Bombing in Saudi City Kills American Monarchy Braces for Eruption of Popular Dissent Against U.S.
By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, October 7, 2001; Page A01
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 6 -- A bomb exploded on a busy street in the Saudi city of Khobar tonight, killing at least one American and wounding several other foreigners as Saudi Arabia braced for aftershocks from any U.S. military action against Afghanistan.
It was unclear whether the bomb was directed at Americans or related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. U.S. officials did not identify the victims or a motive in the attack. "From what we know, we have no indication that this is related to Sept. 11," an official in Washington said.
But the explosion came amid an unsettled atmosphere in this conservative desert kingdom, seen by the United States as a key member of an anti-terrorism coalition. On the eve of expected U.S. strikes targeting Afghanistan's Taliban leadership and Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden, government officials here are preparing for a wave of popular dissent against any U.S. military action.
Since the attacks in the United States, Saudi officials and analysts said, clerical and political leaders here have been consumed with the country's position on the anticipated U.S. response. The debate acknowledges both the political and military goals of an important ally and the fact that an attack by a non-Islamic superpower on Afghanistan's Muslim leadership would anger many Saudis and Muslims.
Both the terrorist attacks in the United States and the conflict with the Taliban, which was supported for many years by the Saudi monarchy, are raising long-term concerns in a country that has struggled to reconcile its strict interpretation of Islam with a U.S. military presence, piety and oil wealth, radical dissent and a closed political system.
"They are going to be rethinking many things," said Othman Rawaf, a local political scientist. He said the time has passed when "these idiots will put a small bomb and destroy a small building. They can endanger a city, and we know that we are on the list of targets."
The attacks on the United States and their aftermath have drawn a mixed reaction in Saudi Arabia. As Saudi leaders rallied to the side of their U.S. allies, knots of young men around the capital, Riyadh, jeered at Westerners and honked horns in celebration, diplomats said. While the Saudi monarchy has allowed the U.S. military to use a local air base, families elsewhere in the country mourned the death of several of the suicide attackers allegedly from the region.
Despite the government's support for a U.S.-led coalition against terrorism, the country's clerical establishment has not given a clear statement on whether a U.S. strike against Afghanistan could be supported under Islamic law.
During the Gulf War, the 20-member Higher Council of Ulema, which acts as a supreme court of religious scholars that guides and in some cases constricts the government, issued an edict supporting the government's decision to allow U.S. troops in the region, giving it important theological justification.
In this case, however, Grand Imam Sheik Saleb Ibn Humaid said this week that "this issue calls for new policies, not new wars," and cautioned that any attack could "stir conflict between civilizations and religions," an outcome that could shake the Saudi establishment if military action is prolonged and opposition to it builds in the Muslim world.
"They feel they are in the cross hairs," one Western diplomat said of the Saudi ruling family. "The violence was in the U.S., but the target is the al-Saud, and to create a new order in the Middle East," the diplomat said, referring to the Saudi royal family.
About 200 British and U.S. planes and about 4,000 troops remain at Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh to enforce an international embargo against Iraq. Despite Saudi sensitivities about the use of the facility in any upcoming action against Afghanistan, U.S. officials intend to help run that offensive from an advanced new command-and-control facility there.
Expelling the U.S. military from a country that is home to Islam's holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, has been cited by bin Laden as a goal of his war on the United States. In 1996, terrorists detonated a truck bomb outside the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, killing 19 American servicemen. Saudi investigators attributed the attack to Saudi nationals amid persistent U.S. allegations that Iran was responsible. The blast led U.S. forces here to consolidate at the Prince Sultan base.
In the past year a number of smaller attacks have killed and injured several Westerners. Though some of the explosions have been attributed by Saudi authorities to a feud between rival groups involved in the illegal liquor trade, others remain unexplained and local analysts said they may be linked to renewed domestic terrorism.
With the world's largest proven oil reserves and a strategic location in the Persian Gulf, the Saudi monarchy has shared with the United States an interest in maintaining stability in the kingdom. U.S. oil companies and technicians have helped pump from the desert a flood of cash. The partners have survived strains such as two oil embargoes in the 1970s.
The Saudi government has used its vast resources to support a welfare state and conservative strains of Islam, elements of which consider the United States an enemy. Oil dollars were used to support fighters in Afghanistan, aiding bin Laden's early efforts, and also to fund Islamic charities which, wittingly or not, also helped sustain militant groups, according to U.S. officials. The support for religious schools has been an important expression of the strict Wahhabi strain of Islam observed and promoted by the Saudis.
Since the arrival of U.S. troops here during the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, however, tension has grown among the monarchy, government-appointed clerics and an opposition group of Muslim scholars who contend that the ruling family has strayed from the faith and squandered on itself wealth that should be spent defending and spreading Islam. With rising unemployment, falling real incomes, and steady, if slow, moves to open the society more to outside influence, "the al-Saud family continues to act with the mentality that it owns the country and its people," complained one journal of the largely London-based Saudi opposition.
Such arguments inspired bin Laden. Propagated through "hotbed" mosques and schools in Mecca and isolated provinces like Asir, they fueled a stream of recruits to his cause.
Though Saudi officials dealt forcefully with their most vocal critics, jailing dissident sheikhs such as Safar Hawali and Salman Audah for up to five years to keep their arguments out of circulation in the mid-1990s, they have not been able to counter the feeling that the birthplace of Islam has become too dependent on Western protection and too deferential to Western advice.
The past year of violence between Israel and the Palestinians has fueled that emotion. Even though Saudi officials have been vocal in criticizing U.S. policy, and even warned of terrorism, their ties to the United States have been increasingly difficult to justify with nightly news reports of Israeli tanks and helicopters moving against the Palestinians.
Bin Laden is a symbol of the dilemma. The product of a wealthy Saudi business family, he is an outcast of the elite, stripped of his citizenship and subject to repeated denouncements from the relatives who now run the billion-dollar construction company that bears their name. However, bin Laden has a following in Saudi Arabia as well, and if it is not apparent from crowds waving photos of him as they do in Pakistan or Indonesia, it is only due to the government's persistent management of appearances.