Chapter 7

THE SAUDIS ARE PART OF THE SOLUTION, NOT THE PROBLEM

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 seems to argue that the Saudi royal family are the real bad guys in the Arab world. When you consider Saudi Arabia’s history, that seems odd. Of all the Arab nations, Saudi Arabia has the greatest chance of bringing peace and stability to the region. Historically, the Saudis have been on our side more often than any other Arab nation. But when you look at them through the lens of lefty political correctness, it makes sense:

Elements of the Saudi royal family have a diplomatic, personal, and professional relationship with the Bush family. This is proof enough to many that they are evil.

Saudi Arabia’s economy is based on oil, which, as we all know, is evil.

Saudi Arabia’s leaders are devoutly religious, but they don’t hate America.

Guess what?

In the Islamic Middle East, repressive rule works; religious liberty doesn’t.

The Saudis have the right enemies: al Qaeda and Michael Moore.

September 11 was a plot against the Saudis too.

We couldn’t have beaten Communism without the Saudis.

The oil connection

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the largest and most lucrative partner of major U.S. oil companies in the world for seventy-five years. During that time, U.S. oil companies have prospered from the partnership, as have U.S. national interests. Since 1967, Saudi Arabia has been the world’s crucial “swing” producer of oil. That means it is the one country with such enormous and easily accessible oil reserves that it can affect global oil prices more than any other nation by increasing or decreasing production and sales.

From 1933 to 1973, Saudi oil flowed to the United States at bargain-basement prices. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Saudis joined forces with the shah of Iran (Richard Nixon’s favorite despot) to quadruple global oil prices. But even then, the Saudis did not use their huge new revenues to undermine or oppose the United States; they invested the lion’s share of the money in America.

In the 1980s, U.S.-Saudi relations became more important than ever. King Fahd took the throne in 1982 after the death of his brother King Khaled, but he had been the real power in the kingdom since the assassination of King Faisal in 1975. Fahd loved America and was convinced the Saudis needed U.S. protection from the Soviet Union, Iran, and other potential threatening powers. Fahd stepped up the already close cooperation with the Reagan administration to fund the mujahedin guerrillas who were fighting the Red Army to a standstill in Afghanistan. Saudi willingness to keep global oil prices low was also a major reason for the terminal crisis that toppled the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Soviets then (like Russia now) was dependent on profits from its oil and gas exports to stay afloat. The Saudi role in toppling communism was therefore arguably greater even than those of major U.S. allies like Britain, Germany, and Japan. They were friends when we needed them to be.

Local Boy Done Good

“In order to be a leader of men, a man has to receive an education in his own country, among his own people, and to grow up in surroundings steeped with the traditions and psychology of his countrymen. Not only did Western education not fulfill that condition, but it tended to wean a young man from the customs and traditions of his country.”

King Abdulaziz ibn Saud, as quoted by Charles Crane, 1931, and as cited by Ronald Lacey in The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud

In 2002, King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz changed the nation’s energy pricing policy: the Saudis became committed to stable higher oil prices rather than stable lower ones. They needed the extra money to buy prosperity (and thus peace and security) at home. The rising threat of Iran across the Gulf unnerved them. And with China’s thirst for oil growing by leaps and bounds, and Japan, South Korea, and India not far behind, the pressure to keep global prices high and output low was growing. But even then, the Saudis were determined not to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs: the health of the global economy.

The biggest bottleneck in global oil supplies is the dearth of oil refineries around the world, especially in the United States. Successive American administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, have blithely ignored this fact. Most major international oil companies have concentrated on paying their healthy profit margins to their shareholders; they haven’t invested in new refinery infrastructure. The only major exception to this rule in recent years has been Saudi-owned Aramco. Once again the Saudis turned out to be the responsible good guys, though you wouldn’t know it by listening to the fevered Left, who seem to think the Saudis are the only bad Arabs.

Saudi Arabia has, in absolute numbers, the largest and wealthiest middle class in the Arab world. A large, stable, propertied middle class is the essential prerequisite for any country’s successful transition to a healthy democracy in the long term. That was as true for England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it was for South Korea and Malaysia in the twentieth century.

