Thursday, June 25, 2015



Iran’s Regime Can Change. But a Nuclear Deal Isn’t Likely to Transform It.   
 AARON DAVID MILLER   Wall Street Journal 6-24-15


Would a nuclear deal with Iran be a transformational accord, realigning the region and bilateral relations? Or would it be a more narrow business proposition: sanctions relief in exchange for slowing Iran’s nuclear program and buying time, or so Western diplomats hope, for more fundamental change in Tehran?
Speculation is risky business. But with a nuclear deal looking likely, I’m thinking a bit about what the post-agreement future might hold.
Even the mullahcracy in Tehran isn’t immune to change. A year ago, few would have predicted that we’d be close to an agreement. (Yes, some will say not to count our deals before they are signed.) Still, a transformation isn’t likely, even over time, particularly in a region that rarely offers good news or quick results. Consider:
Regime preservation: Iran didn’t get into negotiations over its nuclear program because it was seeking to become Switzerland–democratic, and an integral part of the global community. You could argue that Iran’s putative interest in nuclear weapons, or at least the threshold nuclear weapons status, was driven by the desire to sustain power and hedge against regime change. Likewise, Tehran’s willingness to put constraints on its nuclear program is driven by a desire to pacify and control its public by relieving the economic pressure and tremendous dislocation wrought by sanctions. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t see a nuclear agreement as a pathway to letting go of power but as a way of enhancing it and securing the revolution.
Iranian behavior: Japan is a state that also has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons should it choose to do so. Unlike Tokyo, Tehran doesn’t respect international norms or democratic principles; it is repressive at home and expansionist abroad.  Let’s be clear: Iran is rising, and while it cannot dominate the entire Middle East it does seek preeminence in its sphere  of influence: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf. A nuclear deal won’t change these objectives or make Tehran buy into the U.S. vision of the Middle East. And in the wake of an agreement, the Iranian regime may well seek to flex its muscles and demonstrate that it hasn’t been domesticated by the Americans. Relief from sanctions might give it the resources necessary to consolidate its regional position.
Should the Iran deal pass congressional muster–and I’m betting that it will or that the president will have enough support to sustain a vetoit would still remain a controversial and contentious enterprise. There will be struggles over implementation, and Congress will try to monitor Iranian behavior and watch for signs of human rights violations and bad behavior in the region. This isn’t the Egypt-Israel peace treaty; Ayatollah Khamenei isn’t Anwar Sadat and there is next to no willingness in Washington to give the mullahs the benefit of the doubt. A Republican Congress is unlikely to repeal sanctions for the remainder of the Obama presidency. The U.S.-Iranian relationship will, on balance, remain a pretty fraught enterprise–and it will be much harder to improve bilateral relations than it will be with Cuba.
Could the future be different? Might a nuclear deal set into motion a process in which the Iranian regime becomes less repressive, more open to change, and more willing to cooperate with the U.S. on regional issues such as Syria or Yemen? Would a nuclear deal open the spigot and create opportunities for an Iranian public hungry for more freedom, contact with the outside world, and a better life to press the regime for change? It’s tough to see that future now. Authoritarian states can open up economically. But as events in Russia and China have shown, they are also adept at maintaining control. Nobody ever lost money betting against the democratization of authoritarian states. And, for now at least, the safe wager is for continuity.
Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center 


