Posted on 09/06/2003 7:23:37 PM PDT by Clive
When President George W. Bush delivered his state of the union address in January 2002, some 20 weeks after 9/11, he said North Korea, Iran and Iraq "and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."
He omitted, however, any mention of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as members of this same axis.
Since then, much more has been learned about the insidious underworld of international terrorism organized by Muslim fundamentalists.
We continue to discover the extent to which Pakistanis provide organizational and logistic support to the network of terror run by Osama bin Laden and associates, occupying senior operational positions as did Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11 attacks, and Omar Saeed Sheikh, the murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The omission of Pakistan from the axis of evil can only be explained by the location of the country -- its strategic importance in the global war against those who, in Bush's words, "embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed."
Without its location, which makes Pakistan a hinge country between the Middle East and South and Central Asia, it would be simply another failed state in some part of the world of no importance.
But the omission of Saudi Arabia from the axis of evil requires greater effort that -- as the second anniversary of 9/11 approaches -- Bush is finding to be increasingly intolerable to the
American people, given the facts of its collusion with those forces at war with the U.S.
Of the 19 suicide hijackers on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001, all were Arab and Muslim, and 15 of them were Saudi citizens living in America.
Bin Laden is the poster face of this monstrosity, a Saudi by birth whose citizenship was revoked by Saudi authorities in 1994.
And the recently released 900-page U.S. congressional report on intelligence failure in respect to 9/11, with 28 pages on Saudi Arabia deleted on grounds of national security, discloses how Saudis distributed huge sums of money raised as charitable donations to fund the terrorist attack on America.
There is an undeniable Saudi connection with international terrorism of Muslim fundamentalists and fascists. What needs explaining is the basis of this connection, and the reason Bush is compelled to maintain relations with a kingdom despite it being a nest of an explosive bigotry claiming a rising toll of American and other victims.
* * *
More than 60 years ago, on Feb. 18, 1943, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 8926 where we read the following remarkable sentence: "I hereby find the defence of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defence of the United States."
The Second World War, among other things, was also about seizing control of the most vital resource in the hydrocarbon age inaugurated at the beginning of the 20th century. It had become widely known by then that the most accessible supply of this resource, oil, was to be found in the Persian Gulf region.
Two years after signing the executive order and eight weeks before his death, the president of the United States set forth for a secret encounter with the ruler of Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 12, 1945, Roosevelt, returning from the Yalta conference with his wartime allies, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, met King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud on board an American warship, the USS Quincy, in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal located between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
This historic meeting sealed an unusual relationship between an emerging superpower and a country and its people stuck in a timeless pre-modern world of camel-herding and locust-eating.
* * *
Roosevelt's instinct and knowledge have proven right. He understood, better than any of America's rivals, the requirement for being a great industrial-military power in the hydrocarbon age was to control the largest possible supply of oil available outside its own possession.
Roosevelt was the architect of America's policy in the Middle East, and it has remained fixed despite the political upheavals of the intervening decades to the present.
Saudi Arabia, according to available estimates, sits on top of 25 per cent of the world's known oil reserves.
The periodic effort, however, to estimate global reserves without setting a price at which it would be available is a mug's game. Such "reserves" are a function of price: The higher the price the market is willing to pay for oil, the larger becomes the available reserve.
In the global political economy of oil, Saudi Arabia's place is pivotal. It is the swing producer setting the price for all other producers, since the cost of extracting and refining its oil is the lowest, and the difference between this cost and the market price it sets is the source of its immense oil revenue.
As the oil-pumping station for the world's industrial economies, the security of Saudi Arabia is indisputable. Any deliberate disruption of the Saudi oil supply, as occurred in the context of the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, will have immediate devastating effects on the world economy.
But the huge irony, and the source of the present difficulties, is the politics of this oil-based kingdom remain an anachronism hostile to the modern world.
* * *
The political arrangement of Saudi Arabia is based on a compact made between Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (died 1791) and his contemporary, Muhammad Ibn Saud, in the mid-18th century.
Both were emerging into history from Najd in the interior of the Arabian peninsula.
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was the founder of the extremist puritanical sect known as Wahhabi. Wahhabism is the religious-political doctrine of Saudi Arabia.
Ibn Saud was the ancestor of the Saud clan. His descendant, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, supported by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's followers and Britain as patron, founded the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Hamid Algar, a scholar of the Middle East and Islam at the University of California, Berkeley, observes, "Wahhabism is essentially a movement without pedigree; it came out of nowhere in the sense not only of emerging from the wastelands of Najd, but also its lack of substantial precedent in Islamic history."
The Saudi ruler's absolute authority is limited by the compact made between Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Ibn Saud. The House of Saud may only rule while it follows the Wahhabi precepts reflecting the value system of a closed patriarchal tribal society.
Within the larger Arab-Muslim world, Wahhabism has been viewed as a gross aberration of traditional Islam. To change this view, the House of Saud, establishing itself as the protector of the sacred mosque in Mecca, set out to buy approval of Muslims as it bought the loyalty of tribes in the kingdom.
Oil money provided the resource for this purpose of sectarian diplomacy, and Saudi money sent to poorer Muslim countries to build mosques and train preachers became a conduit for Wahhabism into places like Afghanistan, leading to the making of the Taliban.
But the demands of the modern world compounded the internal conflicts of Saudi society. Corruption within the royal family, waste and unaccountable expenditures, relative decline in oil revenue with a rapidly bulging population in excess of 22 million, unprepared and unwilling to work, have taken their cumulative toll.
In 1979, a band of disgruntled Wahhabis stormed the holy mosque in Mecca attempting to overthrow the House of Saud. They failed, but disclosed in their action the extent and nature of the opposition within the kingdom.
The House of Saud made a Faustian bargain with its opposition. It financed them to take their animus into the wider Muslim world in preaching their bigoted version of Islam.
Then came a congruence of Wahhabi fanaticism with the American-supported war in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union. The success of the Afghani war fed into the imagination of Muslim fundamentalists to wage jihad, an armed struggle, against the presence of the West in the Arab-Muslim world.
These Muslim fundamentalists and fascists described the enemy, in the spiteful language of bin Laden, as the Crusader-Zionists. Their first terrorist strike into the heartland of America was the bombing of New York's World Trade Center in 1993.
On the second anniversary of 9/11, Bush finds there is no alternative to maintaining relations with the House of Saud. It is the least of worst options while waging the war against international terrorism that spilled forth from the interiors of the peninsular Arabia's wasteland.
A bit more expensive to extract, but once extracted it can go directly into a North American oil pipeline system. No tankers on the high seas.
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