It was obviously better for America when Texas was our chief source of oil, but our own endless thirst for “Texas tea” drank the Texas gushers dry. Suppose Saudi Arabia’s wells ran dry or the kingdom was torn apart. Who could replace it as the world’s next dominant “swing” producer?

There are only two real candidates: Iraq and Russia. Iraq has five enormous fields south of Baghdad that haven’t even begun to be developed yet. Russia under President Vladimir Putin is already the world’s number-two exporter of crude oil after the Saudis and the number-one exporter of natural gas and oil combined. And if you think the American people and the national interests of the United States would be better served by switching from the Saudis to the Kremlin or Baghdad, Michael Moore may love you, but nobody else will.

Michael Moore’s mania: The Saudis were behind September 11

This “Big Lie” worthy of Joseph Goebbels has probably been the most successful and destructive myth to come out of the September 11 atrocities. The simple and obvious truth is that Osama bin Laden, a renegade from one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest and most respected families, deliberately selected as many Saudi nationals as he could to hijack the four airliners and carry out the attacks because he wanted to destroy Saudi Arabia’s close ties with the United States. He came a lot closer to succeeding than most people realize.

It was true that up to September 11, the Saudis had complacently tolerated the most extreme anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments being taught in their mosques, and they took no efforts to crack down on them. Even after the attacks, this state of affairs continued for another year. The Saudis assumed that al Qaeda and similar groups would not attack them if they gave them no offense.

This policy was not unique to al Qaeda, and it did not mean the Saudis in any way sympathized with al Qaeda’s aims. After all, al Qaeda’s aims were very explicitly the destruction of the Saudi monarchy and its replacement with an extremist caliphate that controlled Saudi oil reserves and the two most holy places in the Muslim world, Mecca and Medina, both of which lie in Saudi territory.

But the Saudis wanted a quiet kingdom and were prepared to pay or look the other way in order to get it. September 11 should have been a wake-up call to the Saudi government to crack down on its own extremist preachers and on the danger of al Qaeda establishing itself in the desert kingdom. But for twenty months after the attacks, the Saudis were relatively blasé about the threat bin Laden posed to his own home country.

That changed on May 12, 2003, when nine al Qaeda suicide bombers attacked a Riyadh residential compound where Westerners were living, killing twenty-six people. Al Qaeda had shown its determination to topple Saudi Arabia. It proved to be a big mistake

Why separation of mosque and state is folly

To their credit, the Saudis, under the able energetic direction of King Abdullah, woke up fast. The way they handled the immediate threat from al Qaeda over the next four years has been almost ignored in the American media. But it is an object lesson in the sensible and successful ways in which Middle East Arab governments can defeat such murderous and nihilistic groups.

First, the Saudis recognized the need to tackle the problem at its source. They started monitoring sermons given in mosques throughout the kingdom by qadis, local religious leaders and preachers. Extreme Islamists who espoused al Qaeda’s wild goals or preached sedition against the Riyadh government were identified and removed from their positions. The worst ones were expelled from the country. The Saudis also instituted a gradual but increasingly effective policy of imposing state control over religious institutions and teachers of Islam to marginalize and discredit Islamist leaders. This policy was studied and copied with great success by Russian president Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Britain was the only major country that allowed radical Islamists to preach their extremism unmolested. The Saudis found themselves in the ironic position of privately asking, in vain, Prime Minister Tony Blair and the British security services to muzzle the radicals. On July 7, 2005, the British learned the price of not heeding the Saudis’ warnings.

The British weakness resulted from the wish to apply Western standards to the Muslim world—a widespread folly since September 11, and the same one the British had committed in their empire days. In Judeo-Christian countries, church and state ought to leave one another alone. After hundreds of years of wrangling, that is standard practice in the Christian West, and is thoroughly in accord with what Jesus taught in the gospels: render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. But Islam doesn’t leave the state alone, and so the state can’t leave it alone. In fact, the control of religious leaders, down to mosque level, has always been a traditional function of every Muslim government.

