Saudi Arabia Exposed - an interview with John R. Bradley
It has been several months since Saudi Arabia was the lead story or headline, or it feels like it. Winds of War readers will have noted a steady drip-drip of reports of Saudi security forces killing ‘militants’ and ‘gunmen’, culminating in the recent killing of Saleh al Awfi, Majid Hamed al Haseri and Mohammed Abdullah Owaida – all wanted men. According to Asharq Al Awsat, since May 2003, Saudi forces have killed over 100 terrorists.
However, all is not well in the kingdom. After attending a debate on whether or not the House of Saud is a friend of the West (accounts here: one, two, three), I read John R. Bradley’s new book, Saudi Arabia Exposed. Bradley worked for the Arab News as a news editor in the aftermath of 9/11, living amongst Saudis rather than in a Western compound, and travelling the country extensively.
[...]
Q: Why do Saudis feel more able to denounce the Wahhabi establishment than the Al-Saud itself?
JOHN R. BRADLEY: The Al-Saud made a pact with the founder of Wahhabism, Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab, in the eighteenth century, and that pact has lasted for 250 years -- a hell of a lot longer than the much coveted 60-year-old Saudi-US alliance. They depend on one another now for their survival now as much as they always have.
Initially, the deal was that, as the Al-Saud conquered territory using the Wahhabi foot soldiers known as the “ikhwan” or brotherhood, the ikhwan were rewarded with the loot. Obviously, when the whole of the country now known as Saudi Arabia was finally established in the 1930s, and Ibn Saud declared himself king, the rewards for his partners had to be proportional.
Hence the Al-Saud rewarding the zealots by gradually giving them effective control over of the judiciary, the media, the schools, the mosques, and the people themselves in the form of the religious police. Such a set up had the advantage, for the Al-Saud, of also creating the mechanisms of a totalitarian state, which would keep in line the people they had conquered -- people, as I try to show in my book, who come from different religious, regional and tribal backgrounds and who historically for the most part were not Wahhabis.
While it is not true to say that the Al-Saud never criticize the Wahhabi religious establishment, you are nevertheless right to imply that they only ever do so when their own rule is threatened by dissenters among them. On the other hand, to come back to your question, the people themselves have been oppressed and brutalized by Wahhabism for decades, and so it is not surprising that they would find much in what the Wahhabis represent to criticize.
The Shia hate them, for instance, because they are damned as infidels by the official Wahhabi propaganda. The tribes hate them because of regional rivalries. The sophisticated Hijazis hate them because they destroyed, almost overnight, the historically pluralistic and tolerant Islam that had existed in that region for centuries before the Al-Saud conquered the region in the 1920s.
[...]
Q: If several members of the same tribe - I'm thinking of the five members of the same tribe who hijacked airliners on 9/11 – are involved in terrorism, can we assume that the tribe leader supports their involvment?
BRADLEY: No, we cannot. The tribe you are referring to, the Al-Ghamdi, is one-million strong, and although concentrated in the city of Baha in the Asir region its members are spread out all over the kingdom, and indeed the world. It is simply not possible, in practical terms, for the tribal sheikh to have a direct influence on all of them.
What we are talking about is more of an emotional and psychological bond between members of the tribe – a shared sense of history, of adhering to certain tribal characteristics, of having an inveterate trust in fellow tribal members, and so on.
It is significant that at least three, and possible four, members of the Al-Ghambi tribe were among the 9/11 hijackers, and in the book I show how other Al-Ghamdi tribal members have been involved in terrorist activities throughout the world, and how this relates to the
history of the Al-Ghambi tribe. It has little to do with specific leaders of the tribe.
Q: How moderate are Saudi citizens? Will the views of Saudi youth be more or less radical than those of their parents?
BRADLEY: I think it all depends on how you define ‘moderate’. Young Saudis are definitely more worldly, less insular and less xenophobic than their elders were, for the simple reason that many have traveled abroad and they have access to satellite TV and the internet at home. But they are still profoundly anti-Semitic (in addition, I mean, to being anti-Israeli), and they are seeped in jihadi rhetoric from a young age, which they are exposed to in the schools and the mosques.
