Down with Saudi Arabia

The Spectator
March 9, 2002
http://www.spectator.co.uk

Mark Steyn says that it's time to destroy the Arab kingdom
which,directly or indirectly, is responsible for 11 September

New Hampshire

Joanne Jacobs, formerly a columnist with the San Jose Mercury
News, spotted a dandy headline in her old paper last week.
A Muslim mob, you'll recall, had attacked a train full of
Hindus, an unfortunate development which the Mercury News
reported to its readers thus: "Religious Tensions Kill 57
In India". Ah, those religious tensions'll kill you every time.
Is there a Preparation H for religious tension? Or an extra-
strength Tylenol, in case you feel a sudden attack coming on?
I haven't looked out the San Jose Mercury News for 12 September,
but I'm assuming the front page read, 'Religious Tensions Kill
3,000 In New York', a particularly bad outbreak.

If I were an Islamic fundamentalist, I'd be wondering what I
had to do to get a bad press. The New York Times had a picture
the other day of a party of Palestinian suicide bombers looking
like Klansmen, all dressed up and ready to blow. They were
captioned 'Hamas activists'. Take my advice and try not to be
standing anywhere near an activist when he activates himself.
You gotta hand it to the Islamofascists: while the usual
doom-mongers are now querying whether America's up to fighting
a war on two fronts (Afghanistan and Iraq), the Islamabaddies
blithely open up new fronts every couple of weeks. At the World
Trade Center, Muslim terrorists killed mainly Christians.
In Israel, they're killing mainly Jews. In India, they're killing
mainly Hindus. Let's not get into the Sudan or the Philippines.
Now, OK, there are two sides to every dispute, but these days
one side can pretty well be predicted: Muslims v. Jews, Muslims
v. Christians, Muslims v. Hindus, Muslims v. [Your Religion Here].
If war were tennis, they'd be Grand Slam champions: they'll play
on anything - lawn, clay, rubble. Andyet the more they kill,
the more frantically the press cranks out the 'Islam is a religion
of peace' editorials.

Now it would be absurd to claim that all Muslims are terrorists.
But the idea that the forces at play in New York, Palestine,
Tora Bora and Kashmir are some sort of tiny unrepresentative
extremist fringe of Islam is equally ludicrous. The other day
the Boston Globe reported from the Saudi town of Abha on the
subtleties of the kingdom's education system: 'At a public
high school in this provincial town in the south-west part of
the country, 10th-grade classes are forced to memorise from
a Ministry of Education textbook entitled "Monotheism" that is
replete with anti-Christian and anti-Jewish bigotry and violent
interpretations of Islamic scripture. A passage on page 64
under the title "Judgment Day" says, "The Hour will not come
until Muslims will fight the Jews, and Muslims will kill all
the Jews." 

That's pretty straightforward, isn't it? In fact, pretty much
everything about Saudi Arabia, except for the urbane evasions
of their Washington ambassador, Prince Bandar, is admirably
straightforward. Saudi citizens were, for the most part,
responsible for 11 September. The Saudi government funds the
madrassahs in Pakistan which are doing their best to breed a
South Asian branch office of Saudi Wahhabism. Admittedly,
the Saudis are less directly responsible for the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, except insofar as they have a vested
interest in it as a distraction from other matters. So, if we
don't want to be beastly about Muslims in general, we could at
least be beastly about the House of Saud in particular.

Instead, the Saudi question has become the ne plus ultra of
the Islamo-euphemist approach, and a beloved staple of comment
pages and cable news shows. By now, 'The Saudis Are Our
Friends' may even have its own category in the Pulitzers.
Usually this piece turns up after the Saudis have done something
not terribly friendly - refused to let Washington use the US bases
in Saudi Arabia, or even to meet with Tony Blair. Then the
apparently vast phalanx of former US ambassadors to Saudi Arabia
fans out across the New York Times, CNN, Nightline, etc.,
to insist that, au contraire, the Saudis have been 'enormously
helpful'. At what? Recommending a decent restaurant in Mayfair?

Charles Freeman, a former ambassador to the kingdom and now
president of something called the Middle East Policy Council,
offered a fine example of the genre the other day when he
revealed that Crown Prince Abdullah, the head honcho since
King Fahd had his stroke, was 'personally anguished' by
developments in the Middle East and that that was why he had
proposed his 'peace plan'. If, indeed, he has proposed it -
to anyone other than Thomas Friedman of the New York Times,
that is. And, come to think of it, it was Friedman who proposed
it to the Prince - Israel withdraws to the 4 June 1967 lines,
Palestinian state, full normalised relations with the Arab
League, etc. ‘After I laid out this idea,' wrote Friedman,
‘the Crown Prince looked at me with mock astonishment and
said, "Have you broken into my desk?"

"No," I said, wondering what he was talking about.

"The reason I ask is that this is exactly the idea I had in
mind..."

