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5). Saudi Arabia's Ambivalence about US Retaliation Plans.(10/21/01)
[Update (8/3/02): Sudairy faction now said to have turned against the US.]
The US press was slow to report the
important AP story, available from Spanish,
pro-Israeli, and
pro-Palestinian sources, that Saudi officials announced
they would not permit the US to use the important Prince Sultan Air
Base, south of Riyadh, or US retaliatory attacks against any Muslim
country. I first read of this story on 9/21. It does not seem
to have reached the US press until 9/23, when Colin Powell commented
in a way that did not really deny it.
The original account of Saudi Arabia's unexpected refusal to supply
bases for retaliation against bin Laden has now been corroborated in
an important report from the usually reliable private intelligence
website
Stratfor.
According to the Stratfor
analysis, the Saudi royal family is divided [as it has been
since the 1960s] between two factions of half-brothers: 1) the
al-Sudairy faction (all full brothers) led by King Fahd and Defense
Minister Sultan, who all favor, and profit and gain power from, the
Saudi alliance with the United States; and 2) the religious coalition
of half-brothers led by the aging Crown Prince Abdullah, whose piety
is backed by alliances with Wahhabi religious leaders.
Tensions between the two factions, usually leading to compromises,
underlie recent developments in the bin Laden story. In late August,
shortly before the WTC attack, Prince
Turki al-Faisal (with links to the religious
faction) was dismissed from his post as head of Saudi intelligence.
Unquestionably Prince Turki had from the Afghan campaign developed
close relations with Osama bin Laden, and was later charged
by the Saudi family with negotiating for bin Laden's surrender
by the Taliban (Rashid, Taliban, 131, 137-39). But his
replacement and uncle, Nawwaf, is also allegedly a member of the
religious faction.
In the wake of the 9/11 WTC attacks, Crown Prince Abdullah,
with the aging King Fahd in a Swiss hospital, surprised the US
by denying the use of the Prince Sultan Air Base for retaliatory
attacks against any Muslim country. But three days later, on September
26, The Foreign Minister Prince Saud announced that Saudi Arabia
was breaking relations with the Taliban, accusing it of contradicting
Islam and harboring terrorists.
[I strongly recommend the website
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0109262300.htm (Stratfor), despite its interventionist bias, and
although (as you will see) not all of its posted stories are free.]
However the Stratfor analysis ignores the relevance of Saudi family
divisions to the highly contested manoeuvres over an Afghan pipeline.
Splits in the Saudi royal family have led to support by different Saudi
princes for each of the two competing multi-billion dollar proposals to
build a gas pipeline across Afghanistan. As narrated below, Prince
Turki was allied with the Argentine company Bridas, while Prince
Abdullah was close to the Saudi company Delta Oil, part of the
US-backed consortium headed up by Unocal.
There is much speculation in Europe whether the sudden dismissal
of Turki by Abdullah in late August was a factor in precipitating
the 9/11 attacks a few days later. An article by Seymour Hersh
in the
New Yorker
reports that NSA intercepts have demonstrated to Washington
analysts "that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden's
Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and
Central Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region." Hersh also
writes that it was hard for these analysts to impress their
discoveries on senior officials of the Clinton and Bush administrations,
a fact to be considered in the light of the enormous Arab petrodollar
investments in the political system of this country (see above under
BCCI).
The theme of Saudi royal family responsibility for Al-Qaeda is
carried even further by
David Wurmser of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute,
a backer of the so-called "Wolfowitz cabal," demands that the US invade
Iraq. Wurmser argues that "al Qaeda must be dealt with not only in
Afghanistan, but also at its source--in the strategic triangle of Syria,
Iraq, and the Wahhabi/Abdallah alliance whose interests it serves and
whose structures and politics brought it to life." I have posted
Wurmser's argument, not because I agree with it, but because it may
have to be understood and responded to intelligently if we are not
soon to see an expansion of the Bush response into yet another country.