All this was anticipated by the neocons' "domino theory"
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that saw the Iraqi conquest as the catalyst which would send the other Arab regimes reeling, with the Saudis first on the list. Last summer, you'll remember, neocon "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle and his Defense Policy Board catapulted themselves into the news by holding a briefing featuring one Laurent Murawiec, who characterized Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" of the U.S. We ought to seize their assets in the U.S., averred Murawiec, whose long career as a cadre in the cult of Lyndon LaRouche explains the unmistakable tone of hysteria in his anti-Saudi conspiracy theories.
Perhaps taking a leaf from National Review editor Rich Lowry's book, Murawiec suggested threatening Mecca and Medina if the Saudis didn't cooperate. Such actions, he recommended to Perle and his fellow Pentagon advisors, would be a prelude to the seizure of the oil fields.
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As reported by Jack Shafer in Slate, the last slide in Murawiec's Power Point presentation, modestly entitled "Grand Strategy for the Middle East," proclaimed:
"Iraq is the tactical pivot
Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot
Egypt the prize"
The calculated instability provoked by U.S. military intervention in Iraq plays right into the Murawiec-Perle scenario. As Al Qaeda garners growing popular support in Saudi Arabia, and the country descends into civil war, one or another wing of the House of Saud asks for U.S. intervention to avert anarchy – and the "strategic pivot" is ours.
As I pointed out ten days into the Iraqi phase of this conflict, we are going for a ride on the Middle East escalator:
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"Move over, Caesar. Go hang your head in shame, Alexander. And you – yeah, you, the Little Corporal! – all three of you are about to be dwarfed by Bush the Bold."
The whole region has been targeted for conquest. Next stop – Cairo!
It seems like only yesterday that certain "anti-terrorist" experts for the U.S. government were telling us that "Al Qaeda is in an irreversible decline." This sunny optimism reflected the official administration line, enunciated by the President as he stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier, dressed in Top Gun drag: "The war on terror is not over," he declared, "but we have seen the turning of the tide." Perhaps, but, after the Riyadh strike, one has to ask: in whose favor?
Osama Bin Laden, you’ll remember, is supposed to have been dead, or so far deep in a cave somewhere that he might as well be. With the capture of alleged senior cadre, Al Qaeda was supposed to have been on the run, in disarray if not actually defeated. As Rumsfeld put it in February of last year:
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"What we do know about him, we may not know where he is and we may not know whether he's dead or alive, but we do know that he is having trouble functioning and operating. That he's on the run, that it's hard for him to raise money, that it's harder for him to recruit, that his training bases in Afghanistan are gone, that the host government, the Taliban, has been thrown out of the country, and that he's hiding in caves or tunnels, having difficulty communication with his associates."
Now, it turns out, it was Bin Laden who ordered this latest attack: according to intelligence sources, the leader of the Riyadh cell took his orders directly from the Al Qaeda chief. Not bad for someone "on the run." As for Al Qaeda's recruitment drive: if it was faltering after the Afghan campaign, the pace no doubt picked up when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad.
Rumsfeld's portrait of Osama, the dysfunctional terrorist, could not have been more off base. This reflects our strategy in the "war on terrorism." Instead of fighting Al Qaeda, or anything remotely resembling it, the Bush administration went after Iraq because it was "doable," as Paul Wolfowitz is alleged to have remarked.
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As for the alleged Al Qaeda-Baghdad alliance: this will go down in history as the tallest in a series of mile-high tales told by the War Party, less credible than Yeti sightings and more improbable than the Hollow Earth theory.
The Bushies tried to pass off some obscure Islamist guerrilla group operating out of Kurd-controlled northern Iraq as the "Al Qaeda connection," but now the real Al Qaeda has reared up in Riyadh, lashing out at U.S. facilities and killing 8 Americans. This barely a week after George the Conqueror stood before his troops, victory emanating from his person like a corona, as the nation did everything but crown him with laurel leaves.
The cries of "Hail Caesar!" had barely died down, when Bin Laden popped up like some macabre jack-in-the-box, catching the U.S. and its Saudi allies off guard – and provoking recriminations against Riyadh from the U.S.
The Americans are complaining that the Saudis provided insufficient security, a not-so-subtle hint that Uncle Sam may move in to do the job if the local authorities can't or won't. The charge of Saudi incompetence, or worse, in failing to prevent the attack is all but out in the open.
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This is an odd charge, however, coming from the very same clueless U.S. government agencies that failed to foil the 9/11 plotters and prevent the most destructive terrorist attack in American history.
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan avers that Crown Prince Abdullah is "sincere" in his desire to crack down on the terrorists, but "execution" is another matter, "and I think there's some ways to go on that, quite frankly." Jordan claims the U.S. had asked for additional security at the targeted facilities: "But they did not, as of the time of this particular tragic event, provide the security we had requested."
The proper answer to Ambassador Jordan was written by an American, not a Saudi, Garet Garrett by name. He was an editor of the New York Times before the Great War, and later chief editorial writer for the Saturday Evening Post during the New Deal era. In 1955, Garrett wrote a little-known book called The American Story that ended like this:
"How now, thou American, frustrated crusader, do you know where you are?
"Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world.
"To think own self a liberator, to the world an alarming portent, do you know where you are going from here?"
That might have been written yesterday. Or five minutes ago. Garrett was a prophet, a libertarian version of Jeremiah – or, perhaps, Cassandra.
Now that I've managed to somehow get on to the subject of this rather interesting writer, who seems to be enjoying a bit of a revival….......
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