The Ottoman Empire specialized in controlling the mosques, which is why they held on so well for so long. When the naïve British didn’t kill or exile the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in the 1920s and 1930s, they allowed him to spread his doctrine of murderous violence. As the mufti was allowed to preach, the Palestinian Arab population concluded (not unreasonably) that the British approved of him. After the 2003 bombings, the Saudis didn’t make the same mistake.

The Saudis also unleashed their own domestic security services in ways that made the Bush administration’s domestic response to September 11 seem liberal and wimpy. And far from being corrupt, sympathetic to the terrorists, or incapable, the Saudi forces responded superbly.

How to fight Muslim terrorists: Build walls and monitor the mosques

Ignored by virtually the entire American domestic media, the Saudi security campaign against al Qaeda from 2002 through 2006 proved to be a total success, in marked contrast to the fiascos unfolding next door in Iraq.

In those years, to be promoted to the position of al Qaeda commander or director of operations in Saudi Arabia was a guaranteed death sentence. The Saudis killed half a dozen of them in a row.

By 2005, the Saudis were building state-of-the-art, high-tech security barriers along their borders with Yemen to the south and Iraq to the north-east. These systems were inspired by the success of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s security fence, which proved to be the decisive weapon in beating the bloody suicide bomber onslaught of the second Palestinian Intifada.

Also, albeit belatedly, the Saudis started to monitor and rewrite their own traditional school textbooks to remove passages that would give aid, comfort, and legitimacy to al Qaeda sympathizers.

It also helped that soaring oil prices in the first decade of the twenty-first century came as a new windfall for Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah’s 1999 accord with Iran to boost global oil prices had worked extremely well.

The Saudis and Arafat: From appeasement to realism

The original Saudi policy of accommodation toward al Qaeda was not admirable, but it was a far cry from eagerly supporting the terror group, let alone cooperating in its September 11 attacks on the United States. It was consistent with the decades-old Saudi policies of accommodation toward Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization.

For more than a quarter of a century, the Saudis paid the PLO huge sums of protection money so Arafat and his guerrillas would leave them alone. But even that policy didn’t last forever.

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein conquered Kuwait and looked poised to conquer Saudi Arabia, Arafat eagerly jumped on Saddam’s bandwagon and offered his support. The Saudis were furious, and they finally cut the PLO off and cracked down on its operations and fund-raising. Because Arafat was so cash-starved and weakened by this Saudi reaction, he put on a more moderate face and agreed to Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres’s proposals to enter the 1993 Oslo Peace Process.

Understanding the Saudis

In short, while sometimes short-sighted, the Saudis have nevertheless sided with the West more often than not. To fully understand the Saudi psyche requires, of course, delving into their history. For our purposes, we need only go back to World War I, when Saudi Arabia and the West became fully intertwined.

A little Saudi history: The myth of Lawrence of Arabia

T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, had an enormous impact on Western conceptions of the Arab world. He even advised Winston Churchill in drawing up what became the map of the modern Middle East at the Cairo Conference of 1921. But he was never the great benefactor and liberator of the Arab peoples his admirers made him out to be. He was a potentially talented archaeologist, a writer and self-dramatizer of extraordinary genius, and a wildly unstable individual with a bewildering variety of highly entertaining fetishes. He was, however, far from the prophet of the Arab Awakening he imagined himself to be, and he was a military genius only in his own dreams.

In his wonderful book Seven Pillars of Wisdom (best read as a highly colored work of pure fiction) Lawrence presents the Arab revolt in the desert as a national uprising ignored by the pedantic British authorities in Cairo but fanned by him. In his telling, it was the crucial episode of World War I in the Middle East, destroying all Ottoman power throughout the Arabian peninsula.

In reality, the revolt was made possible only by enormous British subsidies and bribes paid to the Hashemite family, led by Sherif Hussein, who was the hereditary guardian of the Muslim holy places in Mecca. But Sherif Hussein was despised and distrusted by the general population of the Hejaz, the Red Sea coast region of Arabia, and his writ never ran inside the desert vastness of the Arabian peninsula, where the dynamic young Abdulaziz ibn Saud was then already master of all he surveyed. The tribesmen Lawrence was able to bribe or buy, who agreed to work with him on behalf of the sherif and his sons, did carry out their famous raid on Aqaba. But this was a tiny sideshow militarily irrelevant to the huge clash of the British and Ottoman imperial armies of more than 70,000 men each in the 1917–1918 battles for Palestine.

