Arabia In Disarray
By Mustapha Marrouchi
08 February, 2007
Countercurrents.orgPart One
Saudi Arabia–a vulgarly rich country–is the ally par excellence of the West in the Middle East, the vital link between the US and its oil supply–appears to be sliding steadily toward disaster. This cannot of course be said in Saudi Arabia but a number of Saudi writers, intellectuals, and artists have traveled out of their country in order to be able to speak of the mess in safety. There are many who will find this assessment too pessimistic, but the kingdom faces formidable problems–the economy, family succession, Islamism, regional tension, together with a generalized disenchantment and wish for reform. Since Saudi Arabia is essentially a family company, belonging, though not in equal shares, to the Al Saud tribe and their Wahhabi fanatic partners, the current situation means that the government is in trouble in a country where the government is everything. It would therefore be wise for the West, which still has a decisive influence on the area, not to look the other way as it did in the case of Iran and soon Iraq, but to face up to the reality on the ground now, before Saudi Arabia is caught up in a Catherine-wheel of chaos that could well shower combustible sparks on its Muslim neighbors. The seizure of the Grand Mosque by Islamists in 1979 was one warning, the fifteen out of the nineteen 2001-highjackers was another, against complacency. So is the fact that the Saudi aristocracy has squandered more than $400 billion of reserve since 1990 when, with interest rates around 20%, the royal family was still fabulously wealthy. It may seem astonishing, but Saudi is now entering a new era as a net debtor nation.
What the kingdom projects to the outside world has in fact nothing to do with what goes on inside the realm where executions and floggings are routine: a version of the bread and circus principle favored by the Romans. Until recently, the victims of these popular spectacles have either been wretched Saudi nationals or expatriate workers from poor countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines. We still remember the two expatriate British nurses who were accused of murdering a colleague at a hospital complex. They were each given a sentence of 500 lashes, a punishment that has no place in modern society. The wealthy desert kingdom, while engaging in what Michel Foucault aptly called the “gentle way in punishment” in public to demonstrate to its own subjects that its legal system fully conforms to A’Shari’a (Islamic law), prefers to conceal the practical consequences of that system from the outside world, to which its suave and highly educated bedouin princes like to present the image of a uniquely harmonious blend of modernity and tradition. The government also seeks to present itself as stable and civilized, not only because such is the custom of governments everywhere, but because it depends on Western support. The Saudi regime, as shown with devastating clarity in 1991, relies heavily on US and Europe military power. Like the other oil-rich sheikhdoms, it spends billions of dollars on highly sophisticated equipment which it lacks the manpower, training or expertise to use itself. The tag of medieval barbarism cuts to the quick.
The moral outrage at our incapacity to face the bitter reality on the ground is not limited to Saudi Arabia whose king and princes are lazy, corrupt, and ignorant. Take Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defense Minister. He is one of the Kingdom’s biggest skimmers, making billions out of arms contracts. The list of these “half-made” individuals includes the former Saudi ambassador to the US and close friend of the Bush family, Prince Bandar, a playboy of sorts, who protected his hashish-smuggling circle, and misappropriated CIA funds for his personal use; Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to the US, dazzles Westerners with his wit and charm but is really nothing but a skirt-chasing, narrow-minded tribal chief who sees nothing wrong in lying, stealing, and murder. The verdict is correct insofar as the region’s history was shaped by dubious characters after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Think of Gertrude Bell, Oriental Secretary in Mesopotamia, who had a crucial hand in the creation of modern Iraq. Bell was “an example of the empty socialite managing to misjudge everything in her way and creating havoc in her aftermath”; St. John Philby, the friend and supporter of Ibn Saud and father of Kim, was an “upstart contrarian . . . bent on creating noise” (Aburish, 1994: 56). What rankles in the thesis developed by Aburish is the absence of a broader historical and geopolitical analysis in which the actions of these individuals might be evaluated. True, British and French imperial interests were decisive in shaping the modern Middle East; and given the industrial West’s appetite for cheap oil, it is hardly surprising that Western interests still play an important part in sustaining current regimes, despite endemic corruption, a generally poor record on human rights, and the total absence of real democracy. The export of armaments remains far in excess of the external defense requirements of the autocratic regimes of Arabia and the Gulf, initiated quite cynically as a way of recycling the cash from oil, raises important moral and humanitarian issues. Britain and the US armed Saddam Hussein to the hilt, with devastating consequences for Iran, Kuwait, later for the Kurds and Shi’a of southern Iraq, and finally for Iraq itself. Selling high tech weapons to a thug is a bonanza for the industry, on which thousands of jobs depended. There is a significant irony in the fact that what has become one of Blairism and Bushism’s most successful export industries was assiduously featherbedded in the years of free-market Thatcherism and Reganism, injected with government money and provided with lavish credit guarantees underpinned by the taxpayer. “Arms kill,” Aburish writes:
For 70 years the West has used its position as the primary arms supplier in the Middle East to provide its deputy sheriffs with the ability to kill their enemies. They have used this ability to create phoney states, to maintain them against popular forces, to enforce Western designs to divide Palestine, to pressure unfriendly regimes into co-operating with them, to make money and corrupt leaders who became more dependent on them, and to sponsor minorities to stay in power and uprisings against unfriendly regimes or groups (Ibid., 145).
