Currently, “What next?” seems to be a common thread in the mainstream media. For a group of educated people who spend most of their waking hours broadcasting and writing about everything that they think you should know about trees, there seems to be a certain lack of understanding that a sufficient number of them will join to comprise a forest.
Now that I have been sufficiently obscure, let us look at one such military and political forest in Saudi Arabia by discussing a few of its more notable stands and then the implications of certain decisions made by the regional players.
What is crucial to understand is that the “House of Saud” was selected to safeguard the holiest places in Islam, and it is through this selection that they have grown vastly wealthy through happenstance of the progression of technology and its voracious need for fossil fuels. Much earlier in the last century, the Wahhabis, in conjunction with other major Muslim sects, selected the Saud family as the guardians of Mecca and the other major shrines in order that pilgrims may worship there unmolested.
In looking at the decisions made by the ruling Saudi family over the past few decades, it can reasonably be shown that they (as do all other parties or families in power, wherever they call home) act primarily out of the need for self-preservation rather than altruistic motivations.
When the Iraqi wolf was knocking at their door in 1990 in order to collect on the Saudi promise to look the other way when they moved to take Kuwait in payment for keeping the Iranian Islamists at bay during the 1980s, the House of Saud invited (and significantly bankrolled) the U.S. and the coalition’s efforts to contain Iraqi ambitions at their border. Then when the assembled coalition forces were getting ready to move against Saddam, it was the House of Saud that insisted on the limited objective of displacing, but not overthrowing, the Baathists as this would open the door for the Iranian Islamists to gain control of Iraq as was earlier feared and that we are currently trying to prevent.
It was about this time that al-Qaida and other Islamist non-governmental organizations for terrorism, or INGOTs, began to identify the Saudi ruling family as traitors to their cause and since that time have formally declared a jihad against them.
In the intervening years, the more senior Sauds have looked the other way when members of their family supplied the INGOTs with funds and places to recruit members through the religious schools known as madrassas.
During the Clinton years, these activities were known but dismissed as business-as-usual since they failed in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and then only managed to kill a few hundred inconsequential (to the Clinton White House) military people and civilians overseas. This was part of the price that the Sauds thought would placate the INGOTs so that they would be left alone to rule and grow ever more wealthy. The other part of the price that the ruling family thought would buy peace at home was the marked lack of cooperation with the United States after September 2001.
In an unconscious emulation of Neville Chamberlain (the British prime minister that sought to buy off that unpleasant chap Hitler) and President Lyndon Johnson (who sought to buy off the North Vietnamese), the Saudi Royal Family fails to understand that the INGOTs are not susceptible to this form of placation as they are purely ideologically driven and are hence immune to such worldly blandishments.
Those loyal to the present Saudi government have been ramping up their internal military and counter-terrorist capabilities. Unfortunately, these do not possess the innate drive of the INGOT ideologues and are at a disadvantage because there are some lengths they will just not go to, as will their opponents. As you can see from the above, it is a matter of survival, not any altruistic meeting with the Western mind.
This brings us to the INGOT Ramadan Offensive of 2003 (or 1424 by the Islamic “Hijrah” calendar) wherein they are gambling large, hoping to win big politically as did the North Vietnamese in 1968 even though they also took a most bloody beating militarily to pay for it. The current spate of INGOT attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan (now aided ever more noticeably by the Pakistanis) has been broadened to encompass Saudi Arabia.
The gamble is necessary because for the past two years the INGOTs have failed to produce the appropriate number and magnitude of psychological victories required by any insurgency. Because of this, they have had to rely increasingly upon paid conscripts rather than the ideological shock troops they have used so well in the past. It matters little if they suffer what Westerners would consider unacceptable losses because the absolute need to succeed is the predictor of future funding as well as their political survival. Taking a page from the North Vietnamese playbook, they seek to inflict enough pain to prompt a withdrawal from either Iraq or Afghanistan.
But it is the strategic Saudi gambit that concerns us in this commentary, and it holds much promise – and risk for them.
As Ramadan comes to a close next week, the shrines and pilgrims the House of Saud is dedicated to protecting will increasingly become targets for the INGOTs. By mounting successful attacks against the towns that house the shrines, they can demonstrate the inability of the Saudis to fulfill the religious duties that forms the basis for their dominion. Once this is in question, the ruling family will be faced with being deselected by the Muslim world and the fossil wealth and strategic position of Saudi Arabia can then fall like a ripe plum into the hands of those who already have allied themselves with the INGOTs.
The risk of this move is at least as great as the potential benefits, since the potential for a religious/political schism in the Islamic world is of greater significance than those seen since the time of the Crusades and Salah ad-Din (Saladin) when they kill Muslims during these attacks (as seems all but inevitable). It will be up to the West to make the appropriate political overtures that will nurture such a schism and thereby isolate the INGOTs and the individuals/regimes that overtly and more often than not, covertly support them.
If this gamble goes noticeably against either side, it will be the predictor of just how long our world will continue to suffer this conflict.
Tom Marzullo is a former Special Forces soldier and a veteran of submarine special operations. He resides in Colorado.
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