In 1920, at the urging of British political officials, British military commanders quietly withdrew their forces from the Syrian capital of Damascus, in order to clear the way for its fictional liberation by Hashemite Arab forces. This was a clumsy attempt to undermine the French authorities from occupying Syria in accord with their previous agreements with Britain, and to foster the myth that the British were the champions of Arab nationalism while the French were its cruel enemies. The French treated the British ploy with contempt. A Pan-Arab congress did meet in Damascus in 1920 until the occupying French expelled it. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom , did more than any other single person to establish the myth that the British had evicted the Ottomans (thanks to the Arabs) and had then betrayed the nationalist movement they launched. This interpretation was eagerly adopted by generations of British anti-colonial intellectuals and was a leitmotif of the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House in London for around half a century, creating what the late historian Elie Kedourie called in a famous essay “The Chatham House Version” of modern Middle Eastern history.

Peter O’Toole Could Make Anyone Look Good

“Lawrence’s record, then, shows bravery in war, a great capacity for physical endurance, ingenuity as a guerrilla leader, and later some literary talent. But it also shows that he was self-centered, mercurial, and violently unstable.”

Elie Kedourie, “Colonel Lawrence and His Biographers,” in Islam in the Modern World

In reality, Arab nationalism grew in the great cities of Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, and it was fueled by a perfectly understandable and straightforward resentment of British and French occupation of the great territories of Egypt and what became modern Syria and Iraq.

Bin Laden on Saudi Arabia

Was the Saudi regime behind September 11? In contrast, Osama bin Laden founded al Qaeda as a reaction against Saudi Arabia’s pro-America leanings. Here’s an excerpt from an interview bin Laden did with CNN’s Peter Arnett in March 1997:

The Saudi regime is but a branch or an agent of the U.S. By being loyal to the U.S. regime, the Saudi regime has committed an act against Islam. And this, based on the ruling of sharia, casts the regime outside the religious community. Subsequently, the regime has stopped ruling people according to what Allah revealed, praise and glory be to Him, not to mention many other contradictory acts. When this main foundation was violated, other corrupt acts followed in every aspect of the country, the economic, the social, government services and so on.

Far from being a visionary prophet for the Arabs, Lawrence was a classic example of an alienated young adventurer who projected his own fantasies onto a foreign people he did not understand and who understandably had little time for him. He had zero effect on the history and growth of Arab nationalism.

Everything he did, for the most bizarre and selfish reasons, seemed to feed his legend. He abandoned his fame to serve as a humble airman in the British Royal Air Force under an assumed name. He got uneducated young airmen to whip him and to otherwise physically abuse him. He even had them write reports about his reactions to being tortured so that he could read them afterward. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935. Given the way he rode his bike at high speed through the narrow English country lanes, the only surprise was it had not happened years earlier. Needless to say, conspiracy theories eventually swirled around his demise. Had he lived, he might well have wrought more mischief and chaos with the schemes he would have whispered into Churchill’s ear during World War II. In the 1960s, a superb movie starring Peter O’Toole revived Lawrence’s allure. O’Toole was tall, amazingly handsome, and irresistible to the ladies. Lawrence was none of those things. He was short, coyly intellectual-looking with a large nose in an oval face, and found the female form repulsive.

His enduring reputation confirms the idea that old legends, like old soldiers, never die. But unlike old soldiers, legends like Lawrence’s don’t fade away; they just come back with more allure and fantasy than ever.

The Arab revolt that worked

The real Arab revolt was led by Abdulaziz ibn Saud. The contrasts between Ibn Saud and Lawrence, and with Lawrence’s icons Sherif Hussein of Mecca and his younger son Faisal, were profound. Ibn Saud was a real prince, a man of action and a warrior hero. With his family he fled Riyadh and went into exile when he was only a teenager. In the Arabian heartland, he showed political as well as military genius in merging his loyal Bedouin tribes with the Wahhabi purists of the Islamic faith. He led what amounted to both an Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist restoration movement. Its austerity, integrity, and sense of justice made it popular, and by 1914 he was the master of the Arabian heartland, a desert almost as large as India.