The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that the trains took to… Auschwitz,” Pope Francis remarked this week.
“Tell me,” he asked, “why didn’t they bomb them?”
The pontiff’s question is not merely a matter of historical curiosity. It raises issues of morality, diplomacy, and American foreign policy with profound implications for our own times.
The reason the Allies had photos of the railways leading to Auschwitz is that throughout the spring of 1944, Allied planes conducted surveillance of the area in preparation for bombing German oil factories, some of which were less than five miles from the gas chambers and crematoria.
Yet when Jewish organizations asked the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to bomb the railway lines or the death camp itself, U.S. officials replied that such an operation was not feasible because it would require “diverting” planes from the battlefield. That was false; those oil factories were very much a part of the battlefield.
Ironically, the administration did repeatedly divert military resources or change military plans for other non-military objectives—just not for the Jews. For example, an Air Force plan to bomb the Japanese city of Kyoto was blocked by Secretary of War Henry Stimson because he admired the city’s artistic treasures. Assistant Secretary of War McCloy diverted American bombers from striking the German city of Rothenburg in order to spare its famous medieval architecture. Allied ships were diverted to bring thousands of Muslims on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca in 1943—at the same time U.S. officials were saying no ships were available to take Jewish refugees out of Europe.
The Roosevelt administration opposed calls by Jewish groups to create a government agency to rescue Jewish refugees—but it established a government agency “for the PROTECTIONarrow-10x10.png and salvage of artistic and historic monuments in Europe.” (That episode was chronicled in the recent George Clooney film, “Monuments Men.”) General George Patton even diverted U.S. troops to rescue 150 of the prized Lipizzaner dancing horses in Austria, in April 1945.
Along these same lines, Pope Francis might ask Vatican historians about Allied policy concerning the bombing of Rome. In the summer of 1943, the Allied High Command was anxious to bomb Rome, since it was, as the New York Times put it, “a railway and communications center for Germany and Italian war material.” But Roosevelt feared Catholic voters would blame him if religious sites were damaged or if many civilians were harmed, so a slew of changes and restrictions were imposed on the military.
Leaflets were dropped on the city the day before the attack, warning that bombing was imminent, thus surrendering the advantage of surprise. The bombing was carried out in broad daylight, increasing the danger to the pilots’ lives, in order to make it easier to avoid religious shrines. The bombing crews were given maps showing religious and cultural buildings to be avoided, with the words “Must Not Be Harmed” stamped in large red letters. The bombardiers were ordered to refrain from dropping bombs if there was “any doubt” as to where the bombs would land.
Why the double standard? Why was the Roosevelt administration willing to undertake diversions from standard military policy when medieval ARTWORKarrow-10x10.png, or dancing horses, or Catholic shrines were in danger, but—as Pope Francis noted this week—it refused to “divert” a few bombs to strike the railways that were bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths?
Internal memoranda between senior officials of the Roosevelt State Department during 1941-1943—the peak of the Holocaust—provide the tragic answer. One official, Cavendish Cannon, opposed rescuing Jews from Rumania because  it was “likely to bring about new pressure for an asylum in the western hemisphere… a migration of the Rumanian Jews would therefore open the question of similar treatment for Jews in Hungary and, by extension, all countries where there has been intense persecution.” His colleague Robert Alexander opposed rescuing Jews on the grounds that it would “take the burden and the curse off Hitler.” And R. Borden Reams warned of “the danger that the German government might agree to turn over to the United States and to Great Britain a large number of Jewish refugees.” An administration that viewed Jewish refugees as a “curse” and a “burden” was not going to take any steps that would leave it with large numbers of Jewish refugees on its hands.
Pope Francis made his Auschwitz remark while speaking to a group of young people about why they “find it hard to trust the world.” He was right—but why cite only the 1940s? Young people today see how the international community lets the architect of the Darfur genocide walk free, accuses Israel of war crimes for defending itself against war crimes, and yawns as the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons against civilians. It’s no easier to “trust the world” today than it was during the Holocaust.
Dr. Rafael Medoff is the founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. He recently won a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015



Obama’s Friendly Pass to Turkey’s Erdogan
By: Paul Gherkin  June 23rd, 2015

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/firstonethrough/obamas-friendly-pass-to-turkeys-erdogan/2015/06/23/0/?print

US President Barack Obama has made some interesting friends in office. Those friends get some special attention, and often more importantly, benign neglect.

Among the five world leaders that Obama highlighted as his best friends was the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  Over Obama’s tenure as president, Erdogan served as both the Turkish Prime Minister and President.  This weekend, elections in Turkey could help cement his power as he attempts to remake the country’s constitution.

One would normally CONGRATULATEarrow-10x10.png Obama on aligning himself with such a powerful leader, particularly one with a significant presence in the Muslim world. Such an ally could help the United States advance American interests in the volatile Middle East.

Turkey’s “Help” in The Middle East

Turkey sits geographically as a bridge between the European and Asian continents.  Turkey borders the volatile countries Syria and Iraq, both of which are consumed by war, where Obama has expressed a US interest.

Turkey’s geographic position and large army make it a potential important ally for the US in the fight against the Islamic State.  However, despite the good terms between Obama and Erdogan, Turkey has not been a good partner in this regard.  As relayed by The Guardian October 2014: “The US is especially angry with Turkey because it is a Nato ally and yet it has refused to provide even basic logistical assistance to the US-led coalition.” It took many months for Turkey to agree to even begin training Syrian forces in Turkey to fight ISIS.  Turkey’s efforts CONTINUEarrow-10x10.png to be minimal.

Erdogan’s Values

If Turkey hasn’t been so helpful to American interests, perhaps Obama’s friendship is based on shared values.

As reviewed in “The Churlish Turkish Leadership“, Erdogan has moved his country to the far right into the deep religious Islamic sphere. He has curbed the freedoms of press and expression dramatically over his tenure. Are those shared American values? Obama’s values?

