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During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, many “Saudis were mortified by the need to turn to Christians and Jews to defend the holy land of Islam,” observed Lawrence Wright in his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The Gulf War highlighted the contradictions between Saudi Arabia’s Islamic sectarianism and the country’s mutual interests with non-Muslims globally in peace and prosperity, which 9/11 made only clearer 25 years ago.
The practical defense of Saudi Arabia with its globally vital oil reserves became urgent after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s military overran Saudi Arabia’s neighbor Kuwait at the beginning of August 1990. Wright detailed the Saudi kingdom’s strategic nakedness in the face of powerful neighbors like Iraq. “As the richest country in the region, surrounded by envious neighbors, Saudi Arabia was also the most anxious,” he wrote.
The small population figure in Saudi Arabia’s first census in 1969 so shocked King Faisal that he simply doubled the number. Cooked census books subsequently became a standard feature of Saudi records. In 1990, Saudi Arabia claimed more than 14 million people, nearly equal to Iraq’s population, but Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud privately estimated just over 5 million Saudis.
To compensate for such weakness, Wright wrote,
the Saudi government spent billions of dollars on weapons, buying the most sophisticated equipment on the market from the United States, Britain, France, and China and further enriching members of the royal family with lucrative kickbacks. In the 1980s the Kingdom built a $50 billion air-defense system; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers moved its foreign headquarters from Germany to Saudi Arabia in order to construct bases, schools, and headquarters complexes for the Saudi army, air force, navy, and National Guard.
Saudi Arabia “had the weapons; all it lacked was training and troops—an actual army, in other words,” Wright concluded. The entire Saudi army numbered only 58,000, while Iraq, with the world’s fourth-largest army, had nearly a million men and 5,700 tanks, not counting reserve and paramilitary formations. Moreover, Hussein’s “Republican Guards included the most fearsome and well-trained divisions in the Middle East.”
After Saudi King Fahd personally attempted to mediate between Hussein and the Kuwaiti government on July 31, 1990, the Iraqi army occupied Kuwait on August 2. Shocked, the Saudi royal family forced the government-controlled media to delay announcing the conquest for a week. Wright noted that
suddenly all that stood between Saddam Hussein and the Saudi oil fields was a few miles of sand and the superbly equipped but cowed and undermanned Saudi military. One battalion of the Saudi National Guard—fewer than a thousand men—guarded the oil fields.
Given this intolerable threat to Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, a strategic source of oil for the global economy, the administration of President George H. W. Bush acted decisively to defend against further Iraqi aggression. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and an advisory team, including General Noman Schwarzkopf, flew to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Armed with satellite images showing massive Iraqi troop concentrations in Kuwait and near the Saudi border, the team sought to persuade the Saudi king to accept the deployment of American and other foreign troops in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile the Saudis had intelligence reports of several Iraqi reconnaissance teams already across the Saudi border.
Such reports would have particularly worried Saudi intelligence chief Turki. Previously he had been one of the few Saudi princes to warn of Hussein’s threat to Saudi Arabia (a view shared by Osama bin Laden). He had made over the years several covert operation proposals to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the Iraqi dictator, all rejected.
Turki was vacationing in Washington, DC, when the Kuwait invasion occurred. The White House summoned him while in a theater watching Die Hard 2 and he spent the rest of the night at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, helping to coordinate Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait. Turki believed, Wright noted, “if Saddam were allowed to stay in Kuwait, he would enter the Kingdom at the slightest provocation.”
Popular perceptions of Saddam Hussein and Saudi Arabia in the Arab world only accentuated the kingdom’s sense of peril. Before the Kuwait invasion Hussein had developed a following among Arabs, Wright observed:
Much of the Arab world was elated by Saddam’s anti-Western rhetoric and his threats to “burn half of Israel” with chemical weapons. He was especially popular in Saudi Arabia, which maintained cordial relations with its northern neighbor.
Saudi Arabia’s position only seemed to worsen after Hussein’s Kuwait invasion. In Wright’s words,
after years of paying billions of dollars to cultivate the friendship of neighboring countries, the royal family was stunned to discover how isolated it was in the Arab world. The Palestinians, Sudanese, Algerians, Libyans, Tunisians, Yemenis, and even the Jordanians openly supported Saddam Hussein.
Under the circumstances, Saudi Arabia’s need for foreign soldiers was manifest, yet Islamic doctrine posed hurdles. A hadith or canonical tradition recounts Islam’s prophet Muhammad saying on his deathbed, “Let there be no two religions in Arabia.” “The meaning of this remark has been disputed ever since it was uttered,” Wright noted:
Prince Turki argued that the Prophet meant only that no other religion should dominate the peninsula. Even during the Prophet’s lifetime, he pointed out, Jews and Christians were traveling through Arabia. It was not until 641 C.E., the twentieth year of the Muslim calendar, that Caliph Omar began removing the indigenous Christians and Jews from some parts of Arabia.
Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia have since then prohibited non-Muslims, but this limited exclusion zone is insufficient for pious Muslims like Osama bin Laden. “They believed that the Prophet’s deathbed injunction is clear: All non-Muslims should be expelled from the entire peninsula,” Wright specified.
Bin Laden therefore wrote the Saudi king to implore his rejection of American protection and correspondingly lobbied senior princes. Under the circumstances, the Saudi royal family debated the best policy choice, with Crown Prince Abdullah cautioning against admitting the Americans, fearing they would never leave. Cheney, though, won over the king with the promise that American forces would leave as soon as any threat to Saudi Arabia ended or the king demanded their evacuation.
“Nonetheless,” Wright analyzed,
recognizing the danger that the foreign troops posed to their legitimacy, the Saudi government pressed the clergy to issue a fatwa endorsing the invitation of non-Muslim armies into the Kingdom on the excuse that they were defending Islam. This would give the government the needed religious cover.
Confronted by an angry Bin Laden for their ruling, many senior clerics replied that they dare not challenge the Saudi monarchy.
Along with several Afghan mujahideen commanders and Saudi veterans who had fought alongside him in Afghanistan against the Soviets, bin Laden presented his alternative defense strategy to the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. In “a bizarre and grandiose replication of General Schwarzkopf’s briefing,” Wright wrote, bin Laden used maps, diagrams, and charts to indicate the trenches and sand traps the Saudi Binladen Group construction conglomerate would create. The jihadist would also raise in three months an army of 100,000 men from Afghanistan veterans and unemployed Saudi youth. When bin Laden approached Turki with this plan, he “was taken aback by the naivete of the young Afghan veteran,” Wright recounted.
Instead, “half a million American GIs streamed into the Kingdom, creating what many Saudis feared would be permanent occupation,” Wright noted. These Americans and their coalition allies deployed “mainly outside the cities in order to stay out of view,” especially given the many women soldiers who only increased Saudi discomfort. Wright summarized:
The weakness of the Saudi state and its abject dependence on the West for protection were paraded before the world thanks to the 1,500 foreign journalists who descended on the Kingdom to report on the buildup to the war. For such a private and intensely religious people, with a press that had been entirely under government control, the scrutiny was disorienting—at times both shameful and exhilarating. There was a combustible atmosphere of fear, outrage, humiliation, and xenophobia.
Rather than “rallying behind their imperiled government, many Saudis saw this as a one-time-only opportunity to change it,” Wright marveled. “At this awkward moment in Saudi Arabia’s history, with the world peering through the windows, Saudi progressives were sufficiently emboldened to press their modest agenda.” A December 1990 reform petition, for example, requested the abolition of tribal-based discrimination, the establishment of a shura advisory council to the king, more press freedom, government reforms, and oversight over religious fatwas.
Meanwhile in November 1990, 47 women challenged the kingdom’s informal female driving ban with what Wright called “a defiant fifteen-minute spin” in the capital of Riyadh, provoking a quick crackdown. The Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, instantly banned women drivers and Saudi Arabia’s chief cleric, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, called female motoring a source of depravity in a fatwa. The protesters lost their passports, and several of them also forfeited their professorships at King Saud University’s women’s college after their own female students protested instruction by “infidels.”
In February 1991, 400 religious scholars, judges, and professors from the Saudi religious establishment responded in this culture war with a “Letter of Demands.” The signers demanded strict, thoroughgoing societal sharia conformity (e.g. a ban on interest), an Islamic army created through universal military training, and an Islamic “purifying” of the media. The letter “was an open bid for Islamic control of the Kingdom, containing a barely disguised attack on the predominance of the royal family,” Wright evaluated. They were “more shocked by this letter than by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.”
This letter “became the basis of bin Laden’s political agenda for the Kingdom,” Wright observed, making in retrospect bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on the United States unsurprising, notwithstanding any objective moral analysis. Having rescued Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein’s ravages, many Americans on 9/11 a decade later incredulously wondered why they deserved the wrath of bin Laden and his fellow Saudis, including 15 of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists. Americans and their realist Saudi allies like Turki may have understood the Gulf War as a straightforward act of collective self-defense of a strategic chokepoint critical to the modern world. For Muslim believers in Saudi Arabia’s supposedly sacred sands, however, no amount of oil and economic development, no geopolitics could justify the sacrilege of infidel subversion of Islam’s sanctity in the faith’s holy land. Anyone who would doubt the existence of such seemingly irrational reverence should consider how similar unquestioned beliefs dominate the domestic lives of Muslims like the bin Laden family, as explored in this series’ next article.
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