During World War I, Ibn Saud prudently steered clear of both the British and the Ottomans. He did not like or trust the secular Young Turk radicals who had seized control of the great empire in 1908, and though advised and subsidized by the British, he took his own course. In the 1920s, he completed his conquest of Arabia by sending his forces to capture the two holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

A Pillar of Wisdom

“Defeating guerrillas is like eating soup with a knife: it’s slow and messy.”

T. E. Lawrence

Mecca and Medina were run by Sherif Hussein, the British idol Sir Henry McMahon and Sir Ronald Storrs had so ardently wooed in their infamous and bungled 1915 McMahon-Hussein letters. And Lawrence and Gertrude Bell had worked so hard and so well to present Hussein’s son Faisal as a great warrior-prince and statesman to David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.

But in reality, Sherif Hussein was despised and resented as a repressive, greedy bumbler by his long-suffering subjects. Not only could the Hashemites not set the Arab Muslim world aflame against the Ottomans, but they could not even protect their own backyard. Sherif Hussein was sent packing by Ibn Saud in 1925 as his former subjects eagerly celebrated not their conquest but their liberation. By then, Churchill, at Lawrence and Bell’s urging, had created the kingdom of Iraq just for Hussein’s son Faisal. It did not prove to be a happy or wise decision. Meanwhile, the real power in Arabia was Ibn Saud’s.

The founding father

Ibn Saud built the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and unified its tribes through the imposition of puritanical Wahhabi Islam as a reaction to the allegedly cosmopolitan, corrupt, and decaying Ottoman caliphate in Constantinople. But it is a wild distortion to argue that traditional Saudi Wahhabism is equivalent to the Islamic radicalism that swept the Muslim world in the 1980s. The source of that later radicalism was Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran. Both Ibn Saud’s Wahhabist revolt and Khomeini’s Shiite revolt can be seen as the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation, but the latter was far more radical than the former.

Ibn Saud sat out both world wars but never showed the partiality for the Nazis that other Arab leaders (like Haj Amin al-Husseini, the commanders of the British-trained Iraqi army, and even Anwar Sadat) notoriously did. And he was implacable in his hatred of Communism as a diabolical revolutionary force. He felt the same way about Zionism, for that matter. But he was also throughout his life a great and appreciative friend of the United States. He loathed Jews, but he was appalled and disgusted by the Holocaust.

Ibn Saud built his kingdom not by destroying old values and ways but by restoring and cherishing them. He was the exemplar of a classic Bedouin sheikh. Many of the (true) stories told about him would fit characters like Jethro and Abraham in the Bible, or the first generation of Arab leaders after Muhammad. Unlike Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Ibn Saud never tried to destabilize or subvert neighboring nations. Western styles of parliamentary democracy were alien and ludicrous to him, but he carefully practiced the traditional desert Arab forms of mediation and consultation within his tribe and society. It is because his sons all have continued that practice over the five and a half decades since his death that Saudi Arabia, against so many predictions of doom to the contrary, has remained as stable and successful as it has.

King Faisal and the oil weapon

Faisal ibn Abdulaziz became king of Saudi Arabia in 1964. His ascent to the throne had not been ensured—except by his talent. He was one of Ibn Saud’s older sons, but not the heir apparent in the line of succession. But it was clear long before the death of his father in 1952 that he was the old man’s favorite. At Lake Success in 1947, the young Prince Faisal had led the Arab nations’ fierce opposition to the UN’s partition plan to create the State of Israel. Of all the desert kingdom’s rulers over the next sixty years, he would prove by far the most implacable in his opposition to the very existence of the Jewish state.

But when Faisal came to power, Saudi Arabia appeared to be in trouble. His useless brother King Saud ibn Abdulaziz had squandered the kingdom’s growing oil revenues while letting the consortium of U.S. oil companies in Aramco enjoy a free hand. Saudi Arabia appeared under threat from revolutionary Communist and Arab socialist subversion. The charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser was riding high across the entire region after defying the British and the French in 1956.