A Friend With Benefits: Erdogan

Despite Erdogan’s lack of assistance to America and suppression of human rights, Obama has treated Erdogan rather nicely:
  • There were no ramifications to Turkey from withholding support in the fight against ISIS
  • There were no ramifications from Erdogan’s suppression of human rights
  • Obama has issued no statement about Turkey’s illegal occupation of northern Cyprus since 1974, which is deemed illegal by the United Nations and not recognized by any country other than Turkey.
  • When Erdogan said the “Zionism was a crime against humanity” in February 2013, the White House merely condemned the statement, but did not threaten any action against Turkey.
  • In May 2015, in the week before elections, Erdogan stated that he sought Turkish unity (with the Kurds) in liberating Jerusalem just as our forefathers went together to liberate Jerusalem with Saladin, we will march together on the same path“, in a comment that did not even get a response from the Obama administration.

It would appear that Obama is fine with Erdogan despite the lack of Turkish support for American policies or values.

A Friend without Benefits: Netanyahu

Obama’s relationship with Erdogan is in sharp contrast to the way Obama treats the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Obama claims that the US and Israel are strong allies, his policies appear to be based more on personal friendships.  For Obama, friendship is showing he works for them and not what his friends do for the US. “I think that if you ask them — Angela Merkel, or Prime Minister Singh, or President Lee, or Prime Minister Erdoğan, or David Cameron would say, we have a lot of trust and confidence in the president. We believe what he says. We believe that he’ll follow through on his commitments. We think he’s paying attention to our concerns and our interests,”

Obama will likely CONTINUEarrow-10x10.png to show benign neglect to the demagogic statesman from Turkey who makes vile attacks against allies and quells the rights of the people in Turkey.  Conversely, Obama has demonstrated that he will berate and lecture the Israeli leader about “values” and take actions that threaten the country’s existence.

Troubling trends based on personal preferences.






Saturday, June 20, 2015



By Hanin Ghaddar 6-11-15

Why the idea that economic and social pressure can keep Hezbollah in check is deeply flawed

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/191416/what-iran-will-buy

U.S. administration officials are still defending the nuclear deal by assuring us that Iran will only use the $50 billion “signing bonus” they expect to receive on the country’s internal needs. No Iranian official has ever promised that, not even to the Iranian people who have been struggling with economic hardships. Yet the U.S. administration has presumed that Iran’s infrastructure is more significant to the regime than hegemony over Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Let’s imagine a scenario where Iran decides to spend the windfall on infrastructure and on addressing the needs of the Iranian people, as Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew assured the world it will in an address to the Washington Institute last month. The Iranian people will surely be relieved, and the credibility of the reformists will probably increase. But most significantly, Iran will become a nation with no ambitions for regional dominance. Iran will eventually have to let go of Syria’s Assad, Hezbollah, and all their militias in the region—including those in Yemen and Iraq, because the money is needed for infrastructure and to help rebuild the country’s own economy. The mullahs will then sit down with the world powers to find a realistic political solution for Syria, and stop the bloodshed. Wonderful, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration’s big hopes are unlikely to pan out, for two big reasons. One, no one has forced or will force Iran—deal or no deal—to stop its military operations in the region, so why would they? They can spend the $50 billion both internally and on their regional militias and maintain some kind of “Resistance Economy” until sanctions are lifted and investments get going. Two, Syria is too significant for Iran to just let go, as Iranian officials have declared publicly many times. Without Syria, Iran will lose its link to Hezbollah, and thereby its leverage over Lebanon and its borders with Israel. If this leverage is lost, Iran will be forced to let go of its ambitions to become a main regional player and to forget about exporting the Islamic Revolution, the hope on which the regime was founded.
With the recent gains by rebels, Iran seems to be losing in Syria if it doesn’t boost its military operations soon. A political solution that won’t guarantee Iran’s link to Lebanon through Iraq and Syria will not pass. Even if Iran and the world powers reach a compromise to divide Syria and guarantee Iran’s control of certain areas, the rebels on the ground and their regional backers will not accept it. Attempts to achieve more gains by the rebels will continue, and Iran will never be able to stop fighting. More fighting requires more money. It is that simple.
Iran’s Real Budgetary Priorities
A look at Iran’s current budgeting shows that the country’s leadership seems to be boosting its military budgets at the expense of providing services to the Iranian people. And contrary to recent assertions by President Barack Obama himself, Iran’s programs of regional subversion and terror do not come cheap. Even under sanctions, Iran has been bankrolling Hezbollah with up to $200 million a year. This budget has been recently cut by 40 percent in 2015 due to the economic crisis Iran is facing, which has been caused by sanctions and the drop in oil prices. However, this cut affected Hezbollah’s social and health services, not its military budget. Services were sacrificed for the sake of military strength.
In addition to the lack of services, salary cuts and delays in payments, reported by Newsweek in January, Hezbollah has decided to reduce the coverage of its social security by withdrawing the “Nour card” from many members and their families. The Nour Card is like a Social Security card that provides medical and other basic services to its holder in addition to major discounts in certain shops. The clear message here is that whatever money the party possesses needs to be allocated to the military. The community will have to sacrifice—as Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly asked—until victory is achieved, or until the economy gets better. Earlier this year, Nasrallah reassured the Shiites that a deal between Iran and the West will make Hezbollah and its allies stronger. He did not mention the money Iran will receive for signing the deal, but his meaning was clear.

