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DATES: 1953-1975; the effect of massive financial wealth on the House of Saud, and the effect this had on other Arabians.

After 1953, the flow of oil rents into Saudi Arabia accelerated ahead of the costs of expanding port facilities and pipelines to carry the oil out of the country. This coincided with the accession of the rake, Saud. Saud actually spent so much on bribes and on his immense retinue of courtiers, that the Saudi state ran a deficit. In 1958, he appointed his brother, Crown Prince Faisal, to manage the nation's finances; Faisal quickly brought the exchequer into the black, but naturally angered the chieftains and the court. In 1961, he resigned, while Saud thrashed about alienating social conservatives (outraged at his support for 3rd world nationalism and solidarity) and Muslim idealists (affronted by his personal extravagance and the boom in vice). In November 1964, Saud was ordered to abdicate, and went into exile in Europe. The country was now under the leadership of the shrewd, single-minded Faisal.

Faisal was an interesting character: tough, battle-hardened, extremely brave, clever, diligent, and ferociously judeaphobic. He was the sort of fellow who would bide his time, making himself entirely essential, until suddenly he had a nonnegotiable demand. His indispensibility to the monarchy meant his resignation was a crisis for the entire civil service, of which the 'ulema were a part. Hence, even Saud knew his days as King were numbered.

The accession of King Faisal allowed a wave of innovations: universal education, including schools for women, and television. Television outraged many of the die-hard Ikhwan, including his nephew Khalid, who led an attack on the broadcasting station and was killed by security forces. Ten years later, the dead nephew's brother, Faisal ibn Musab, shot his uncle and king at point blank range, and was beheaded for it.

Faisal was obsessed with strengthening the nation's defenses, replacing the USA as a patron or ally, and destroying Israel. Because he was a seasoned warrior, he was never fatuous enough to participate in the for-glamour-only attacks on Israel¹, seeking instead to build up the Arab nations diplomatically and militarily. He probably understood that the juntas in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt were not serious about mounting a serious challenge to Israel, since they needed it to justify their own faux-radicalism. He therefore sought alliances with Pakistan and a settlement of the festering war in North Yemen (unlike Nasser, who waited until after defeat by Israel to take peace initiatives seriously).

Faisal was succeeded immediately upon his death by Khalid, perceived by Western journalists as a liberal reformer. Khalid sought renewed ties with Washington, chiefly by acquiring a fleet of US-made F-15 fighter jets and inviting the Americans to regard him as a crucial, equal partner in the Cold War. Almost at once, Crown Prince Fahd took over the actual running of the Kingdom. He was mainly interested in building up the capital assets of the country in an era of rapidly increasing revenues from oil. His brother, king, and boss, Khalid, adopted startlingly modern management techniques, devolving power and opening up the decisionmaking process to oversight.

Khalid and Fahd, thanks to modernized governance, established a new continuity in Saudi policies that greatly strengthened the country internationally. Hereafter, it would be appropriate to speak of an establishment running the country, rather than an eccentric like Saud or Faisal. The establishment was less likely to feel any urgent need to redress the wrongs of the Palestinians, even though popular sentiment in the region was, if anything, more hostile to Israel than ever. Acceptance by Washington as a partner in the struggle against Communism or populist nationalism was drifting from a means to an end; and the new, conservative regime of Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan allowed the Saudis a huge new scope of action. When the USSR invaded Aghanistan, it was almost as big a windfall for the Kingdom as the first discovery of oil had been.

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

As a force, Saudi Arabia went far beyond merely donating billions of dollars; although it certainly did that. Saudi assistance flowed to the mujahadin via Pakistan; it altered the character of Iraqi society during the Iran-Iraq War by pressuring Saddam to play up pietism and Sunni Islam (in exchange for Saudi financial support); it flowed into the famine-stricken areas of the Sahel region, along with a gigantic missionary effort on behalf of Salafism; it even was used to finance the Nicaraguan contras, permitting the Reagan Administration to circumvent the will of Congress in the service of a foreign power.

The US population accepted this because many Americans believed the Saudis were merely an ally in a covert operation, of the sort required to defeat the USSR. This was, however, setting a dangerous precedent: hereafter, Congress would have little or no meaningful influence over foreign policy. Even their control over the purse strings was now irrelevant, when the Saudis or other Gulf emirates could be trusted to come up with ready cash. The fact that the Saudis would expect something in return, something that Congress would (by definition) be likely to resist, evidently occurred to very few Americans indeed.

The Saudi establishment probably had little desire or even suspicion that they would create a gigantic cohort of externally displaced persons (EDPs) in Pakistan and Iran; I think the US NSC did, but did not care. Indeed, the mujahadin and Soviets between them drove about 7 million Afghanis to leave for Pakistan and Iran; the ones who wound up in Pakistan were dependent upon Salafist aid organizations, who essentially turned the camps into indoctrination centers for what were, indeed, Ikhwanist notions. This explains in part the difference between the version of Salafism adopted by the Taliban, and that in practice in Saudi Arabia: the Taliban were indoctrinated by the vestiges of the Ikhwan, the millenarian movement Abdul Aziz had created to defeat internal opposition to his rule. The Taliban, like the Ikhwan before them, never actually took on a non-Muslim enemy; the Soviets, of course, withdrew before the Taliban entered the war.

The Saudis and the Pakistanis, and other governments in the Islamic world were interested chiefly in defending the aristocratic rights and privileges of the landlords or paternalistic rulers against progress movements, or republican governments with progressive pretensions. This had nothing to do with Islam, although Muslim obscurantism of the sort offered up by Sayyid Qutb or the Saudi Ikhwan were exceptionally handy. They offered up a fantasy to the despairing masses as well: the enemy, being an infidel, would be defeated by(a) the hand of God, or (b) an enemy utterly unafraid of death.

Movements like this flourished in the region not because of Islam, but because of the peculiar character of class struggle in the region. The ruling class was tiny, and no longer could rely on mafia-like organizations to retain power; the clergy, too, was gradually becoming infected with the Muslim analogue of "liberation theology." So they turned to followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to recruit, indoctrinate, and intimidate rival people's movements. The ruling class also requested, and received, covert assistance from Washington to finance and supply these groups. All the while, secular methods of mitigating class struggle were squelched.

Today, Pakistanis are likely to curse Pres. Zia ul-Haq for having allowed the CIA and the Saudis to use their country as a base for subverting the Soviet-installed regime in Afghanistan. Many believe he ought to have obtained guarantees from the USA, or more money, or at least, massively greater pressure on India to quit Kashmir. Others believe that only neutrality would have spared Pakistan the nightmare of heroin addiction, terrorist violence, and ultimately, the subversion of their sovereignty to an unfeeling foreign power. As we shall presently see, Americans too will likely have occasion to do so.

(Part 5)

SOURCES & RECOMMENDED READING: Prof. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1991;

Prof. Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1988;

Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (1989); The Trench (Vintage, 1993); Variations on Day and Night (1994); dates refer to translations from the Arabic by Peter Theroux ONLINE:

Library of Congress Country Studies: Saudi Arabia

CIA World Factbook: Saudi Arabia Wikipedia Entry, Saudi Arabia; history of; insurgency in; Saudi Aramco;