The cry “What can we do to stop this?” comes up every time ISIS or some other group of Sunni Wahabist or neo-Wahabist types does an asymmetrical warfare move against the modern secular world: the Moscow theatre siege, the Charlie Hebdo murders, the Boston Marathon bombings. (Though maybe not the recent Russian airliner explosion, as Russian airliners aren’t exactly the paragons of safety that regularly-maintained US jets are.)
Here’s one thing we could do, and now is a good time to do it: stop assuming the Saudis are our friends.
In their quest to make Islam in particular and the world in general more Wahabist, the House of Saud’s members and their fellow travelers in Kuwait and Yemen have spent decades and billions (if not trillions) backing, tacitly and often directly, jihadists that have taken down, among other things, the once-flourishing and secular lefty Pan-Arab Socialist movements. Since the USG has a reflexively unthinking paranoia of anything to the left of Pat Buchanan, we were only too happy to help in this regard, especially if it meant directly tweaking the Soviets — and as is the case with things done largely out of fear of Soviet expansion, it’s come back to bite us in the ass. (The classic example: Arming the mujahdeen, the Saudi-backed jihadis who would later form the core of Al-Qaeda and repay our kindness with 9/11, so they could more quickly and efficiently kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan.)
Here, courtesy of the War Nerd, are a few examples you won’t see brought up in most mainstream US media:
The Middle East has been Saudi-ized while we looked on and laughed at those goofy Saudis who didn’t understand progress. No wonder they’re content to play dumb. If we took a serious look at them, they’d be terrifying.
And of all their many skills, the one the Saudis have mastered most thoroughly is disruption. Not the cute tech-geek kind of disruption, but the real, ugly thing-in-itself. They don’t just "turn a blind eye” to young Saudi men going off to do jihad—they cheer them on. It’s a brilliant strategy that kills two very dangerous birds with one plane ticket. By exporting their dangerous young men, the Saudis rid themselves of a potential troublemaker while creating a huge amount of pain for the people who live wherever those men end up.
Saudis have shipped money, sermons, and volunteers to Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Russia’s North Caucasus just as they’re doing now in Syria. It’s a package deal—to get the money, you have to accept the Wahhabism and the volunteers. And it works. The Saudi package is usually resented at first, like it was by the Afghans who were outraged to be told they were "bad Muslims” by Saudi volunteers.
But Afghan Islam has been Wahhabized over time. The same thing happened much more dramatically in Chechnya, where Saudi volunteers showed they were serious about war and religion, a nice change from the coopted quasi-Soviet imams the Chechens had known before. Saudis like Ibn al-Khattab, Abu al-Walid, and Muhannad (all noms de guerre) provided the only real jobs a young man could get in Chechnya, and in the process did a great job of miring the Chechens in an endless war that has killed something like 160,000 people while forcing Chechen women into Saudi-style isolation, eventually leaving Chechnya under the control of Ramzan Kadyrov, a second-generation death-squad commander who does most of the Kremlin’s killing for them. This is a typical Saudi aid result: A disaster for the recipients, the Chechens, and their enemies, the Russians, but a huge win for Saudi. Same thing is going on in the rest of Russia’s North Caucasus, especially in Dagestan, where the Boston Marathon bombers’ parents live.
And one aspect of that victory is the elimination of potentially troublesome young males who might have made trouble inside Saudi. Jihad is like the princess in those fairy tales: It draws all the daring young princes to undertake quests no underwriter would insure, and in the process gets them far away from home during their most aggressive years. Better yet from the Sauds’ POV, most of them die. The three biggest Saudi jihadis in Chechnya, Khattab, Walid, and Muhannad, all died violently. Khattab’s death, come to think of it, was genuine fairy-tale material: The Russians finally got him with a poisoned letter, impregnated with a toxin absorbed through the skin. That goddamn Umberto Eco stole the method for his Name of the Rose medieval pedantry-romp murder mystery.