Aburish supplies a wealth of details to support his argument, including evidence of CIA involvement in the overthrow in 1963 of the Iraqi leader General Kassem, an honorable and genuinely popular figure, and of the Agency’s machinations in the run-up to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (which led to the Israeli take-over of the West Bank). He sees the venality of some of the actors, and the opportunism of others, as sufficient explanation for the Arab world’s failure to realize the promise of independence and freedom that was held out after the First and Second World Wars. That promise was embodied in the only hero of his book, Gamal Abdel Nasser–the one leader who came “very close to breaking the back of the abusive pro-West Arab establishment.” To Aburish, Nasser was the only man who represented Arab dreams, complexes and foibles against Western hegemony. His quarrels with the West can be judged as an expression of the complex relationship between the Arabs and the West. The core of this relationship was an intrinsic desire on his part to be understood and respected and a consequent desire to be left alone and free. In this, he was the average Arab wants nothing more than a recognition of his or her rights against Western strategic interests and commitments to special interest groups (Ibid., 233).
But Nasser and the hope he represented were deliberately destroyed by Western support for his rival in the Arab world, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Had it not been for the West’s support for Saudi Arabia and Saudi support for the monarchists in Yemen, Aburish argues, 200,000 of Nasser’s best troops would not have been tied up in Yemen in 1967 when they could have been deployed against Israel.
There is much to be learned from Aurish. His underlying theme of Western cunning and hegemonic control exercised through corrupt rulers and greedy arms merchants is not without its attractions. Where I part company with him is when he advances that an Arab superstate comprising Iraq, Egypt, and Syria would have been any more viable than the union between Egypt and Syria which collapsed in 1961 when the Syrians seceded. Despite the rhetoric of Arabism, and that of the pan-Islamism into which it has recently been subsumed, the economic, religious, and ethnic differences between the countries making up the Middle East have always been irreconcilable and will remain so, regardless of the machinations of the West. The territorial divisions agreed between the Great Powers after the First World War may be arbitrary, but in the modern world, territorial units are meshed into an international system and it is the primary interest of the elites controlling those units to weld them into states using whatever force is necessary and the best available ideological tools. The ideological nuances distinguishing “regional” Syrian Ba’athism from “national” Iraqi Ba’athism sustained the competing power structures of Syria and Iraq, just as the ideology of Wahhabism (a sectarian version of Islam distinguished by xenophobia, misogyny, and intolerance) sustains the power of the Saudi dynasty. The elites Aburish so despises are not puppets: they are willing and active patterns in a bilateral process that helps to keep them in power. If, as he implies, obsolete monarchies, special interest groups, and military regimes continues to govern undemocratically, without genuine popular mandates, that is because (as he rightly points out) institutions which reflect the will of the people and protect their rights have yet to be created.
Unfortunately, Aburish fails to address the deeper reasons for the democratic deficit in Middle Eastern societies–the product of history, and to a considerable extent of Islamic law itself. The sociologist Bryan Turner refers to a “cluster of absences” in Islamic history: no concept of liberty, no autonomous corporate institutions and assemblies, no concept of “city,” no self-confident middle class. Many of the institutions through which popular power is channeled in Western societies originated in the Church, the paradigm for the corporate bodies through which power is now routinized and mediated in impersonal ways. A’Shari’a, by contrast, remains uncompromisingly personal and unmediated–with the consequence that the public interest, in the form of city, state or any other institution standing between the individual and God, suffers from a lack of legitimacy. As a result, popular demands for representation throughout the Arab world are currently couched, not in the universal language of human rights, justice, democracy, equality but in Islamist terms which most Westerners find incomprehensible, even repulsive. However, the absence of democratic tradition in Islamic history should not automatically lead to the conclusion that Islam and democracy are incompatible, or that Islamists should be denied the right to stand in elections (as they did in Egypt and Algeria) on the grounds that once having come to power by democratic means, they will necessarily suppress democracy. Democrats of any political stripe deserve all the support they can get–even when they adopt the language of Islam. The only valid test for a democrat is a willingness to stand for election and to abide by a fair result. The alleged threat that Islamists pose to pro-Western and spuriously pro-democratic regimes is not a reason to supply those regimes with weapons of torture and internal suppression.
