The War on Terror edged toward defeat the day Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia left the Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas with a smile on his face. Attention was reverted from Saudi inspired terrorists, creatures of the cold war, back to Saudi enemies in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.
In hindsight the group of ideologues that had agglomerated around President Bush were ineffectual and hardly influential. Further, Walt and Mearsheimer's unlikely Israel Lobby was all bark (no bite).
The only game in town was strategic, corporative, and cooperative interaction within the context of American and Saudi interests. This relationship emerged in full ernest in the 1970s, it nourished international Saudist terrorists and saw the transformation of groups like Hizbollah, Hamas, and the nascent Sadrists in Iraq into grassroots popular anti-Saudist movements attracting the remnants of the Arab leftist intelligentsia.
What I will be talking about there is the impact in the Middle East of the Cold War, which nobody really talks about. It’s usually talked about from the point of view of Washington or Moscow ...
I also go on to argue that there hasn’t been as much of a change in American policy as you might have expected at the end of the Cold War. Rashid Khalidi
The group of neoconservatives wanted change in US policy in the Middle East and the War on Terror was an instrument for such change. They, of course, had considerable access to the White House. This group included sharp ideologues, successful academics, iniquitous crooks, gangsters, and madmen who we know well for their various articulations of the natural propensity for negligence in any assembly that includes rehabilitated, or otherwise, Trotskyists.* They coined a few terms, terrorized Arab American academics with the likes of campus watch, vilified non-Saudist Arabs and Muslims in popular culture with MEMRI, generated a culture of hate with various racist media outlets like jihadwatch, targeted progressive Palestinians with hate forums such as CAMERA, and helped define The War on Terror in a peculiar hybrid manner.
They were, and some remain, pro-war on principle as well as useful idiots who helped, and occasionally inadvertently hindered by way of negligence, the usual activities of an old ongoing relationship between the Saudi regime and the US.
The War on Terror, if it was a slogan that is in any way coherent, at the very least could have meant a refocusing of US Middle East policy away from its cold war articulation, which saw Saudi encouragement of Saudist terrorists, toward engagement of mass grassroots anti-colonialist movements, some of whom have Islamic perspectives but all of whom are hated by the Saudi regime.
In this diary I will briefly outline the state of play a decade around the fall of the Soviet union. I will concentrate on four aspects of the evolution of the US and Saudi cold war strategy in the Middle East. In particular, the crafting of Saudist counter revolutionary militias from which groups like al-Qaida emerged, and the evolution of grassroots Islamic movements into widely popular anti-Saudist movements that attracted remnants of the left and its intelligentsia.
In the next installment I will address the rebalancing of the US-Saudi relationship following the al-Qaida attack back towards its cold war outlook highlighting some of its main examples.
1. Arab Oil for the Arab masses: the Arab leftist threat to Saudi and American interests
In this connection I would like to pay tribute to the memory of my comrade and friend, Jabra Nicola (1912–74).** He joined the Israeli Socialist Organization (Matzpen) a few months after its foundation, and his analysis of the impact of Zionism on Palestine and the Arab East greatly influenced our thinking on the subject. In particular, we owe to him the insistence on the regional context of the Palestinian problem and its eventual resolution – which is a central theme of my lecture. Mosh ́e Machover
A number of decades ago the Arab leftist movements were hugely popular in the Arab world. Though they generally recognized that their environment is Islamic, the Arab left was secular and inclusive. Its leaderships included Christian, Shiite, Druze, as well as Sunni Muslim Arabs. It was a popular mass movement with concentration in at least three groups. First, the refugee camps of Palestinian farmers (falahin) cleared from Israel in 1948. Initially, these where squalid holding camps for the almost entirely illiterate Palestinian villagers who were not allowed to return to their homes in north and central Israel. Second, the various Shiite centers of poverty in Lebanon. Third, within the remnants of the Palestinians who had managed to remain in Israel following its clearing from most of its Arab inhabitants.
One theme that emerged in the Marxist corners of this movement is Arab oil is for the Arab masses. That is, the oil riches of the Arab world should be shared by all Arabs, the great bulk of whom were poor; it should not be controlled by a handful of kings, princes, and dictators.
A dramatic, and at the time rather popular, manifestation of this demand was the storming of an OPEC meeting in December 1975 in Vienna, where senior members of OPEC dictatorships where taken hostage (it seems to have been "bungled" because apparently one order, which was not carried out, was to execute the minister of Saudi Arabia). One argument is that another expression of this theme was the more than tepid reception of Saddam Hussain's invasion of oil rich Kuwait in August 1990, even though it was popularly understood that Saddam was a CIA asset who saw the Kuwait as the appropriate price for his US and Saudi inspired bungled invasion of Iran following its revolution.