The Saudis have managed to, in the space of a few decades, use their oil wealth and Euro-American fear of Communism to spread their own form of anti-secularism in places across the globe. Often, they did so by blaming Saudi-soil terror attacks by their own citizens on their most hated enemies, the Shia running Iran. (The 1996 Khobar Towers attack being a classic example. It took until 2007 for any USG official to publicly admit that it was done not by Iran, but by Saudi Sunni jihadis. As late as 2003 the NYT had to grovellingly apologize, with an incorrect “correction”, for daring to state this truth in an article.)
But their ability to cloud Western men’s minds with big wads of cash and other persuaders has diminshed somewhat of late. The Saudi connections to Wahabist jihadism just got too blatant for even Saudi money to conceal. (The prominence in Al Qaeda of Saudi citizen Osama bin Laden and other Saudi Wahabist veterans of the mujahdeen war against the Soviets was kind of a big hint.) Furthermore, the source of their power — namely, their oil wealth — is on the wane, and the key blow was in fact a move dictated by the advisors of King Salman, a little over a year ago: the decision to flood the world oil market with cheap crude. This move, intended to kill off competition to the Saudi oil empire, has dropped the cash flow coming into the Kingdom even as domestic demand for oil is rising and its expenses are mounting at an unprecedented rate. As Nafeez Ahmed, writing for Middle East Eye, states:
But Saudi Arabia’s spare capacity to pump like crazy can only last so long. A new peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering anticipates that Saudi Arabia will experience a peak in its oil production, followed by inexorable decline, in 2028 – that’s just 13 years away.
This could well underestimate the extent of the problem. According to the Export Land Model (ELM) created by Texas petroleum geologist Jeffrey J Brown and Dr Sam Foucher, the key issue is not oil production alone, but the capacity to translate production into exports against rising rates of domestic consumption.
Brown and Foucher showed that the inflection point to watch out for is when an oil producer can no longer increase the quantity of oil sales abroad because of the need to meet rising domestic energy demand.
In 2008, they found that Saudi net oil exports had already begun declining as of 2006. They forecast that this trend would continue.
They were right. From 2005 to 2015, Saudi net exports have experienced an annual decline rate of 1.4 percent, within the range predicted by Brown and Foucher. A report by Citigroup recently predicted that net exports would plummet to zero in the next 15 years.
Oh, and did I mention that the Kingdom has the world’s fourth-largest military in terms of cost? Only the US, China, and Russia — in that order — spend more on war than do the Saudis. (And the Saudis aren’t that far behind the Russians, either.) Currently that military is mired in Yemen, trying to finish off a bit of anti-Shia ethnic cleansing the House of Saud thought had long since been accomplished. Trying to crush the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, whose previous government was a Wahabist client state of the Kingdom’s, is proving a touch more difficult than paying off Chechen jihadis or ISIS troops fighting alongside Iraqi Sunni.
All of this means that it’s going to get a lot harder for Sunni jihadis to keep practicing what in essence has been de facto state-sponsored terrorism. Kurdish victories are cutting off ISIS access to both recruits and the cash needed to pay them. (Now, if the US wasn’t so determined not to offend Turkey’s current Saudi-friendly conservative Sunni rulers like Erdogan who are so determined to undo Kemal Ataturk’s secular grounding of that nation, we would be giving the Kurds all the support we currently are wasting, mujahdeen-in-Afghanistan style, on the various Sunni jihadist groups fighting Assad in Syria so they can replace his regime with yet another Sunni theocracy.)
The upshot of all of this is: Be patient, and don’t give in to the feeling of the moment. The power source of the thing we most fear has given itself a death-blow. The death throes will be ugly, make no mistake. But they are the last desperation-fueled acts of a dying movement, one which recently lost its most visible, “coolest” member in a very uncool, loserish manner unconductive to the making of proper martyrs. And the best thing we can do in my view is to step away from the power source of that movement and acknowledge it for what it is.
Read More