Conservative monarchies seemed to be toppling across the Middle East. Revolutionary regimes that wanted to overthrow the Saudi monarchy now existed on the country’s northern and eastern borders. The Iraqi monarchy had been mercilessly massacred by a military coup in 1958. Nasser was making Egypt the region’s military mini-superpower with Soviet weapons, and Syria was its ally. Faisal, devoutly Muslim and passionately loyal to the desert traditions of his Bedouin people and to the memory of his late father, seemed a ridiculous anachronism in the modern Arab world. Instead, he was about to transform it in his image.

Characters like Faisal’s ousted brother King Saud, the obese playboy King Farouk of Egypt, and King Faisal I of Iraq, the darling of T. E. Lawrence, Churchill, and Gertrude Bell, had led many Westerners and Communists to assume all hereditary Arab monarchs could be written off as weak and decadent. But the religiously devout Faisal was not. He was a quiet, methodical, and even shy workaholic who set about cleaning up the wrecked finances of his country and studying the terms of its relationship with the American oil companies. He was not given to grandiose, empty speeches like Nasser. He hated Communism with at least as much passion as he did Zionism. He proved a formidable enemy to both.

Un-PC History: Great Men Change the World

“It is not fashionable today to construct history around heroes. The anthropology, sociology, and economics of Arabia in the early years of this century should, in theory, explain how the disparate sheikhdoms, towns, and tribes of the peninsula came together to form this massive and extraordinary state. But they do not. The only satisfactory answer resides in the unique vision and skills of Abdulaziz himself.”

Ronald Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud

Faisal realized that the Hashemite line no longer posed any threat to oil-rich Saudi Arabia. The Hashemite royal house had been extinguished in Iraq, and King Hussein’s Jordan was too small to worry about. Indeed, Faisal realized the advantage of keeping Jordan in King Hussein’s cautious and responsible hands. That way Faisal could support Yasser Arafat and his young PLO against Israel, but also use Jordan as a buffer, preventing it from being another revolutionary bridgehead like Iraq, Syria, and Egypt.

Faisal was helped by world events. In 1967—the same epochal year that Israel smashed Nasser’s dreams and conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and the holy city of Jerusalem—the great oil reserves of Texas started to fall short. Faisal benefited from his vast experience as a diplomat serving his late father and as the most respected senior figure in the kingdom during the reign of his worthless brother. In return for richly funding the PLO in its guerrilla attacks against Israel and Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, he won immunity for his country from PLO troublemaking and subversion that afflicted Jordan and Lebanon. He authorized his oil ministers to start negotiating with Shah Reza Pahlavi, the autocratic dictator of Shiite Iran across the Persian Gulf, about coordinating their policies on fixing oil prices.

Sound Monarchies

“The important thing about a regime is not what it is called but how it acts. There are corrupt republican regimes and sound monarchies, and vice versa. . . . The quality of a regime should be judged by its deeds and the integrity of its rulers.”

King Faisal ibn Abdulaziz, quoted in Ronald Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud

After the death of Nasser in 1970, Faisal found his successor, Anwar Sadat, a welcome change. Sadat did not have Nasser’s grandiose ambitions to wreak revolution and havoc throughout the Arab world. Like Faisal, he was ready to work cooperatively with the Americans and was anti-Soviet. And he offered the only realistic Arab military option against Israel. The two men created a new Saudi-Egyptian axis that remains a key factor for stability in the Arab world today.

In 1973, when Sadat threw 80,000 Egyptian soldiers against Israel’s hollow shell of a defensive line on the east side of the Suez Canal, Faisal struck too. Over the following weeks, to the shock and then horror of the world, Saudi Arabia and Iran led Iraq, Indonesia, Venezuela, and the other main oil-producing nations in arbitrarily raising the price of oil. In a few months, they had quadrupled it.

