Author: David Wurmser
Publication: The Weekly Standard
- Volume 7, Number 7
Date: October 29, 2001
URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/393rwyib.asp
Two Questions have been raised about
Osama bin Laden. First, if bin Laden opposes the Saudi regime, why has
he never struck Saudi targets? Second, if he threatens Saudi Arabia, why
has the Saudi government taken the lead in recognizing and funding the
Taliban government of Afghanistan, which is entwined with bin Laden's al
Qaeda organization? The answer is: The bin Laden problem is deeply embedded
both in Saudi religious and dynastic politics and in an effort by Iraq
and Syria to shift the balance of power in the Middle East.
To begin to unravel this murky business,
it is necessary to go back to the mid 1990s, when a succession struggle
was beginning in Saudi Arabia. This struggle pits the octogenarian king,
Fahd bin Abdel-Aziz, and his full brothers in the Sudairi branch of the
family (especially the defense minister, Prince Sultan) against their half-brother,
Crown Prince Abdallah. King Fahd and the Sudairis favor close ties to the
United States, while Crown Prince Abdallah prefers Syria and is generally
more enamored of pan-Islamic and pan-Arab ideas. All of these contenders
are old. Whoever succeeds in securing the crown after Fahd will anoint
the next generation of royal heirs and determine Saudi Arabia's future
course--either toward the West or toward Syria, Iraq, and others who challenge
the position of the United States in the region.
Abdallah is closely allied with
the puritanical Wahhabi religious establishment that has underpinned the
Saudi government for over a century. The Wahhabis are strident and hostile
to a continued American presence in the Middle East. They made this explicit
in 1990 in a pronouncement known as the Muzkara an-Nasiha, originated by
Osama bin Laden and signed by virtually every sheikh in the Wahhabi establishment.
It condemned Saudi Arabia's decision to allow U.S. troops into the kingdom
for the purpose of resisting Saddam.
Crown Prince Abdallah has long challenged
the Sudairi branch by pushing an anti-Western agenda. In mid 1995, numerous
Arab newspapers reported that the crown prince was working with Syria and
Egypt to sabotage Jordanian-Saudi rapprochement. The same year, the Turkish
weekly Nokta reported that Abdallah had blocked Turkish-Saudi ties by ordering
the execution of some Turks, incarcerated for drug-dealing, after King
Fahd had assured Turkish emissaries that they would be spared.
In late 1995, King Fahd became ill
and feeble, passing power temporarily to Abdallah. When shortly afterwards
Abdallah briefly visited a neighboring state, his Sudairi rival, Prince
Sultan, asserted power in Riyadh. Abdallah returned to reclaim his dominance,
but to do so he employed his wife's close family ties to the Assad clan
and invited Syrian intelligence operatives into the kingdom. Then the problems
began.
ABDALLAH'S QUEST to secure the succession--leading
as it did to his strategic relationship with Syrian president Hafez Assad,
and their joint willingness to cooperate with Iraq--is essential background
to the major terrorist attacks of recent years, including Khobar Towers,
the USS Cole, and September 11. When Abdallah invited Syrian intelligence
into Saudi Arabia, he created an opportunity for Syria to foster a terror
network on Saudi soil. Its handiwork surfaced first in a minor attack on
an American bus in Jeddah in 1995, then in the major attack on Khobar in
June 1996 in which 19 U.S. servicemen died. The Washington Post reported
that the Khobar bomb had originated in Syrian-controlled Lebanon, and just
this month, members of the Syrian-backed Hezbollah were indicted in a U.S.
court for this attack.
Sober strategic considerations brought
Abdallah, Syria, and Iraq together. The years 1995 and 1996 were watershed
years in the Middle East. Before then, hopeful developments (from the American
point of view) had seemed afoot in the region. Between 1992 and 1995, Israel
had formed a strategic relationship with Turkey; Jordan and Israel had
signed a peace treaty with strategic cooperation clauses; Saddam had faced
a viable, advancing opposition movement; and Jordan had become the vanguard
of an anti-Saddam grouping after the defection in Amman of Saddam's son-in-law,
Hussein Kamal. Pro-Western elements of the Saudi royal family pushed to
reestablish Jordanian-Saudi ties, solidify Saudi-Turkish ties, and anchor
Saudi Arabia in this emerging, powerful, pro-Western regional bloc.
This was a time when the Palestine
Liberation Organization averted near collapse only by the generosity of
Israel. And the Iranian revolution was floundering. The memory of America's
twin victories in the Gulf War and the Cold War was fresh, and Israel's
image of invulnerability earned in half a dozen wars still loomed large.
Syria, Iraq, and the PLO faced the prospect of a loose-knit pro-American
coalition of Turkey, a post-Saddam Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
But tyrants like Saddam and Assad, and tyrannical regimes like Iran's and
the PLO's, never accept defeat, which can mean only disgrace or death.
Survival demanded action. It took
many forms but crystallized when Syria and Iraq turned from enemies to
bedfellows against America; when the Palestinian Authority became sufficiently
established to host a smorgasbord of terror groups; and when Abdallah invited
Syria into the kingdom. The bin Laden network developed inside this Wahhabi/Abdallah-Syria-Iraq-PLO
strategic bloc and became its terrorist skeleton, unifying hitherto separate,
isolated, and strategically uncoordinated groups.
