Policy makers of the United States declared two years ago there were 'no good terrorists' or 'bad terrorists'; no 'our terrorists' or 'their terrorists'. All terrorists were bad. That was when Washington needed the help of all the good people in the world to avenge the attack on the twin towers.
So a vengeful US bombed Kabul, Kandahar and the Hindukush, and routed the Taliban who still carried US-made Stinger missiles which their elders had got free of cost to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Then it bombed and combed Baghdad and Basra where weapons of mass destruction were allegedly concealed.
Osama bin Laden and his followers are proponents of the Wahabbi sect, which, say US think-tanks, was nurtured and given legitimacy by the ruling family of Saudi Arabia.
Terror-masters Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are yet to be caught, weapons of mass destruction are yet to be found, but the oil sources of Iraq and the oil route to the east through Afghanistan have been secured. Now what?
Washington's attention is now turning to Saudi Arabia, the largest known source of oil and unknown source of terror funds. Laser designators, which direct plane-dropped bombs to fall precisely on target, may never be turned on the kingdom, but it may get scalded in the political heat. There may never be a hot war against Saudi Arabia as long as the royal family behaves. But it may have to pay a heavy price.
That Saudi Arabia was the ultimate target was clear even in the days when the US was only planning to bomb Baghdad. Months before the war on Iraq began, US think-tanks had been studying and publishing papers on how the Saudi oil earnings were being channelled to Islamic terrorists. The most comprehensive one was prepared by New York's prestigious Council of Foreign Relations, which was released in October 2002, almost six months before the war against Iraq started. The paper squarely blamed Saudi Arabia as the source of terror funds.
The US had been aware of Islam's anger with it even before the September 11 attack, but had ascribed that to its support for Israel. The anger had been kept under control by appeasing Sunni Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, or at least their ruling elite. So after flashing the oil weapon once in the 1970s, these states emerged as the greatest protectors of US interests in the west Asian region, especially against the attempts of the godless communist Soviet Union to make inroads.
It was then that the Shia awakening took place, manifesting through the Iranian revolution, toppling the US-friendly Shah regime. Shia Islam was now perceived to be America's enemy, and the Sunni-Wahhabis were friends. Thus, the Saudis and even the Sunni clique around Saddam Hussein which ruled Shia-majority Iraq were appeased, as a leverage against the rising power of Shi'ite Iran. It was during this time that the US went out of its way to help Saddam in his war against Iran.
The US attack on Iraq was also meant to take control of Saddam's large oil reserves and progressively weaken the stranglehold of the Saudis on the global energy market.
Similarly, the Afghan mujahideen, mostly Sunnis, were armed to rout the Soviets. Even the rise of the Taliban, again a Sunni phenomenon, was initially considered a development that could further US interests. The US companies even explored the possibility of building oil and gas pipelines through Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The September 11 attack changed all that. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the 19 hijackers, were Saudi Arabian nationals. Suddenly the US discovered that the Sunnis, especially the Wahhabis, were a larger threat than the Shias. Also, by then, the Iranian Shias had got over their 'revolutionary immaturity' and settled down to rule a stable state.
Once the Taliban had been routed and a US-friendly regime installed in Afghanistan, the US began to address the larger problem of Islamic terrorism. It was during this time that the think-tanks got active on the Saudi front, publishing scores of papers.
But confronting the Saudis head on would have been foolhardy. For one, the Saudi-led OPEC could just starve the world of energy. Two, the Saudis enjoyed a special place in the Islamic world as the custodians of Islam's holiest places.
The first attempt then had to be to weaken Saudi Arabia's stranglehold on the global energy market. That could be done by taking control of the next largest reserves, those in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The most visible trend in the think-tank papers was that virtually all of them hinted or openly announced that Islam and oil made a combination lethal to American interests. To cite a few examples, the prestigious Foreign Affairs published in March-April 2002 an article by Edward Morse of Hess Energy Trading Company and James Richard of Firebird Management on how oil-rich Russia could be brought around to break the OPEC cartel dominated by Saudi Arabia. Former CIA director James Woolsey argued how releasing USA's strategic petroleum reserves could unsettle the Saudis and how "the Wahhabis are more given to lopping off limbs and heads-and smashing passenger aircraft into skyscrapers." Such papers laid the intellectual groundwork. Though not read by ordinary Americans, the US think-tank papers are widely circulated among governments, diplomats, strategic thinkers and policy-makers across the globe.
Thus, long before the US launched the first Tomahawk against Baghdad, it was clear that the ultimate target was Saudi Arabia. For, only by securing Iraq's oil, and thus ensuring the world's energy security, could the Saudi-led cartel be tackled.
The dirty word in the post-Saddam world, as far as the US is concerned, is Wahhabism, a radical sect among the Sunnis. The word has suddenly gained currency in the think-tank literature. A recent article in a US newspaper by Senators Jon Kyl and Charles Schumer (the former is chairman of Senate judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and government information, and the latter a member of the judiciary committee) alleged that "upon its establishment as the nation's ruling family, the House of Saud forged an alliance with the radical Wahhabi sect of Islam. The deal that was struck gave the House of Saud control over political and foreign policy, while the Wahhabis would be free to take charge of religious and cultural institutions".
The House of Saud has been ruling Saudi Arabia for decades now, protecting US interests, but only now has the senate subcommittee got "findings [that] were alarming" such as "Wahhabism is an extremist, exclusionary form of Islam that not only denigrates other faiths but also marginalises peaceful followers of Islam".
Wahhabism, according to the senators, "uses mosques and schools, called madrasas, to indoctrinate mostly young people with a hatred of Jews, Christians and traditional Muslims who reject this radicalism. Its goals are world domination and the destruction of its enemies. Osama bin Laden is a follower of Wahhabism. So were all 19 of the September 11 hijackers". The sin of the Saudis, according to the senators, is that they "conferred dangerous legitimacy on the Wahhabi sect".
All the same, most analysts do not believe that there will be a hot war with Saudi Arabia or even a regime change. The regime may be allowed to continue if it cuts down on madrasa funding and gives a better account of where its oil-dollars are going.
There are some who also believe that there could be a simultaneous attempt to ease the Saudis' control over Islam's holy sites. Much of the prestige that the Saudis enjoy today in the Islamic world is thanks to their status as the custodians of these places. "The next argument could be that Islam's holy sites should belong to the entire Islam and no state should be allowed to be their sole custodian," said a policy analyst in Delhi. "A move like this could get even the support of Saudi Arabia's rivals who are jealous of the Saudi house strutting around as the keepers of the Ka'aba."
Many in the policy-making circles in India believe that the US attempt now is to free Islam's holiest centres from the hold of the Saudis, and entrust them to perhaps a consortium of US-friendly clerics from all over the Islamic world.
With that would be gone the prestige enjoyed by the Saudis as the keeper of Ka'aba. And this is what the House of Saud dreads.