Britain and France had fully withdrawn from the Middle East. The United States was exhausted and demoralized from the war in Vietnam. None of the major Western powers had either the military clout or the nerve to try to move against the key oil-producing nations, either by invasion or by fomenting a coup. Besides, Saudi Arabia and Iran were—supposedly—the United States’ main allies in the region. Nixon and Henry Kissinger had eagerly built up the shah of Iran as their regional policeman to keep the Soviets and Arab revolutionary regimes out of the Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields. The Saudis, however, had rightly judged that the shah was an unstable and unpredictable megalomaniac whom the Americans could not trust, and Faisal offered the shah a deal he couldn’t refuse: vastly increased oil revenues. The “oil weapon” was born.

Faisal did not hesitate to use it on a global scale. Threatened with the big stick of soaring oil prices, or having crucial oil supplies withheld, dozens of nations ended their diplomatic relations with Israel. Third World countries expelled Israeli development teams who were part of Prime Minister Golda Meir’s fatuous attempt to make Israel the leader of a new Third World power bloc. As the African nations fell obediently in line behind the Saudis, the United Nations was transformed overnight into a relentless global megaphone of rejection and hate against Israel and the United States. Faisal made no secret of his dark side. He was not just implacably anti-Zionist and devoted to the annihilation of Israel, but equally anti-Semitic. He believed the ancient, long-discredited “blood libel” that Jews killed Muslim and Christian children and used their blood to bake Passover matzos. He believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged Jewish plot to conquer the world concocted by the Okhrana, the czarist Russian secret police. Hitler had used the Protocols as one of his justifications for the Holocaust, and historian Norman Cohn rightly called it a “warrant for genocide.” Faisal enthusiastically gave copies of it to his visitors as gifts.

Faisal was, as it turned out, far ahead of his time in championing a revived pan-Arab movement based on religious extremism. He dramatically stepped up funding of madrassas, Islamic religious schools, across the Islamic world. He was not typical of his successors, but he set Saudi policy along fateful paths that his successors did not dare to change.

There is no telling how much further Faisal might have gone. Would he have made common cause with Ronald Reagan to bring the Soviet Union down, as his successors did? He might have—or he might have refused because of Reagan’s strong support for Israel. He might well have made common cause instead with Ayatollah Khomeini after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The prospect of Saudi Arabia and Iran united in implacable opposition to the United States and Israel could have transformed the world in the early 1980s, and not for the better.

But on March 25, 1975, at a majlis, a traditional gathering of Saudi royals, where even the most obscure and junior members were granted access and allowed to present their grievances and concerns, King Faisal was shot dead. He fell victim not to a Communist, Nasserite, or extreme Islamist revolutionary, but to his own nephew, a mentally deranged drug addict who had hung out in California. The killer was convicted of regicide and beheaded three months later.

Saudi Arabia’s three threats

King Faisal was followed by King Khaled (1975–1982), King Fahd (1982–2005), and King Abdullah (acting as crown prince and regent, 1995–2005). During these years, Saudi Arabia regarded the three greatest threats to its existence as a revolutionary Iran, an aggressive or unstable Iraq, and Islamic radicalism.

Saudi attitudes toward Iran had fluctuated wildly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, finally culminating in fear of the radical Shiites, which pushed the kingdom into the arms of Ronald Reagan. Like the United States, the Saudis under King Fahd financed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran until 1988. When, however, Saddam swallowed Kuwait in July 1990, the terrified Saudi leaders realized they could very easily be next. Relations with the United States became even closer, and Saudi Arabia became the marshalling yard for the U.S-led 700,000 strong allied army—the greatest ever gathered in the Middle East—that smashed Saddam’s military power in the 1991 Gulf War.

Relations with the United States slowly deteriorated during the Clinton years, however. It didn’t help when cautious and tactful Warren Christopher was replaced as secretary of state in Clinton’s second term by in-your-face, pro-democracy Madeleine Albright. Also, King Fahd was slowly dying, and by the late 1990s, effective power in the kingdom had passed to his brother Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz. While cautiously pro-American, Abdullah was much more traditional and incorruptible than Fahd. He lost confidence in Clinton and Albright and was concerned about the financial effect of plummeting global oil prices on the kingdom’s fiscal stability. He also noted that Iran had elected its most moderate leader since before the 1979 revolution, Mohammad Khatami. So in 1999 Saudi Abdullah concluded an oil production limiting and price-control agreement with Iran. The two giants quickly showed they still had the clout within OPEC, given the right circumstances, to make a difference. Over the next four years, oil prices trebled from around ten dollars a barrel to more than thirty. It seemed like a lot of money at the time.