What you have is widespread resistance to Al-Saud-Wahhabi hegemony in the regions outside Al-Saud, but also deeply embedded anti-Westernism. The latter partly comes, of course, from the fact that Washington has propped up the regime that oppresses them.
So when I try to bring out in my book the fact that there is such resistance I am not necessarily implying it translates all the time into moderation in the Western sense. It does sometimes, but for the most part it is moderation only when compared to the ultra-extremism of the Wahhabis.
Q: You frequently refer to Osama bin Laden as a 'Saudi dissident' -- how central to al-Qaeda's war on the world is his feud with the House of Saud?
BRADLEY: Without wanting to sink into psycho-babble, I think Bin Laden’s gripe with the Al-Saud is very personal. After all, he only turned against them in 1990 when they refused his offer to liberate Kuwait with an army of mujahideen in the same way that he had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation.
So, even after the Afghan campaign, he was willing to work closely with the Al-Saud in the context of waging jihad, which suggests that he still thought they themselves had jihadi credentials. That’s not really surprising since they had bankrolled the Afghanistan campaign, even providing one-way tickets for Saudis to join him in Afghanistan.
He is clearly a ‘dissident’ because he has since been exiled from Saudi Arabia and been stripped of his nationality. However, while commentators often refer to Bin laden’s wish to ‘overthrow the House of Saud’, he has never actually called for their removal. He has issued two statements specifically directed at them – one in 1995 and another in December of last year. In both he calls not for revolution from below but for reform from above, from within the ranks fo the royals. He clearly feels, for many reasons, that the time is not right for revolution in Saudi Arabia.
[...]
Q: King Fahd died at 81, and King Abdullah is 80 (or thereabouts - birth certificates in the kingdom being as they are). Will the next generation of kings be noticeably different from this one?
BRADLEY: You have to remember that the Saudi regime is in the arthritic grip of some very old people and the older they get the fewer signs they show of ever letting go. But they are also not going to learn any new tricks, and they are still applying the remedies of a time before terror and satellite television and the Internet and population explosion to the grim realities of today: when there is a problem, make a public example of the usual suspects, hand out a little grace and favor, and go back to the way things always were.
Take the example of the kingdom's eternally deferred bid to join the WTO. That calls for massive structural changes, corporate government mechanisms, a transparent judiciary, the lot. And every six months or so the Saudis have another go at making out that they have now met all the criteria: they have reformed their financial system and judiciary overnight, they have made everything as transparent as the windscreens of their SUVs, all of it accompanied by a huge fanfare in the local media, which seem quite oblivious that they made the exact same preposterous claims last year and the year before that. There is a deep-seated belief in the ruling family that saying something does make it so.
And in that blinkered commitment to the quick fix the Al-Saud have basically sown the seed of their own downfall. They have headed off the emergence of a literate urban middle class as long as they could, but economic realities mean they can't do that for much longer, and there are going to be very many of these people before long. Riyadh is set to become the first mega-city in the Gulf. Half the population is under 21, and these are increasingly listless young people who have been denied a proper education or any way of expression other than, for the boys, driving their cars.
The ruling clan's outmoded ways also mean that the old guard haven't thought to groom the younger generation for the succession when the grim reaper takes them; instead they have doled out preferment to their favorite sons, most of whom never had any cause to develop the intellectual faculties required to peel an egg, let alone steer a country through mass unemployment, disaffection, falling per-capita income and the complete obsolescence of the Bedouin values they like to exalt.
Like many Stalinist dictatorships, the Al-Saud cannot bring themselves to imagine a world they no longer control, and paradoxically that ensures that their world will end, because they have failed to nurture a generation of the ruling elite that is up to the job. The few genuinely smart people there are have been marginalized or shunted into jobs abroad because they are seen as a threat.
It is not even a feudal regime, as people claim, because a feudal system relies on the younger sons of the minor aristocracy and the aspiring clerks to keep the wheels ticking over from one king to the next, no matter how deranged the monarch: but the House of Saud is too frightened of the younger sons to trust them and is spending a good deal of resources it cannot afford on ensuring there is no aspiring class.
[...]
Q: The Saudis have quietly announced that they don't believe the U.S. will be their primary arms supplier in the coming decades. Are they anticipating a split with the U.S.? Is the U.S.-Saudi relationship salvageable?
