Yesterday's press conference by Bush and Blair in the
Foreign Office, originally organised as part of president Bush's state
visit to England was expected to be devoted largely to questions
concerning the invasion of Iraq. So it was, but the answers weren't.
Earlier that morning, we were beginning to hear about the suicidal
attacks by Al Qaeda on the British Consulate and the HSBC bank building
in Istanbul which killed 26 people and injured two or three hundred more.
The result was that few of the questions about Iraq were directly
answered but were turned into diatribes by Bush and Blair against
terrorism.
They were quite right to be deeply shocked by these terrorist attacks.
All of us have been. But quite what were Bush and Blair really thinking
as they stood behind their lecterns? They both knew that they had been
advised by their own intelligence people before the invasion of Iraq that
it might well result in more turbulence in the Middle East and an
extension of the terrorism. Well, this is what has happened so far and,
as time goes on , the total death toll might well exceed the numbers of
those killed on 11 September 2001 at the New York Trade Center.
Both Bush and Blair declared resonantly and repeatedly that the Al
Qaeda-led terrorism would be defeated. Indeed, they said it so many
times during the press conference that one realised that they were really
only trying to reassure themselves. In truth, they were probably not at
all confident.
The press conference, as shown on BBC 2, was actually interleaved with
the Politics programme and on this an Arabic newspaper editor commented
that politicians always say that they are going to defeat terrorism. He
reminded us that a succession of British prime ministers had been saying
this for over 30 years about the troubles in Northern Ireland but that,
in the end, they had to negotiate with the IRA terrorists -- or at least
with those who were closely connected with them in order to clarify the
injustices and grievances that existed and had to be put right. In fact,
we now know that secret negotiations had been going for some years before
it was publicly admitted. Even then, they weren't catalysed until the IRA
hurt the UK where it hurt the most -- by destroying the Baltic Tower in
the City of London. If the UK government had not acted from then onwards
with the greatest celerity, then it is quite possible that the IRA would
have driven all the major financial institutions from the City of London,
and London would be finished as the second largest financial business
centre in th world.
The grievances of the majority of Muslims in the Middle East,
particularly of millions of young unemployed Muslims in Saudi Arabia and
Palestine, are far more complex and intractable than those of the
Catholics in Northern Ireland. It must be said that a considerable part
of the problem of Islam has been due to the way that a succession of
ijtihads -- interpretations of the Koran -- over the centuries by
leading mullahs has contributed to its decline as a rich and scholastic
culture and its withdrawal fom the normal trading circuits of other
cultures, but the depradations of western nations in exploiting oil
resources in recent decades has only intensified their
problems.
In these days of easily available weapons and explosives, Al Qaeda-type
terrorism, welling up from the misery and oppression of so many
people will never end until deep and sensitive investigation is made.
Otherwise the deaths will mount and there could be incidents far worse
than 9/11.
There are several deep trouble spots in the Middle East, such as
Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Morocco and several more. The first
two are by far the most serious and in both of these America, being the
overwhelming military power in the world, could have been much more
active in finding solutions and of gently encouraging more
contact.
Yesterday evening, as I began writing this, we received the news of the
suicide bombings in Istanbul. This morning, as I write afinal paragraph,
we are hearing of the latest rocket attacks in Baghdad (something I've
been expecting while Bush is in England). Little is known yet of
fatalities but the only two main hotels left in Baghdad, the Sheraton and
the Palestine, and the only government ministry that had been kept
inviolate by the American invasion, the oil ministry, have been attacked.
It is difficult to imagine that any foreign firms will be able to send
staff to Iraq from now onwards in order to help in the rebuilding of
Iraq.
The invasion of Iraq has been the biggest blunder imaginable by two
nations which should have been better informed of the real situation in
Iraq. The real reason for the invasion of the nation with the second
largest oil reserves in the world was the dangerous internal state of the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia, containing the largest oil reserves in the
world, which is a principal supplier of oil to America and the UK. Saudi
Arabia is also the main exporter of finance which has procured the
weaponry and exposives that Al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist groups
have been able to use.
The fundamental problem of Saudi Arabia thus remains, and the following
article from the Economist is a fairly succinct descrption of the
situation now. My own view, despite the current attacks in Istanbul and
Baghdad, is that the main weight of Al Qaeda terrorism is already in the
process of shifting to Saudi Arabia itself. This problem will still
remain even if the Iraq situation could miraculously disappear overnight.
The gist of most of what I have been reading in recent months suggests
that the Saudi Arabian authorities are failing in their attempts to
extinguish their home-grown Al Qaeda network.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
HOW SAFE IS THE HOUSE OF SAUD?