2. The Saudist counter revolutionaries: All places but Jerusalem
The Saudis recognized the dangers of the Arab left and sought to undermine it. The grand strategy, to which both the US and the Saudis contributed, was to weaken the Arab left by driving a wedge between the various ethnic groups in the Arab world, shifting the focus away from the Palestinian refugee camp, which motivated the Arab left and whose members tended to dominate the movement's more leftist branches. Further, the Saudis sought to reignite the thousand year old fitna between Shiites and Sunnis taking into account the solid support at the time in non-Sunni Muslim communities for the left. In particular, in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
Armed groups occasionally called Wahabists, Salafists, Tawhidists-whose most notorious guilds include al-Qaida, the now virtually defunct jamaat al-tawhid wal Jihad in Iraq, and al-jamaa al-islamiyah al-musallaha in Algeria--are more appropriately addressed by the functional name of Saudists rather than Islamists. This focuses on their aims and motivations rather than the theology and ideology that they has adopted as a matter of convenience.
To facilitate their eforts against the Arab left the Saudis used the theology in writings of post crusade medieval scholars, such as Ibn Taymiya, and their successors (for a collection of mainly sectarian fatwas see link and use google's translator) . This theology is conveniently suited to the Saudi strategy of undermining Arab nationalism and the Arab left. The main characteristic of these scholars is sectarianism, especially in their attitudes toward Shiite Muslims and their treatment of indigenous Christians.
الحمد لله رب العالمين، أجمع علماء المسلمين على أن كل طائفة ممتنعة عن شريعة من شرائع الإسلام الظاهرة المتواترة، فإنه يجب قتالها، حتى يكون الدين كله لله.
Thanks to God rab al-`almin. The unanimous opinion of Muslim scholars is that any sect that avoids any part of (Sunni Muslim) understandings must be fought (violently) so that religion becomes complete to God.
Ibn Taymiya 1263 – 1328
Further, an argument of such scholars that is convenient for the Saudis is that Jerusalem, the city, is not so important (it seems that during the wars against the crusaders and after its liberation the status of Jerusalem in popular thinking increased and competed with the standing of Mecca-to my mind Jerusalem is now once again competing in stature with Mecca in popular islamic thinking, occupied Jerusalem has been transformed into the emotional capital in the everyday Islamic experience). One crude way that for some years one could use to distinguish Saudists from Islamists is through their symbols. Saudists almost never used Jerusalem or the al-Aqsa Temple or its Dome of the Rock as a motif, while pictures of Jerusalem are typically used by Islamists, such as Hizbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and always by the Arab left.
كانت قبلة، ثم نُسخت، وهي قبلة اليهود، فلم يبق في شريعتنا ما يوجب تخصيصها بحكم، كما ليس في شريعتنا ما يوجب تخصيص يوم السبت
It was a direction of prayer and then it was replaced, and it is the direction of prayer of Jews and it must not be considered as special, in the same way that the special role of Saturday is not part of our religious laws.
Ibn Taymiya 1263 – 1328
The main method for implementing the Saudist strategy of undermining the Arab left is through the immense oil wealth controlled by the Saudi regime, which is used to infiltrate Mosques around the world. Further, they found a significant ally in the United States during the cold war. They began implementing their strategy by shifting the focus of Arab revolutionary activity to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Kashmere. Indeed, the further away from Jerusalem you were the more likely you were to be funded and support by the Saudis, and thus co-opted by the Saudists.
In addition, a number of terrorist attacks in the Middle East were widely attributed to Saudi and US intelligence services. One of the most spectacular of these was the 1985 massive car bombing near a Shiite mosque in Lebanon aimed at killing Shiite spiritual leader Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, which followed a series of car bombs in the leftist stronghold of West Beirut (see Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 by Bob Woodward. This terrorism, according to Woodward, was financed by Prince Bandar.)
3. The Revolutionary Mosque: Sayyed Musa aS-Sader's intellectual revolution
ثورة النبي محمد
عندما تحاول الماركسية التاريخية أن تقسم مراحل تطور المجتمعات إلى أربعة، هذه وجهة نظر ندرسها. نحن نعتقد أن المجتمعات التي تعتمد القيم المادية صنف، والمجتمعات التي تعتمد القيم المطلقة النابعة عن الإيمان، صنف آخر.
(best read as Arabic with a Persian accent and Farsi sentence construction)
The revolution of the Prophet Mohammad
We shall study ... the point of view of historical Marxism which attempts to divide the stages of development into four stages. We foresee that societies guided by materialism are essentially different from societies guided by absolute values that spring from faith
http://www.imamsadr.net/...
One of the call to arms for the Arab left was the overthrow in 1953 of Iran's President Mohammad Mosaddeq's by the US and its allies for his move to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and his efforts to democratize Iran. This call to arms also motivated the Islamic revolution of Iran, which in turn happened a few years after the disappearance of Shiite Lebanese Imam Sayyed Musa aS-Sader; who in the intellectual scheme of things was far more important than even Khomeini.