What a coincidence! Apparently, the Prince had ‘drafted a
speech along those lines' and 'it is in my desk'. It's just
that he hadn't got around to delivering the speech. Still
hasn't, in fact. Seems an awful waste of a good speech.
Unless - perish the thought - it's just something he keeps
in his desk to flatter visiting American correspondents.
In any case, it's the same peace plan the Saudis dust off
every ten years - they proposed it in 1991, and before that
in 1981. It's just a couple of months late this time round.
But book a meeting around October 2011 with King Abdullah
(as he plans on being by then) and he'll gladly propose it
to you one mo' time. Prince Abdullah has no interest in
Palestinians: it's easier for a Palestinian to emigrate to
Tipton and become a subject of the Queen than to emigrate to
Riyadh and become a subject of King Fahd. But the Prince's
peace plan usefully changes the subject from more embarrassing
matters - such as the kingdom's role in the events of
11 September.

There are only two convincing positions on the House of Saud
and what happened that grim day:
a) They're indirectly responsible for it;
b) They're directly responsible for it.
There's a lot of evidence for the former - the Saudi funding
of the madrassahs, etc. - and a certain amount of not yet
totally compelling evidence for the latter - a Saudi
'humanitarian aid' office in the Balkans set up by a member
of the royal family which appears to be a front for terrorism.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether it's (a) or (b) but
for Americans to argue that the Saudis are our allies in the
war on terrorism is like Ron Goldman's dad joining O.J. in his
search for the real killers. The advantage of this thesis to
fellows like Charles Freeman is that it places a premium on
their nuance-interpretation skills. Because everything the
kingdom does seems to be self-evidently inimical to the West,
any old four-year-old can point out that the King is in the
altogether hostile mode. It takes an old Saudi hand like
Mr Freeman to draw attention to the subtler shades of meaning,
to explain the ancient ways of Araby, by which, say, an adamant
refusal to arrest associates of the 11 September hijackers is,
in fact, a clear sign of the Saudis' remarkable support for
Washington. If the Saudis nuked Delaware, the massed ranks of
former ambassadors would be telling Larry King that, obviously,
even the best allies have their difficulties from time to time,
but this is essentially a little hiccup that can be smoothed
over by closer consultation.

Do they know what they're talking about? You'll remember the
old-school Kremlinologists, who'd watch the Red Army parades
and tip as the coming man the 87-year-old corpse with the
luxuriant monobrow and the waxy complexion propped up against
the 93-year-old commissar of the Sverdlovsk gasworks and
people's hall of culture. The Kremlinologists got everything
wrong, of course, and they had only a couple of dozen guys
to divine the intentions of. Saudi Arabia has 7,000 princes -
at the time of writing; it may be up to 7,600 if you're reading
this after lunch. Many of us have never met a Saudi who isn't
a prince. Chances are you can find princes to represent any
view you want. But the awkward fact is that the dominant
faction in the House of Saud right now is anti-American.

Instead of presenting Prince Abdullah with Israeli–Palestinian
peaceproposals, Americans ought to be handing him US–Saudi
peace proposals: clean up your own education system and stop
destabilising Asian Muslim culture, for starters. Washington
(and London, too) needs to figure out what it wants from Saudi
Arabia and whether it's likely to get it from King Fahd and
his bloated clan. We already know one thing we're not going
to get: the Taleban had two major allies before 11 September,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and it's clear the royal house has
no inclination to do a Musharraf. If the West has a medium-term
aim in the Middle East, it ought to be the evolution of Arabic
Islam into something closer to the more moderate Muslim
temperament of Turkey or Bangladesh. I know, I know, all these
things are relative, but even that modest goal is unattainable
under the House of Saud. The royal family derives such legitimacy
as it has from its role as the guardian and promoter of Wahhabism.
It is, therefore, the ideological font of militant Islamism in
the way that Saddam and Boy Assad and Mubarak and the other
Arab thugs aren't. Saddam is as Islamic as the wind is blowing:
say what you like about the old mass murderer, but his malign
activities are not, in that sense, defined by his religion.
One cannot say the same for the House of Saud. If the issue is
‘religious tensions', who's fomenting them, from Pakistan to
the Balkans to America itself? Saudi Arabia should be a
‘root cause' we can all agree on.

But sadly not. John O'Sullivan, former editor of National
Review, wrote recently that ‘reforming the House of Saud
will be a formidable and subtle task. But it offers a great
deal more hope for everyone than blithely burning it down.'
I disagree. Reforming the House of Saud is all but impossible.
Lavish economic engagement with the West has only entrenched
it more firmly in its barbarism. 'Stability' means letting
layabout princes use Western oil revenues to seduce their
people into anti-Western nihilism.
On the other hand, blithely burning it down offers quite a
bit of hope, given that no likely replacement would provide
the ideological succour to the Islamakazis that Saud-endorsed
Wahhabism does. My own view - maps available on request - is
that the Muslim holy sites and most of the interior should
go to the Hashemites of Jordan, and what's left should
be divided between the less wacky Gulf emirs. That should be
the policy goal, even if for the moment it's pursued covertly
rather than by daisy cutters.

Borders are not sacrosanct. The House of Saud is not royal;
they are merely nomads who found a sugar daddy. There's no
good reason why every time a soccer mom fills her Chevy
Suburban she should be helping fund some toxic madrassah.
In this instance, destabilisation is our friend.