House of Saud looks close to collapse
Modern Saudi Arabia is supported by the US and Britain in order to guarantee a steady flow of oil. Their war on terrorism could destroy it
David Leigh & Richard Norton-Taylor
While tabloid cheerleaders and spin doctors have been celebrating the fall of Kabul and the retreat of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters, the mood in other parts of Whitehall is much more sombre. For senior ministerial advisers know that the real cancer in the Middle East is not Afghanistan, but Saudi Arabia.
Fears are growing that the important but anachronistic country which spawned Osama bin Laden and many of the September 11 hijackers faces the real prospect of a coup. "The Saudi royals have been paying off the terrorists with danegeld for a long while," says one well-placed source. "There is a danger that well-educated returnees from US colleges who cannot get work will make common cause with the people of the souks and overthrow them." This week, newspapers, including the Economist and Time magazine, published extensive and flattering advertisements placed by the Saudi regime - a clear indication of its concern about the future, as well as the bad publicity seeping out about its past links with Bin Laden and the Taliban.
Modern Saudi Arabia is to an extent a perverted creation of America and its British ally. Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, spelled out in his recent book on American foreign policy its essentially manipulative approach to such Middle East states as Saudi Arabia. The US, he says, cannot afford the region to be "dominated by countries whose purposes are inimical to ours". Their economic "purposes" have been to prop up a regime which would guarantee a stable flow of petrol and oil to the US at relatively low prices and recycle its petrodollars back to the west in the shape of construction projects and arms purchases.
The Saudis control 25% of world oil reserves. The US has paid the royal family up to $100bn a year for it.
The first bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in New York took place in 1993: Osama bin Laden was in exile in Khartoum, nursing his rage against the Saudi royal family and the US bases they permit on Saudi soil. In Britain, the then government was more interested in money-making opportunities than in registering these sinister signs and re-evaluating their relationships with a frustrated Muslim world.
British MI6 intelligence about Iranian military planning was being circulated by John Major to the ailing King Fahd in Riyadh, to help keep him on his throne in return for more lucrative arms sales: the notorious Al Yamamah weapons deal was already transferring £1.5bn a year into British pockets.
The Saud clan - now estimated to number more than 7,000 privileged tribesmen - are still clinging to absolute power. However, much of their oil wealth has been frittered away, and unemployment among young Saudis is rising. Per capita income in the early 1980s was $28,000. It is now below $10,000.
The dictatorial Saud clan describe themselves as "guardians of the two holy places" and preside over the vast annual pilgrimages to Mecca. They poured cash into the Islamic University at Medina and similar schools across the Muslim world, from Cairo to Peshawar.
The anti-modernist religion they promoted became a focus for guilt and anger among young men frustrated at modern "corruption" and deprived not only of normal social lives, but of all democratic political outlets.
In 1979, 200 armed fundamentalists, many of whom had studied Islam at Medina, took over the grand mosque at Mecca. But 63 of the ringleaders were publicly beheaded in selected town squares all over the country, and the seeds of rebellion quickly led to repression. Shaheed Coovadia, who now teaches in the US, studied at Medina. He says: "That incident was a turning point. When I was there you couldn't move without permission. It was like living in a police state. People even came to check your bed to see if you'd risen for the morning prayer."
Providentially that same year, Soviet troops rumbled over the mountain roads into Afghanistan to shore up a tottering pro-communist regime. The CIA had been covertly undermining the Afghan government by arming fundamentalist rebels - the mojahedin. In Washington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, was cock-a-hoop that the Russians had been drawn into what he saw as his cleverly baited trap. The day Soviet forces crossed the border, he wrote to Carter, saying: "We now have the opportunity to give the USSR their Vietnam war."
Young Bin Laden, son of a wealthy construction magnate, joined the anti-Soviet campaign. He set off for Peshawar, as the most prominent of a Saudi contingent of poor citizens, students, taxi-drivers and Bedouin tribesmen.
For the Saudi regime it was an outlet for an otherwise dangerous fanaticism. For the US, the Afghan Arabs were useful proxy troops in the cold war. As Bin Laden himself later described it: "The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis."
Did the Saudi royals or the US have any qualms about arming and brutalising these frustrated young fundamentalists? Brzezinski had his response to that question ready: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Nowadays, the west is less smug about its interference. It is beginning to realise that the "stirred-up Muslims" may not have finished their upheavals.
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David Leigh is the Guardian's investigations editor. Richard Norton-Taylor is the security affairs editor.