While al Qaeda from the start was
rooted in the Wahhabi religious establishment, it sprouted and flourished
parasitically wherever Iraqi intelligence felt secure: Sudan, then Yemen
and Qatar. Bin Laden himself left Saudi Arabia in 1991 for Sudan, where
he lived until his removal, via Yemen and Qatar, to Afghanistan in 1996.
For Syria, the new terrorist super-network
had the virtue of absorbing and channeling Sunni fundamentalist fervor.
Energies that might have been turned against the regime were directed instead
against American targets and into Saudi politics. Within the terror network,
Shiite and Sunni--who otherwise would never have countenanced working together--could
join forces, as could secular Palestinians and Islamic extremists, all
the while deflecting their attention from Damascus.
For Iraq, the network offered a
way to defeat America. It would be a grave mistake to imagine that Saddam's
animus against Saudi Arabia or his secular disposition would prevent him
from working with the Wahhabi religious establishment or Abdallah if he
found this could advance his designs against King Fahd, the Sudairis, or
their American patrons. Sure enough, travelers from Iraq report that Saddam's
regime has lately encouraged the rise, in Iraq's northern safe haven, of
Salafism, a puritanical sect tied to Wahhabism that hitherto had been alien
to Iraq. It is no surprise, then, that one of these Salafi movements inside
Iraq, the Jund al-Islami, turns out to be a front for bin Laden.
AT ITS CORE, al Qaeda is a product
of Saudi dynastic politics. Its purpose is to swing Saudi politics toward
the Wahhabi establishment and Crown Prince Abdallah, but not necessarily
to destroy the royal family, at least not at first. The most virulent of
Saudi dissident groups, such as al-Masari's Committee for the Defense of
Legal Rights, call for violence, but they pointedly direct their wrath
against the Sudairis, the only targets they mention by name. Bin Laden
seeks to destroy the Sudairis indirectly, by separating them from America.
In August 2001, King Fahd fired
his director of intelligence, Prince Turki al Faisal. It was a blow to
bin Laden. The bin Laden and Faisal families have longstanding ties: Osama's
father helped install King Faisal, who reigned from 1964 to 1975. Since
the mid 1990s, Turki had anchored the Abdallah faction, and under his leadership
Saudi intelligence had become difficult to distinguish from al Qaeda. In
particular, Saudi intelligence had served as bin Laden's nexus to the Wahhabi
network of charities, foundations, and other funding sources.
Here too family ties are important.
Thus, Turki's brother heads a key Saudi "philanthropic" organization (originally
headed by Osama) that funds the Taliban and al Qaeda, according to the
Lebanese weekly East-West Review. And the Central Asia operations officer
in Saudi intelligence is the brother of bin Laden's chief case officer
on Saudi Arabia, according to a former CIA official in Iraq. The same former
official also reports that Turki was instrumental in arranging a meeting
in Kandahar, Afghanistan, between the head of Iraq's terror network, Faruk
Hejazi, and bin Laden in December 1998. More recently, Turki bin Faisal's
full brother, Saudi foreign minister Saud bin Faisal, unleashed his diplomats
to write shrill and caustic attacks on the United States, such as the article
a few weeks ago by Saudi Arabia's ambassador in London, Ghazi al Qusaibi,
calling President Bush mentally unstable.
But like Frankenstein's monster,
bin Laden is becoming a problem for his creators. It is unclear whether
Saudi royal factions now control al Qaeda, or bin Laden has become a kingmaker--or
aspiring king. Many young princes who face bleak prospects in a gilded,
top-heavy royal structure are enamored of bin Laden. This is true even
of some Sudairis. Indeed, bin Laden's lieutenants, far from hailing from
the margins of society, are products of its elite, with whom they maintain
relations. The mastermind of Arab terrorism in the 1980s and '90s, Imad
Mughniyeh, a godfather-like figure with links to the PLO, Hezbollah, and
al Qaeda, comes from an illustrious family. His father was a cleric renowned
among Shiites. And bin Laden's second in command, the Egyptian al-Zawahiri,
is the grandson of the head of al-Azhar mosque in Egypt. Syria too, meanwhile,
may be feeling the pressure of bin Laden's growing power. Damascus recently
had to put down a Wahhabi-inspired revolt in Lebanon's Akka! r mountains
led by bin Laden associate Bassam Kanj.
It is impossible to avoid concluding,
then, that the bin Laden phenomenon is about politics and conflicts within
and among states. Some states in the region--such as Jordan and Kuwait--can
truthfully deny employing and abetting terror. But many Arab states refuse
to consent to America's expanding the war beyond Afghanistan because they
know the trail of terror will eventually lead to them. They have trafficked
in terror, believing they could harness it and use it to their advantage--none
more than Saudi Arabia. This is why the Saudis blocked the American investigation
into the Khobar attack, never investigated the December 2000 hijacking
of a plane from Jeddah to Baghdad by two men from Abdallah's security forces,
and now, according to press reports, lag in providing access to possible
culprits and relevant documents.
Bin Laden emerged from a dangerous
strategic shift underway since 1995 that was driven by dynastic rivalries.
Now, al Qaeda must be dealt with not only in Afghanistan, but also at its
source--in the strategic triangle of Syria, Iraq, and the Wahhabi/Abdallah
alliance whose interests it serves and whose structures and politics brought
it to life. To fail to strike at the roots of al Qaeda will only lengthen
the war and make it more deadly.
(David Wurmser is director of Middle
East studies at the American Enterprise Institute.)