A stark example of the “obsolete monarchies” that Aburish ponders over may be found in the case of Saudi Arabia, a country where it is not easy to come by reliable information. There are no firm statistics on the most important economic indicators, oil output or revenue. Few independent observers believe the official population figure of a round 18 million. No one seems to know how much many Saudi princes there are, each entitled to a khususia, or annual allowance of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and to perks, including free air travel. Currently, the rulers, and owners, of the Kingdom give the impression of having some, short-term, reasons for feeling a little more at ease. The price of oil (which costs the locals 80 c a gallon) rose in late 2005 by 35 per cent, adding an estimated $16 billion to an income from oil of around $62 billion. In the tense context of the Gulf before the invasion of Iraq, the two main sources of unease, Iraq and Iran, appear to be in defensive mood. Within the country, a-salafiin, the conservative and in some ways fundamentalist critics of the regime, have been less in evidence, as repression, exile, and money take their toll. The men “with long beards and short thaub (Arab dress)” are, for the moment, in retreat.
In other respects unease continues. In Riyadh’s “Thirty Street”–where men thrust their visiting-cards through the windows of cars with women passengers–the site of a bomb explosion in November 1995, which destroyed a US-Saudi military training center and killed several people, still stands empty. A later bomb, in Dhahran, which killed 17 Americans and wounded over 300, remains unexplained. There are rumors that those involved in the first explosion, for which four men were executed after a secret trial, were associated with al-mutawwa’in, the Islamic vigilantes attached to the Ministry of the Interior, who tour the city in brown jeeps, harassing inadequately covered women and anyone who fails to observe the hours of prayer. Investigations into the second bomb remain even more obscure: there have been many arrests in areas suspected of fundamentalist influence, both Sunni and Shi’a. But some Saudis suggest that there is a high-up connection, possibly with some prince or military commander, whose disclosure would embarrass the regime.
The Saudi state has longer-term problems for which there are no easy solutions. The first is paralysis at the top: there is more than a hint of late Brezhnevite Moscow about Riyadh, of an Islamic variant of “stagnation.” The three key people in the country are Abdullah, the debauched King; Faisal, the Crown Prince and Commander of the National Guard; and Sultan, the Minister of defense. The King is about 82, extremely passive, and useless. The other leading princes, all sons of the founder of the regime Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, who died in 1953, defer to him. Major policy issues, not least concerning economic change and the slow pace of Constitutional reform, remain unsettled. Abdullah is believed to be more sympathetic to Arab nationalism, and to want stronger checks on princely corruption. The second problem is jobs. Saudi Arabia is becoming a more “normal” country. Over the past decade, per capita income has fallen by as much as two-thirds, to around $6000 a year, and more and more young people are looking for work. Attempts to “Saudianize” the economy meet with resistance even from Saudi employers. Graduates of the Islamic universities, set up by King Faisal in an attempt to channel Islamist sentiment, are particularly unemployable. The discontent over jobs and money is accentuated by something never far below the surface in the Kingdom–namely, regional differences. In the more cosmopolitan, Western region, al-Hijaz, there is resentment of the bedouin tribesmen who overrun them in the Twenties and who take a disproportionate amount of the oil revenue. Prominent Hijazis, close to the top of the regime, openly scorn the claim that their country is not ready for a more democratic system. In the Eastern, Shi’a region, where the oil fields are, a partial relaxation in the early 1990s has now gone into reverse, and university instructors openly denounce Shi’a as un-Islamic.
Another major problem is the country’s reliance on the US. Saddam’s execution came as a big shock to Saudi Arabia: it showed that there were real threats to the rulers of the country. It also exposed the hollowness of the warrior ethos, on which the ruling family had hitherto based its legitimacy. Attempts by the princes to emphasize the achievements of their troops in the conflict seem to have convinced nobody. Many Saudis resent the US military presence, seeing it in terms of the infidels despoiling sacred territory–a fatuous argument for opponents of the Saudi regime to use, since it is only the Saudi sate that claims the whole territory, Mecca and Medina apart, to be sacred. Resentment against the US was reinforced whenever Washington blocked a vote at the Security Council to condemn Israel for the genocidal policy it has been conducting in Palestine. The regime is, however, caught: after the 1995-bomb blasts it moved US forces out of the cities, but they are never out of mind. Indeed, nationalist sentiment is growing in Saudi Arabia but also in the rest of the Arab world; it is leveled against the West, and at other, allegedly money-grubbing, Arab countries, laced with suggestions of an international conspiracy. There is a vogue for books on al-istishraaq, or “Orientalism,” i.e. the study of the Arab world seen as victim of an imperialist plot. In the opulent bookshops the section on Orientalism is found next to that on espionage and Western or Zionist conspiracies. Many Saudis believe that articles questioning Saudi financial reserves in the Wall Street Journal and other US papers over the past decade were officially inspired. The real test for the kingdom will come when the US forces leave (if they ever do) Iraq. The question then becomes: What will Saudi Arabia do to counter a resurgence of Iran and Shi’ite Islam?
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