The Saudi Curse

THE SAUDI CURSE

Behind The LinesBy Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, August 4, 2005

Saudi Arabia is a pre-eminent example of how God’s sense of humor is unfathomable to mere human beings. A tribe of primitive desert nomads who believe in an atavistic religion seize control of a vast sandy wasteland under which, completely unknown to them, contains more of the critical substance upon which modern civilization depends than anywhere else on earth.

This makes the nomads impossibly rich without doing anything to earn their wealth, which they proceed to spend billions of disseminating around the world their religion which is dedicated to destroying the civilization that gave them their wealth.

So now God is patiently waiting for us to get the joke and figure a way out of it. To even begin to try, we need to understand how Saudi Arabia was created through the Saud tribe conquering and subjugating its neighbors – as described in The Soviet Saudi Union.

Just like the Soviet Union was a Russian imperial empire with Soviet Communism as the ideological justification for ruling conquered peoples (Latvians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc.), so Saudi Arabia is a Saudi imperial empire with Wahhabi Islam as the ideological justification for ruling conquered peoples in the Arabian Peninsula.

So just as the Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and political independence coming to its conquered parts (Latvia, Ukraine, 15 in all), so the War on Moslem Terrorism cannot end until Saudi Arabia is disassembled, and its conquered parts like the Hejaz liberated from Saudi-Wahhabi rule.

This has to come someday, with or without The Ultimate Solution that I told you about almost two years ago, over which the folks who were contemplating it have since gotten frozen feet. In fact, the feet of the entire Washington Establishment, not just the Bush Administration, are freezing cold over the Saudis. No one in any position of actual power seems to know what to do. Everyone knows that the line of “Saudi Brezhnevs” has to come to an end.

The founder of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, ordered that monarchical succession after him should be passed not from father-to-son, but brother-to-brother among his sons, one after the other. That’s why with the death last week of Ibn Saud’s octogenarian son Fahd (who followed his brothers Saud, Faisal, and Khaled), the kingship passed to Fahd’s octogenarian brother Abdullah – and when he dies (which can’t be too far off as he’s 82), yet another octogenarian son of Ibn Saud, Sultan (he’s 81) will succeed him.

The brother next in line has yet to be named, but it’s likely to be Nayef, now 71, and head of the Saudi secret police. He’s the guy who denied that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijacker-terrorists were Saudi citizens and claimed it was an Israeli Jewish plot. He’s the worst of the lot. (Note to Saudi optimists: Forget about Sultan’s son, former ambassador to the US Prince Bandar, succeeding his father instead of Nayef. Bandar’s mother was a Yemeni housemaid, so his blood isn’t pure enough to be king.)

The explosion of oil prices since I wrote the Soviet Saudi Union back in January 2004 has given the Saudi Royals the money to literally buy time. The Kingdom is not going to come apart tomorrow. It may not for several years. But with 60% of their population under 18 and 75% under 30, the place is going to fracture sooner or later. The catalyst the Saudi Royals are most afraid of is a successful democracy next door in Iraq.

Saudi kids, Shia and Sunni, will demand the same. The Royals know it, and that is why they are cooperating with Syria and Iran in sponsoring terrorism in Iraq in the hope a Democratic Iraq will never come into being.

The Bushistas are not only not doing anything to counteract this, they seem oblivious to the problem. I wish I had a happy ending here, and maybe there will be one some years away. For now, however, the Saudi “situation report” is bleak: more of the same.

We will not force the Saudis to shut down their financing of radical Wahhabi mosques and imams all over the world (80% of mosques in America and perhaps 90% in Europe are Wahhabi).

We will not force the Saudis to stop their support of terrorism in Iraq. Fahd, Abdullah, Nayef – all the same for years and several more years to come.

We will not soon be free of the Saudi Curse.