Suicide bombers will probably not topple the Saudi regime, but they could
tempt it to slow or reverse whgat passes for reform in the
kingdom
A year ago, Saudi Arabia's interior minister, Prince Nayef, scorned the
idea that militant Islamists posed a threat to the kingdom. They were
mere chatterers and fabricators of nonsense, too lazy to get off their
backsides, he said in an interview. The suicide bombing, on November 9th,
of a palm-shaded housing compound in the suburbs of Riyadh, the capital,
which killed at least 18 people and hurt 120 more, has buried such cosy
notions.
The attack came on the night of the full moon that marks the middle of
the fasting month of Ramadan. Assailants distracted guards with gunfire,
letting accomplices drive what looked like a police car into the centre
of the compound. The explosion flattened eight nearby villas and blew out
windows a mile away.
It was not the first such murderous blast in the kingdom. A sequence of
smaller strikes has killed half a dozen foreign workers, most of them
westerners, in the last seven years. In May, suicide bombers hit two
other expatriate compounds, killing 35 people. Since then, nationwide
manhunts have left some 12 policemen and 18 wanted men dead. Twice as
many terror suspects -- 600 -- have been captured since May as in the
previous two years.
What was novel about this week's bombing was that it killed Arabs, mostly
Lebanese and Egyptian professionals, and their children. Several of the
victims were Muslim. This, and the fact that the attack took place during
a month of special religious significance, has made Saudis more anxious
and angry than ever before.
The government has been quick to claim the moral high ground. The top
government-appointed religious authority condemned the attackers as
agents of Satan. State television, whose normal task is to linger at
royal receptions, instead broadcast live from the gory scene throughout
the fatal night. Furious commentary flooded the state-monitored press.
"You are either with the country or with terrorism," warned the
daily Al Watan.
It's all America's fault
Many Saudi Muslims excused previous acts of terror on the ground that
Islam itself was under threat from a rampaging America. If the acts
themselves were misguided, they shrugged, at least the motive of
jihad was pure. Earlier this year, for example, Safar al-Hawali, a
popular preacher once imprisoned for his combative views, launched a
group called the World Campaign to Fight Aggression. "We are one
nation and one body; we share one goal and one clear enemy," he
declared. Although Mr Hawaii said his group would adopt peaceful methods
inside the kingdom, he endorsed armed jihad "wherever circumstances
permit".
Until now, few Saudis had heard coherent arguments against this idea of
Muslim victimhood. Even when, in April, America withdrew the 5,000 troops
it had long based in the kingdom (thus resolving one of Osama bin Laden's
main grievances), few Saudis changed their minds about American
"imperialism". They were too busy watching footage from
Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Arab satellite channels ennobled the
ideal of guerrilla "resistance". The House of Saud, like other
Muslim governments, fostered this sense of siege to boost its own
popularity.
In this context, many Saudis sympathised with the youthful excesses of
home-grown terrorists, or at least thought they understood the temptation
to join the jihad. Even after the Riyadh bombing, anonymous
writers on the internet chat sites where militant views proliferate have
cited holy scripture to explain that the end justifies the means. In an
e-mail to a Saudi magazine, a man purporting to lead a group called
Mujahideen of the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the
attack. If Muslim innocents died, he said, well, they should not have
been consorting with infidels. (Perhaps he was referring to the fact that
the bombed compound once housed workers for Boeing, the American aircraft
maker.)
Yet very few Saudis now share such reasoning. This week, Mr Hawaii
himself denied that the Riyadh bombing could be considered jihad.
"Our problem as Muslims is with those who seek to destroy us and our
religion -- and they are well known -- not with the Arab and Islamic
governments in our countries," he said.
Mr Hawaii and other Saudi radicals think the government should use them
as a conduit to open a dialogue with the rebels. They say that most would
turn themselves in if they were guaranteed fair treatment. But Prince
Nayef rejects the notion, saying the only way to talk with them was with
"rifles and swords".
Such words worry liberal Saudis, who fear that too hard a crackdown will
prolong strife and imperil reform. In recent years, the kingdom's elderly
top princes have opened up a bit, welcoming foreign investment, deleting
from school books passages warning children to shun infidels, and hinting
that they may one day allow elections. In the long term, the monarchy's
best chance of survival is to become less autocratic, and for some of its
members to become less ostentatiously corrupt. It seems secure at the
moment, buoyed by high oil prices, but the legions of unemployed Saudi
youths may not always sit idly by as yet more princes award each other
lavishly paid jobs.
The Economist -- 15 November 2003
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