Hezbollah’s community is waiting eagerly for the money to come back, not only because of the lack of services, but mainly because the war has lasted too long. They believe that more money will certainly boost the military budget and raise Hezbollah’s winning chances in Syria.
There has also been a hike in the military budget in Iran. President Hassan Rouhani, who was supposed to have been elected by the Iranian people because of his reformist ideas and concern for people’s needs, was the one who announced last year a hike in military spending by 33.5 percent in the 2015 fiscal year, despite the “cautious, tight” budget he presented to parliament. Most of this military budget will be assigned to the elite Revolutionary Guards. For public employees, Rouhani proposed a 14 percent wage increase.
Sanctions and a drop in oil prices have cost Iran over $160 billion in oil revenues since 2012, and its GDP shrank by 9 percent. So yes, Lew is right. Iran will have to address those needs to attract investment. But what Lew misses is that Iran’s military budget, chiefly that of the revolutionary guards—the institution which has been supervising and leading Iran’s regional military operations—is far more important than domestic needs.
How Much Does Hezbollah Cost?
Hezbollah’s cut in social services to the Shiites did not apply to the fighters and their families. According to recent reports the Party of God is paying an average of $1,000 a month per fighter, depending on their rank and responsibilities. The Lebanese Shiites cost the most, followed by Iraqis, then Pakistanis and Afghanis.
The Financial Times reported last month that Hezbollah had doubled its deployment in Syria to between 6,000 and 7,000 fighters due to the regime’s manpower crisis, costing the party a bigger budget in salaries, equipment, and weaponry. But military budget is not limited to ground troops. Hezbollah’s war budget reaches a bigger structure of institutions and compensations that support its operations.
In addition to the Jihad Council that foresees the military operations and costs, there are other institutions that are still functioning, such as media, health, and social institutions. They might not provide services to the same number of beneficiaries as they used to, but they still cater to the fighters and their families. Al-Manar TV—their media arm—is still a vital propaganda tool used to keep the community rallied around Hezbollah’s war against “the takfiris.” Al-Manar’s budget alone is at least $15 million per year.
Hezbollah also operates the Jihad Construction Foundation, Jihad El Binaa, the Martyrs’ Foundation, the Foundation for the Wounded, and the Khomeini Support Committee. Hezbollah’s Martyrs’ Foundation provides financial assistance and health and social services to the families of the “martyrs.” Sources in the Southern Suburbs in Beirut told Tablet that for each “martyr,” Hezbollah pays his family between $25,000 and $45,000. The Foundation for the Wounded provides assistance to those who have been injured during combat. Other organizations include Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Unit—with more than three hospitals and 12 health centers, Hezbollah’s schools, which serve around 15,000 students, many of whom receive financial assistance and scholarships.
Of course the military budget costs the most, but these institutions all drain Hezbollah’s budget. With less than $200 million per year, Hezbollah can still manage the necessary services needed for its current operations. Imagine what it could do with even a small part of $50 billion.
Why Losing the War In Syria Is Not an Option
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy to Syria, recently told a private gathering in Washington that Iran has been channeling as much as $35 billion a year into Syria. This figure is probably exaggerated, but the Financial Times reported that Syria has so far cost Iran around $10 billion a year. Iran’s economy can no longer handle this budget. Syria’s defense minister was recently in Tehran asking for $6 billion but got a promise of $1 billion. In compensation, Iran recently sent 15,000 of its Revolutionary Guard fighters to Syria’s coastal side, in an attempt to take back Jisr el-Shougour from the rebels and protect Hama and Damascus.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is stretched out to very dangerous extents, and 15,000 new fighters won’t be enough to cover all the battle lines from Qalamoun to the Alawite coast. These fighters will have to protect the status quo on the ground, until the end of the month when Iran gets its bonus. Then, more Shiite fighters will be brought in from all over the Middle East and Asia, and Hezbollah will be able to breathe again.
Hezbollah will not go back to Lebanon as long as Iran’s war is raging on, but it will also not let go of Lebanon and its Shiite support base. To preserve this base, Hezbollah will have to go back to providing services to the Shiites, not only to Hezbollah’s fighters and members. Otherwise, discontent will grow.
Hezbollah desperately needs to revive its “provider” role so that it stays the guardian of the community, who both protects and provides. Without this role, the Party of God, and eventually Iran, will lose the Shiites and eventually the tools to fight for dominance in the region.
When Iran’s finances improve, its services to its people and the Shiites in Lebanon will improve—but not at the expense of the military operations and regional goals. Obama’s $50 billion check to Iran will make sure of that.

