Title: Down with Saudi Arabia
Author: Mark Steyn
Publication: Spectator, UK
Date: Mar 9, 2002
URL: http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2002-03-09&id=1648

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. And yet 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 peace proposals, 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.