BRADLEY: In the long-term I predict an invasion by the U.S. military of Eastern Province to secure the oil fields there. The plans are there, drawn up. The invasion would take a matter of hours; all that is needed is a certain number of forces to occupy all the strategic positions.
I really don't believe Washington has forgiven Riyadh for sending so many Saudis to Iraq for the fight against the occupation there, or forgotten that so many of the suicide bombers were Saudis. In a sense, Washington forgave the Saudi royals for 9/11 because they argued that Bin Laden was attacking both the U.S. and the Al-Saud, to undermine their historic oil-for-security alliance.
But Iraq is another matter entirely: there it is the Saudi royal family, not Bin Laden, who is sending the jihadis. More people now have died in Iraq as a result than were killed in New York and Washington on 9/11. By pretending to be Washington's ally while helping to blow Americans to smithereens in Iraq, the Saudi royal family is again engineering its own downfall. The invasion will come either because of internal instability or because Washington has decided to abandon the Al-Saud. The U.S. and British have had detailed invasion scenarios in place since the early 1970s, when the Saudis led an oil embargo against the west in support of the Palestinians.
U.S. forces are there already, guarding the main oil installations. The U.S. could never risk the oil falling into the hands of its enemies, and if any rumblings of an Islamist revolution were heard, that could offer the pretext. The area itself is geographically contained, and very easy to secure. Within a few hours of a decision it would be American property.
I think the Al-Saud recognize this a clear scenario, which is why they are trying to wean themselves off dependence on the US, for instance by giving their huge gas deals to three other permanent members of the UN Security Council: Russia, China and France. They also recognize the potential in forging closer ties more generally with emerging superpowers like India and China which, in the coming decades, with form a counter balance to US hegemony in much of the world. The Al-Saud may be many things, but they are not idiots. They will keep all their options open. Forging military ties with countries like Pakistan will be a part of their own realignment.
[...]
BRADLEY: What keeps together the people of many counties in the Middle East whose borders were drawn either arbitrarily by imperial powers (such as Iraq) or by brute force by local conquerors (such as Saudi Arabia) is a powerful, and usually dictatorial, central regime. When it disappears, historic ethnic, religious, tribal and geographical tensions, which have been suppressed but not erased, are unleashed. That has happened, obviously, in Iraq, and it would certainly happen in Saudi Arabia if the Al-Saud were either overthrown by homegrown Islamists or as a result of a US-invasion of the oil-rich Eastern Province.
All the kingdom's regions have been historically very resistant to Al-Saud-Wahhabi hegemony. In the formative years of the 1920s, when these regions were being conquered by the Al-Saud and Wahhabi zealots, there were at least 26 major rebellions, and one historian says as many as 400,000 rebels resisting the Al-Saud forces were put to the sword. Shiites, Sufis and other non-Wahhabi Muslims were damned as infidels, and had their shrines destroyed.
What I found when I travelled to these regions is that the Saudi people who inhabit them are still very aware of their hidden history, despite all the state-sponsored propaganda; they have for the most part not embraced Wahhabism, and indeed see their country as an empire whose various regions were conquered and are still ruled over by this alien royal family, who use the Wahhabi ideology to oppress them. Their loyalty to the Al-Saud, where it exists, has been bought, not earned, and so remains very fragile.
The overwhelming impression I was left with was that the people are just waiting for the moment to rid themselves of that imperial legacy, just as those who lived under the oppressive Communist ideology of the Soviet Union were.
An invasion of the Eastern Province is the more likely scenario to bring about change, since what would precipitate it is precicely the risk of an Islamist uprising. As for the broader consequences, for Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, I imagine it would largely
depend on how the invasion was carried out and interpreted –– as a way of liberating the oil and (by implication) the holy cities in the Hijaz from the corrupt Al-Saud on behalf of the Saudi people, or merely trying to steal the oil reserves?
I have no doubt that the Shia-majority in the Eastern Province would welcome an American invasion, as would the indigenous Sunni minority in that region. However, the imported Wahhabi Sunnis would put up fierce resistance, and they would have to be located immediately and effectively ethnically cleansed because they would form the core of a
massive local insurgency. I'm not advocating this, by the way; merely suggesting what might have to be done should the situation come about.
