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The terrible legacy of the man who failed the world
<br>
<br>By Robert Fisk - 02 August 2005
<br>
<br>http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article303129.ece
<br>
<br>
<br>http://www.selvesandothers.org/article10657.html
<br>
<br>So the old man will be buried this afternoon on the
<br>edge of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in a desert
<br>graveyard of no memorials.
<br>
<br>The strict Wahhabi tradition - to which, of course,
<br>that far more famous Saudi, Osama bin Laden, belongs -
<br>demands no statues, no gravestones, no slabs. So Fahd
<br>will be laid in the desert sand, his head touching the
<br>earth, covered over and left for the after-life. Not a
<br>single stone will mark his place.
<br>
<br>Would that some of our own great leaders would suffer
<br>such humility - if less ostentatiously so - on their
<br>deaths.
<br>
<br>King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has died after 22 years on
<br>the throne. His successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, will
<br>formally take his place tomorrow.
<br>
<br>But the old king really died in 1995, when an embolic
<br>stroke disabled him, paralysed his mind, befuddled his
<br>senses - the 84-year-old Keeper of the Two Holy Places
<br>would often ask servants to pour coffee for Muslim
<br>guests during Ramadan - when drinking and eating is
<br>forbidden in the hours of daylight.
<br>
<br>In effect, his half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah has
<br>been "king" since then and, now aged 82, is still, as
<br>the cliché goes, "clinging to power". Another
<br>half-brother - and all these half-brothers reflect the
<br>Bedouin background of the Saudi monarchy - Prince
<br>Sultan Abdul Aziz, will be the new crown prince. And
<br>he is already 81.
<br>
<br>Those who claim the Saudi royal family is led by
<br>sclerotic old men have a point - but perhaps they do
<br>not go far enough. Like the massive Muslim oil nation
<br>to the north, Iran, Saudi Arabia has become a
<br>necrocracy: government by, with and for the dead.
<br>
<br>For years, we had been saying that Fahd would die - at
<br>his massive family palace in Andalusia (he knew, of
<br>course, that this was once part of a fine Arab empire)
<br>or on his gorgeous, preposterous, jet airliners, their
<br>interiors designed to look like Arab tents, or just in
<br>that hideously famous swimming pool. He suffered from
<br>pneumonia and a high fever, officials would insist.
<br>Anything else was "malicious speculation" - which
<br>meant that it was all true.
<br>
<br>This was the man, however, who had funded the Arab
<br>legions against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
<br>1979 when, as we know, Bin Laden took the role of
<br>"prince" because Fahd’s real princes, including 7,000
<br>official and unofficial ones, preferred the bars of
<br>Monaco or the whores of Paris to drawing the sword for
<br>the religion in whose lands stood their greatest
<br>shrines, Mecca and Medina.
<br>
<br>And it was this same Fahd who brought down upon the
<br>Arab Gulf - and eventually upon the Americans - the
<br>wrath of Bin Laden and his al-Qa’ida, by asking the US
<br>to send troops to protect the land of the Prophet
<br>after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. And
<br>his fate might have been to have died in an
<br>assassination before; but it’s difficult to murder an
<br>already dead man.
<br>
<br>This was the king who had poured his vast coffers into
<br>Saddam Hussein’s war chest against Iran, studiously
<br>saying nothing about the gassing of up to 60,000
<br>Iranian soldiers and civilians during that conflict,
<br>in the hope that the Beast of Baghdad (our friend at
<br>the time, needless to say) would overthrow that far
<br>more terrible beast, the revolutionary Ayatollah
<br>Ruhollah Khomeini.
<br>
<br>When Saddam arrived in Kuwait, Fahd wrote him a
<br>letter, reminding him of how much the Saudis had
<br>contributed to his brutal war against Iraq. "Oh Ruler
<br>of Iraq," Fahd wrote, "the Kingdom extended to your
<br>country $25,734,469,885. 80 cents." Analysing that
<br>sum, I once calculated the figure issued by Fahd
<br>courtiers was out by a dollar and a cent. By contrast,
<br>Fahd’s bankers calculated they spent $27.5bn on paying
<br>for America’s liberation of Kuwait - slightly more
<br>than they paid to Saddam.
<br>
<br>It was Fahd and the Pakistanis who had, on America’s
<br>behalf, helped to arm the militias of Afghanistan
<br>against the Soviet Union and - disgusted by the
<br>victors’ feuding - supported Mullah Omar’s Wahhabi
<br>army of self-righteous peasant clerics, the Taliban.
<br>Under Fahd, the kingdom poured millions into the
<br>madrassas in Pakistan which have made the news again
<br>following 7 July. The Taliban (like some of the London
<br>suicide bombers) were an authentic product of
<br>Wahhabism, the strict, pseudo-reformist Islamist state
<br>faith of Saudi Arabia founded by the 18th cleric
<br>Mohamed Ibn Abdul-Wahab.
