Saudi Arabia is our enemy. Buying golfers doesn’t change that
In the latest stroke of the LIV Golf tour controversy, a group of families and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has vowed to stage a protest at the Augusta National Golf Club if any of the golfers who played in the Saudifunded series are allowed to compete in the Masters in April.
“In the aftermath of 9/11, our country agreed we would ‘Never Forget’ that horrible day,” 9/11 Families United said in a press release. “The only reason the Saudis launched LIV was to try to make the world forget who they are and what they did, including their role in 9/11.”
Whether or not the Saudis played a direct role in that horror is an unresolved question. Yet the Saudis’ historical role as the ideological protagonists of the rise of modern Islamic extremism is beyond doubt. Such a legacy cannot be masked with bought golfers.
What is the basic identity of the Saudi monarchy? What have they done, and what was their relation to the events that launched an era of prolonged wars and mass violence on several continents?
Although the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi is the most-cited charge against the Saudis, not enough attention ispaid to the things he said that got him killed — insights that go far towards answering these fundamental questions.
In his new book “Without Borders: The Haqqani Network and the Road to Kabul,” veteran Afghan wars correspondent Jere Van Dyk tells about a dinner he had with the freedom of the press martyr in Bahrain a few years before his killing. It is required reading for anyone who would fathom this tragic trajectory in modern history.
“What was Salafism? It was Wahhabism,” Khashoggi affirmed, equating a standard term for violent fundamentalism with the fanatical official Saudi creed. “If I scanned all radical movements that carried arms, their Islamic background came from Saudi Arabia.”
Van Dyk carefully delineates how this global poisoning of minds, which saw generations raised to hate, was accomplished. The Saudis sought to destroy the power of nationalism, tribalism, and the forces of modernizing reform across the Muslim world. They did so by promoting a vision of life focused entirely on religious grievances and alleged purity, using their oil wealth to diffuse Wahhabism in multiple ways.
Through the World Muslim League they founded in 1962, they established universities to train fundamentalist missionaries and endowed radical religious schools, or madrassas, especially in Pakistan, whose allpowerful military was their fervent partner in this severely reactionary program. The two regimes’ motive was to preserve intact the absolute socio-economic power wielded by their ruling feudal elites, a power that could not withstand enlightened societal change.
The Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s was the point of metastasis for all this. These allies heavily backed the most extreme Afghan factions and rotated the so-called “Arab Afghans” — among them Osama bin Laden — in and out of the conflict zone so they could fight and then use the prestige they had acquired as jihadis to spreadWahhabism abroad.
It was a historically transformational dynamic. And it was carried out with the active participation of the Reagan administration, which only saw its alleged utility in the struggle against communism.
The first Bush and Clinton administrations did not interfere when Saudi Arabia used its vast financial resources, and Pakistan its American-provided military hardware, to back the Taliban’s initial drive to power in the 1990s. That culminated in the militants providing a safe haven for al Qaeda and other terror groups, and finally in 9/11.
Again, the Saudi legacy cannot be masked with bought golfers, nor the building of fantasy cities equipped with robot dinosaurs and flying taxis, or cosmetic social reforms. Yet the attempt to do so plays into a strong mindset of denial about who the Saudis really are. America’s stubborn refusal to reassess its support for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan despite the great national reversal of 9/11 and the subsequent wars was a critical factor in the conflicts’ prolongation, and the subsequent military and political defeats.
Even at this late date, the greatest sin that Washington seeks to hold the Saudis responsible for is that they will not play ball on oil prices. Khashoggi told Jere Van Dyk that when it comes to fathoming terrorism, “The physical network was not important. It kept changing, and new men came up, older men died, and other men got killed, and new people replaced them. It was the history of the idea that was important.”
This is the truth that Washington has yet to take to heart, and is why, despite the trumpeted killings of Zarqawi, bin Laden, Baghdadi and Zawahiri, in the wake of the lost war in Afghanistan and the exhilaration that outcome has produced among jihadis around the world, Islamic extremism is now a greater threat to international security than it has ever been.