It has been several months since Saudi Arabia was the lead story or headline, or it feels like it. Winds of War readers will have noted a steady drip-drip of reports of Saudi security forces killing ‘militants’ and ‘gunmen’, culminating in the recent killing of Saleh al Awfi, Majid Hamed al Haseri and Mohammed Abdullah Owaida – all wanted men. According to Asharq Al Awsat, since May 2003, Saudi forces have killed over 100 terrorists.
However, all is not well in the kingdom. After attending a debate on whether or not the House of Saud is a friend of the West (accounts here: one, two, three), I read John R. Bradley’s new book, Saudi Arabia Exposed. Bradley worked for the Arab News as a news editor in the aftermath of 9/11, living amongst Saudis rather than in a Western compound, and travelling the country extensively.
[...]
Q: Why do Saudis feel more able to denounce the Wahhabi establishment than the Al-Saud itself?
JOHN R. BRADLEY: The Al-Saud made a pact with the founder of Wahhabism, Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab, in the eighteenth century, and that pact has lasted for 250 years -- a hell of a lot longer than the much coveted 60-year-old Saudi-US alliance. They depend on one another now for their survival now as much as they always have.
Initially, the deal was that, as the Al-Saud conquered territory using the Wahhabi foot soldiers known as the “ikhwan” or brotherhood, the ikhwan were rewarded with the loot. Obviously, when the whole of the country now known as Saudi Arabia was finally established in the 1930s, and Ibn Saud declared himself king, the rewards for his partners had to be proportional.
Hence the Al-Saud rewarding the zealots by gradually giving them effective control over of the judiciary, the media, the schools, the mosques, and the people themselves in the form of the religious police. Such a set up had the advantage, for the Al-Saud, of also creating the mechanisms of a totalitarian state, which would keep in line the people they had conquered -- people, as I try to show in my book, who come from different religious, regional and tribal backgrounds and who historically for the most part were not Wahhabis.
While it is not true to say that the Al-Saud never criticize the Wahhabi religious establishment, you are nevertheless right to imply that they only ever do so when their own rule is threatened by dissenters among them. On the other hand, to come back to your question, the people themselves have been oppressed and brutalized by Wahhabism for decades, and so it is not surprising that they would find much in what the Wahhabis represent to criticize.
The Shia hate them, for instance, because they are damned as infidels by the official Wahhabi propaganda. The tribes hate them because of regional rivalries. The sophisticated Hijazis hate them because they destroyed, almost overnight, the historically pluralistic and tolerant Islam that had existed in that region for centuries before the Al-Saud conquered the region in the 1920s.
[...]
Q: If several members of the same tribe - I'm thinking of the five members of the same tribe who hijacked airliners on 9/11 – are involved in terrorism, can we assume that the tribe leader supports their involvment?
BRADLEY: No, we cannot. The tribe you are referring to, the Al-Ghamdi, is one-million strong, and although concentrated in the city of Baha in the Asir region its members are spread out all over the kingdom, and indeed the world. It is simply not possible, in practical terms, for the tribal sheikh to have a direct influence on all of them.
What we are talking about is more of an emotional and psychological bond between members of the tribe – a shared sense of history, of adhering to certain tribal characteristics, of having an inveterate trust in fellow tribal members, and so on.
It is significant that at least three, and possible four, members of the Al-Ghambi tribe were among the 9/11 hijackers, and in the book I show how other Al-Ghamdi tribal members have been involved in terrorist activities throughout the world, and how this relates to the
history of the Al-Ghambi tribe. It has little to do with specific leaders of the tribe.
Q: How moderate are Saudi citizens? Will the views of Saudi youth be more or less radical than those of their parents?
BRADLEY: I think it all depends on how you define ‘moderate’. Young Saudis are definitely more worldly, less insular and less xenophobic than their elders were, for the simple reason that many have traveled abroad and they have access to satellite TV and the internet at home. But they are still profoundly anti-Semitic (in addition, I mean, to being anti-Israeli), and they are seeped in jihadi rhetoric from a young age, which they are exposed to in the schools and the mosques.