<br>
<br>Journalists like to claim that Wahhabism is
<br>"obscurantist" but it is not true. Abdul-Wahab was not
<br>a great thinker or philosopher but, for his followers,
<br>he was a near-saint. Waging war on fellow Muslims who
<br>had erred was an obligatory part of his philosophy,
<br>whether they be the "deviant" Shia Muslims of Basra -
<br>whom he vainly attempted to convert to Sunni Islam
<br>(they chucked him out) - or Arabians who did not
<br>follow his own exclusive interpretation of Muslim
<br>unity. But he also proscribed rebellion against
<br>rulers. His orthodoxy threatened the modern-day House
<br>of Saud because of its corruption, yet secured its
<br>future by forbidding revolution. The Saudi ruling
<br>family thus embraced the one faith which could protect
<br>and destroy it.
<br>
<br>Which is why all the talk in modern Saudi Arabia of
<br>"cracking down on terror", protecting women’s rights,
<br>lessening the power of the religious police, is so
<br>much hokum.
<br>
<br>Saudi Arabia’s role - under Fahd’s nominal leadership
<br>- in the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity has
<br>still not been fully explored. While senior members of
<br>the royal family, especially the then Crown Prince
<br>Abdullah, who was never as convinced of America’s
<br>foreign policy wisdom in the Middle East as Fahd,
<br>expressed the obligatory shock and horror that was
<br>expected of them, no attempt was made to examine the
<br>nature of Wahhabism and its inherent contempt for all
<br>representation of human activity or death.
<br>
<br>The destruction of the two giant Buddhas of Bamian by
<br>the Taliban in 2000 - along with the vandalism in the
<br>Kabul museum, fit perfectly into the theocratic
<br>wisdom. So too, it might be argued did the Twin Towers
<br>of the World Trade Centre.
<br>
<br>In 1820, the much-worshipped statues of Dhu Khalasa,
<br>dating from the 12th century, were destroyed by
<br>Wahhabis. Only weeks after the Lebanese Professor
<br>Kamal Salibi suggested in the late 1990s that
<br>once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia might
<br>have constituted the location of the Bible, Fahd sent
<br>bulldozers to destroy the ancient buildings in these
<br>towns.
<br>
<br>Saudi religious authorities have destroyed hundreds of
<br>historic structures in the name of religion in Mecca
<br>and Medina, and former UN officials have condemned the
<br>bulldozing of Ottoman buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi
<br>aid agency backed by the Fahd government which claimed
<br>they were "idolatrous".
<br>
<br>So all the talk of "restive" princes, of potential
<br>rivalries between the half-brothers now that Fahd is
<br>dead has a kind of pseudo-importance to it. Saudi
<br>Arabian society is not - and cannot be - a "modern"
<br>society in our sense of the word as long as Wahhabism
<br>holds its power. But it must be allowed to do so - to
<br>protect the king. And since it increasingly becomes a
<br>poor country, the Wahhabi authorities and the
<br>religious police grow stronger.
<br>
<br>And as we depend ever more on the Saudis to pump oil,
<br>we are ever more silent about what is wrong in the
<br>kingdom. Our policy towards Saudi Arabia is now
<br>exactly what it was in Iran before the fall of the
<br>Shah in 1979.
<br>
<br>When he was governor of Riyadh, Prince Sultan,
<br>according to that brilliant American journalist
<br>Seymour Hersh, was once heard to say on a US telephone
<br>intercept that King Fahd didn’t know what was
<br>happening during an international flight. "He’s a
<br>prisoner of the plane," he remarked. "Like all the
<br>Saudi royal family."
<br>
<br>The Crown Prince who becomes King at last
<br>
<br>Crown Prince Abdullah now formally takes on a role
<br>that he has served de facto for nearly a decade. The
<br>half-brother of King Fahd, Prince Abdullah has become
<br>the face of the kingdom.
<br>
<br>He served as commander of the National Guard for 30
<br>years before taking over day-to-day affairs of state
<br>after his half-brother Saud’s strokes in 1995 and
<br>1996.
<br>
<br>Diplomats said they did not expect major changes in
<br>Saudi foreign or oil policy under Abdullah who talks
<br>quietly, with a stutter, but is described as imposing
<br>and statesmanlike.
<br>
<br>There are 30 surviving sons of the late King
<br>Abdul-Aziz, who founded Saudi Arabia in 1932. But with
<br>only half-brothers in the royal family, diplomats say
<br>the octogenarian Abdullah’s power has limits. Fahd has
<br>six full brothers who wield great influence and can
<br>band together at family meetings.
<br>
<br>His crackdown on al-Qa’ida suicide bombers in 2003 who
<br>aimed to topple the House of Saud was unprecedented.
<br>
<br>www.independent.co.uk <b on></b><!-- 54 -->
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