Sayyed Musa aS-Sader was a religious intellectual who emerged in the late 1960's from within Lebanon's solidly leftist Shiite community. He crafted a distinctly leftist revolutionary Islamic perspective. His lecture Religion and national liberation in the Arab world (unfortunately not translated to English) is a must read. His overall thesis drew from theoretical Marxism and he brought to the Arab left a tremendously powerful Islamic point of view: [His ideas obviously influenced an old diary of mine].
- Islam is born explicitly universalist and internationalist. There is no notion of nationalism in Islam and it is explicitly hostile to tribalism and racism.
- On issues concerning justice Islam is liberationist in its theology. Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism is built into Islam.
- Multiculturalism and the idea that there can be many centre of culture is an idea in Islam.
- On economic issues Islam is progressive, in particular with regard to social welfare.
The Hizbollah of Lebanon emerged with a Khomeinist perspective but within a number years (especially after the camps war in Lebanon) and by the mid to late 1980's it became intellectually solidly Sadrist, revolutionary with a leftist perspective. In time the Sadrist point of view became the focus of great hate for Saudist propagandist. Here we had a grassroots Shiite progressive movement that challenged Saudi and Western influence in the Middle East. The Revolutionary Mosque was born and quickly transformed Hizbollah into a national liberation movement with leftist anti-colonialist agenda.
4. Reclaiming Jihad: settling the intellectual wasteland of the Sunni Brotherhood
For well over two decades after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel ...[used] the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas in Gaza as a counterweight to the nationalist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). This reached the point where the Israeli military occupation encouraged Brotherhood thugs to intimidate PLO supporters.
Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
By the mid 1980's the Saudis, the US, and Israel, were vying for control and influence of the Muslim Brothers, which for decades had been disjoint minor associations of Arab bourgeoisie and an intellectual wasteland even in the area of Islamic theology. Indeed, I recall the late, and thoroughly missed, Edward Said being perplexed in the early nineties by the lack of any intellectual underpinnings to such groups in Palestine. They had no economic policy, they hardly thought about foreign policy.
By early 1990's the Arab left was weakening as a mass movement with popular support. However, in each region there was a core of leftist intellectuals who were active politically. At least amongst Palestinians, many of these individuals and their groups inevitably sought to flirt with the Islamic Brotherhood. In Palestine, the Brotherhood basically called themselves Hamas. The idea among leftists was to coopt, influence, and take advantage of the almost universal appeal of the Islamic politics that at the time was unencumbered by theoretical foundations. So the idea was to tap into the mass appeal of these movements.
A former member of the Palestinian left now a religious identity once related to me that he hardly managed to attract an audience of a dozen in secular forums while at the mosque he can speak to hundreds each week. Apart from a certain level of social conservatism, Islamic groups either did not have well developed agendas dealing with important issues or naturally shared leftist aims and characteristics. Moreover, Sunni Islam shares the progressive characteristics tapped by Sayyed Mussa aS-Sader and at the same time Sunni Islam is born protestant, it has no hierarchy and it has been a grass roots movement from its inception.
By the mid 1990's the Brotherhood in Palestine had been infiltrated and arguably dominated by the left. There were problems in this regard. By integrating into Islamic movements these leftists had to accept and adopt the theological rhetoric and language of popular Islamism. I think that rhetoric is very important. It is particularly important for national liberation movements like Hamas. Adopting the rhetoric and language of Islamists tends to have a feedback effect. This surfaces in terms of the mechanisms for the emergence of new leadership. Those who are more adapt at justifying their actions based on the dominant Islamic rhetoric tend to do better and become leaders. It also surfaces in terms of the accountability of this leadership. Leaders become accountable to the dominant rhetorical framework. So if the rhetoric is pragmatism and is progressive where for instance the goals are of national liberation and the welfare of the dispossessed, then practical instruments measure leaders and their decisions. If the dominant rhetoric is religious mythology, then eventually those whose main skill is the articulation of the mythology become leaders and they become accountable to the framework of this mythology. Further, in cases where the religious mythology and its development are shared and owned by rich foreign powers, Saudi Arabia is one example, these things inevitably lead to opportunities for interference.
The case of Hamas remains complicated. It is dominated and influenced by the Palestinian intelligentsia, it is influenced by Hizbollah and its intellectuals, and occasionally the Saudis are able to affect it through religious instruments. Nevertheless, Hamas has emerged as distinctly anti-Saudist and one of the main targets of Saudi-US policy in the the Middle East.
* Humor best served with (**)
** My beloved Jabra Nicola's work has hardly been translated from Arabic or Hebrew.