What you have is widespread resistance to Al-Saud-Wahhabi hegemony in the regions outside Al-Saud, but also deeply embedded anti-Westernism. The latter partly comes, of course, from the fact that Washington has propped up the regime that oppresses them.
So when I try to bring out in my book the fact that there is such resistance I am not necessarily implying it translates all the time into moderation in the Western sense. It does sometimes, but for the most part it is moderation only when compared to the ultra-extremism of the Wahhabis.
Q: You frequently refer to Osama bin Laden as a 'Saudi dissident' -- how central to al-Qaeda's war on the world is his feud with the House of Saud?
BRADLEY: Without wanting to sink into psycho-babble, I think Bin Laden’s gripe with the Al-Saud is very personal. After all, he only turned against them in 1990 when they refused his offer to liberate Kuwait with an army of mujahideen in the same way that he had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation.
So, even after the Afghan campaign, he was willing to work closely with the Al-Saud in the context of waging jihad, which suggests that he still thought they themselves had jihadi credentials. That’s not really surprising since they had bankrolled the Afghanistan campaign, even providing one-way tickets for Saudis to join him in Afghanistan.
He is clearly a ‘dissident’ because he has since been exiled from Saudi Arabia and been stripped of his nationality. However, while commentators often refer to Bin laden’s wish to ‘overthrow the House of Saud’, he has never actually called for their removal. He has issued two statements specifically directed at them – one in 1995 and another in December of last year. In both he calls not for revolution from below but for reform from above, from within the ranks fo the royals. He clearly feels, for many reasons, that the time is not right for revolution in Saudi Arabia.
[...]
Q: King Fahd died at 81, and King Abdullah is 80 (or thereabouts - birth certificates in the kingdom being as they are). Will the next generation of kings be noticeably different from this one?
BRADLEY: You have to remember that the Saudi regime is in the arthritic grip of some very old people and the older they get the fewer signs they show of ever letting go. But they are also not going to learn any new tricks, and they are still applying the remedies of a time before terror and satellite television and the Internet and population explosion to the grim realities of today: when there is a problem, make a public example of the usual suspects, hand out a little grace and favor, and go back to the way things always were.
Take the example of the kingdom's eternally deferred bid to join the WTO. That calls for massive structural changes, corporate government mechanisms, a transparent judiciary, the lot. And every six months or so the Saudis have another go at making out that they have now met all the criteria: they have reformed their financial system and judiciary overnight, they have made everything as transparent as the windscreens of their SUVs, all of it accompanied by a huge fanfare in the local media, which seem quite oblivious that they made the exact same preposterous claims last year and the year before that. There is a deep-seated belief in the ruling family that saying something does make it so.
And in that blinkered commitment to the quick fix the Al-Saud have basically sown the seed of their own downfall. They have headed off the emergence of a literate urban middle class as long as they could, but economic realities mean they can't do that for much longer, and there are going to be very many of these people before long. Riyadh is set to become the first mega-city in the Gulf. Half the population is under 21, and these are increasingly listless young people who have been denied a proper education or any way of expression other than, for the boys, driving their cars.
The ruling clan's outmoded ways also mean that the old guard haven't thought to groom the younger generation for the succession when the grim reaper takes them; instead they have doled out preferment to their favorite sons, most of whom never had any cause to develop the intellectual faculties required to peel an egg, let alone steer a country through mass unemployment, disaffection, falling per-capita income and the complete obsolescence of the Bedouin values they like to exalt.
Like many Stalinist dictatorships, the Al-Saud cannot bring themselves to imagine a world they no longer control, and paradoxically that ensures that their world will end, because they have failed to nurture a generation of the ruling elite that is up to the job. The few genuinely smart people there are have been marginalized or shunted into jobs abroad because they are seen as a threat.
It is not even a feudal regime, as people claim, because a feudal system relies on the younger sons of the minor aristocracy and the aspiring clerks to keep the wheels ticking over from one king to the next, no matter how deranged the monarch: but the House of Saud is too frightened of the younger sons to trust them and is spending a good deal of resources it cannot afford on ensuring there is no aspiring class.
[...]
Q: The Saudis have quietly announced that they don't believe the U.S. will be their primary arms supplier in the coming decades. Are they anticipating a split with the U.S.? Is the U.S.-Saudi relationship salvageable?