Saudi Arabia vs. the Terrorists

“Al Qaeda underestimated the efficacy of Saudi intelligence and security forces and their ability to adapt to new types of threat and attack. While ordinary police were not equipped to deal with the new threat, Saudi intelligence was able to accurately identify those militants who comprised the twenty-six most-wanted list as leaders of al Qaeda relatively quickly, and the security services were able to hunt down and disrupt most of the cells they headed.”

Anthony Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid, of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia: Asymmetric Threats and Islamist Extremists,” 2005

Harry St. John Philby: The Anti-Lawrence

T. E. Lawrence was a romantic dreamer who acted out his crazed fantasies. But the unsung giant of the Middle East of Lawrence’s time was Harry “Jack” Philby. Philby was another Englishman gone native, but unlike Lawrence, who embraced the unpopular and ineffectual Hashemite family, he befriended Abdulaziz ibn Saud and became the highly influential advisor to the real power in the Arabian desert. In the early 1930s, to his vast personal gain, he helped negotiate between Ibn Saud and Standard Oil of California, granting the company the prospecting concession for oil in the eastern part of the kingdom. Philby turned his back on England and converted to Islam (and accepted its requirement of circumcision) in middle age. His son Kim, who worked for the British secret service, became even more infamous than his father, serving as a spy for the Soviet Union for a quarter-century until he defected there in 1963.

If nothing else, Jack Philby was a realist. He did not try to impose his own vision on the Middle East but clearly recognized its winners and losers and the crucial importance of oil. He served his master Ibn Saud loyally and well, and in the process, served the national interests of the United States superbly. He died a wealthy man, in his own bed, at a ripe old age.

As Ronald Lacey notes in his book The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud, “There was much that was noble, little that was gracious, about Harry St. John Philby. That was probably why he got on so well with the Arabs.”

President Khatami served two terms in power, but his successor in 2005 was a very different kind of man. King Abdullah met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, according to Saudi sources, quickly became alarmed at how irrational and unpredictable he could be. It was a good argument for stabilizing relations with the United States.

Unfortunately for the Saudis, from their point of view, the United States wasn’t acting cautiously or responsibly in the Middle East either, after the 2003 Iraq War and the ousting of Saddam Hussein. They were privately happy to see Saddam gone, but they knew from firsthand experience that Western liberal democracy doesn’t work in their part of the world.

The Saudis were also very wary of Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite feud spilling into their own country. Popular opinion among Sunni Muslims in Saudi Arabia was strongly engaged on the side of the Sunnis in Iraq. But oil-rich Dhahran is home to many Shiites, perhaps even a majority. The Saudis responded by building a massive, costly security barrier on their northern border.

The Saudis had an even more immediate concern. By 2006, the U.S. military was noting an increasing number of young Saudis active in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, particularly in the ranks of the suicide bombers. This identification was predictable, but it frightened the Saudis. Saudi support for the anti-Communist mujahedin in Afghanistan had produced bin Laden, al Qaeda, September 11, and the 2003 bombings in Saudi Arabia. The Iraq civil war threatened to produce a far larger number of radicalized Saudis committed to toppling their own government. So the Saudis cracked down on the radical religious teachers within their own borders. While trying to seal their northern borders, they also tried to seal their southern border with Yemen, whence an estimated 400,000 people a year were trekking north for a better life. The Saudis, suspecting radical elements in impoverished Yemen were infiltrating their kingdom, acted to shut them down by building another security fence.

The Saudi monarchy will always have its own national interests, but the interests of a conservative monarchy are much more likely to align in the future, as they have in the past, with America’s desire for a stable, non-Communist, non-radical Middle East. And if we will take the Saudis’ advice, conservative, tradition-minded monarchies are a better bet for the future of a pro-Western Middle East than are Islamic democracies and the Islamists they might elect.