BRADLEY: In the long-term I predict an invasion by the U.S. military of Eastern Province to secure the oil fields there. The plans are there, drawn up. The invasion would take a matter of hours; all that is needed is a certain number of forces to occupy all the strategic positions.
I really don't believe Washington has forgiven Riyadh for sending so many Saudis to Iraq for the fight against the occupation there, or forgotten that so many of the suicide bombers were Saudis. In a sense, Washington forgave the Saudi royals for 9/11 because they argued that Bin Laden was attacking both the U.S. and the Al-Saud, to undermine their historic oil-for-security alliance.
But Iraq is another matter entirely: there it is the Saudi royal family, not Bin Laden, who is sending the jihadis. More people now have died in Iraq as a result than were killed in New York and Washington on 9/11. By pretending to be Washington's ally while helping to blow Americans to smithereens in Iraq, the Saudi royal family is again engineering its own downfall. The invasion will come either because of internal instability or because Washington has decided to abandon the Al-Saud. The U.S. and British have had detailed invasion scenarios in place since the early 1970s, when the Saudis led an oil embargo against the west in support of the Palestinians.
U.S. forces are there already, guarding the main oil installations. The U.S. could never risk the oil falling into the hands of its enemies, and if any rumblings of an Islamist revolution were heard, that could offer the pretext. The area itself is geographically contained, and very easy to secure. Within a few hours of a decision it would be American property.
I think the Al-Saud recognize this a clear scenario, which is why they are trying to wean themselves off dependence on the US, for instance by giving their huge gas deals to three other permanent members of the UN Security Council: Russia, China and France. They also recognize the potential in forging closer ties more generally with emerging superpowers like India and China which, in the coming decades, with form a counter balance to US hegemony in much of the world. The Al-Saud may be many things, but they are not idiots. They will keep all their options open. Forging military ties with countries like Pakistan will be a part of their own realignment.
[...]
BRADLEY: What keeps together the people of many counties in the Middle East whose borders were drawn either arbitrarily by imperial powers (such as Iraq) or by brute force by local conquerors (such as Saudi Arabia) is a powerful, and usually dictatorial, central regime. When it disappears, historic ethnic, religious, tribal and geographical tensions, which have been suppressed but not erased, are unleashed. That has happened, obviously, in Iraq, and it would certainly happen in Saudi Arabia if the Al-Saud were either overthrown by homegrown Islamists or as a result of a US-invasion of the oil-rich Eastern Province.
All the kingdom's regions have been historically very resistant to Al-Saud-Wahhabi hegemony. In the formative years of the 1920s, when these regions were being conquered by the Al-Saud and Wahhabi zealots, there were at least 26 major rebellions, and one historian says as many as 400,000 rebels resisting the Al-Saud forces were put to the sword. Shiites, Sufis and other non-Wahhabi Muslims were damned as infidels, and had their shrines destroyed.
What I found when I travelled to these regions is that the Saudi people who inhabit them are still very aware of their hidden history, despite all the state-sponsored propaganda; they have for the most part not embraced Wahhabism, and indeed see their country as an empire whose various regions were conquered and are still ruled over by this alien royal family, who use the Wahhabi ideology to oppress them. Their loyalty to the Al-Saud, where it exists, has been bought, not earned, and so remains very fragile.
The overwhelming impression I was left with was that the people are just waiting for the moment to rid themselves of that imperial legacy, just as those who lived under the oppressive Communist ideology of the Soviet Union were.
An invasion of the Eastern Province is the more likely scenario to bring about change, since what would precipitate it is precicely the risk of an Islamist uprising. As for the broader consequences, for Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, I imagine it would largely
depend on how the invasion was carried out and interpreted –– as a way of liberating the oil and (by implication) the holy cities in the Hijaz from the corrupt Al-Saud on behalf of the Saudi people, or merely trying to steal the oil reserves?
I have no doubt that the Shia-majority in the Eastern Province would welcome an American invasion, as would the indigenous Sunni minority in that region. However, the imported Wahhabi Sunnis would put up fierce resistance, and they would have to be located immediately and effectively ethnically cleansed because they would form the core of a
massive local insurgency. I'm not advocating this, by the way; merely suggesting what might have to be done should the situation come about.
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