Was the IDF Overprotective During Operation Protective Edge? | Voice of IsraelAttorneys at War
Inside an elite Israeli military law unit
JUN 15, 2015, VOL. 20, NO. 38 • BY WILLY STERN


Kirya Military Base, Israel
For three straight days starting on July 15, 2014, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) made thousands of PHONEarrow-10x10.png calls to the residents of Shejaiya in northern Gaza. The locals were encouraged to evacuate their homes before IDF tanks rolled across the border. Tens of thousands of leaflets were dropped into the village. These leaflets suggested both a safe evacuation route and safe destinations to head for within Gaza City. The IDF sent similar messages daily via local television and radio. But that’s not all. The IDF also made dozens of phone calls to Shejaiya’s influential citizens, asking them to get out the word of the impending IDF incursion.
WELL.v20-38.2015-06-15.Stern_.rkts_.WissamNassar_Flash90.jpg
WEAPONS TRAININGarrow-10x10.png IN A RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOOD IN GAZA
WISSAM NASSAR / FLASH 90
Thousands and thousands of warnings were given. The Israeli military authorities essentially told the enemy where the IDF troops would ENTERarrow-10x10.png the village and when. And for three days, Hamas fighters, no dummies, took full advantage. They dug their own forces in deeper. They activated booby-traps. They hid IEDs. They got snipers into perfect positions. They brought in additional fighters. They pre-positioned weapons. They readied their terror tunnels.
At this point, it was abundantly clear that IDF commanders had gone beyond any mandates that international law requires to avoid civilian casualties. No matter. Putting their own troops at even greater risk, IDF commanders decided to wait yet another day to allow more time for civilians to get out.
Then all hell broke loose. Shejaiya was the location of nasty urban fighting between Hamas and the IDF during the 2014 summer conflict. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers would die in that war, and many of the injured are still in hospitals.



PLO/FATAH AND IRAN : The Special Relationship


PLO/Fatah, now better known as the “Palestinian Authority,” will govern a "Palestinian State in the militarily strategic territories of Judea and Samaria (or “West Bank”) if the Middle East “peace process” concludes with a “Two-State Solution.”
 Given that Iranian leaders daily promise the destruction of Israel, most people assume that PLO/Fatah has nothing to do with Iran. It would be absurd, they implicitly reason, for Israeli leaders to give strategic territory to an Iranian proxy. And yet, it is a historical fact that PLO/Fatah helped install Ayatollah Khomeini in power and create the current Iranian Islamist regime. It has maintained a close relationship with this regime ever since. This short film documents that relationship.
 VIDEO:      https://www.youtube.com/user/FACESHIRHOME 

The strategy as described by various key members of the Palestinian Authority is “a plan of phases”. 1. Promise peace; 2. Get as much territory by negotiation as possible; 3. Then destroy Israel. Such words as “Trojan horse” are actually used by the Palestinians on public TV when they are explaining the reasons for their  various actions.


‘We’re On Our Own’
http://freebeacon.com/columns/were-on-our-own/


 Michael Oren reveals how Barack Obama tore apart the U.S.-Israel alliance  


By the summer of 2013, President Obama had convinced several key Israelis that he wasn’t bluffing about using force against the Iranian nuclear PROGRAMarrow-10x10.png. Then he failed to enforce his red line against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad—and the Israelis realized they’d been snookered. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, recalls the shock inside his government. “Everyone went quiet,” he said in a recent interview. “An eerie quiet. Everyone understood that that was not an option, that we’re on our own.”
Reading Oren’s new memoir Ally, it’s clear that Israel has been on her own since the day Obama took office. Oren provides an inside ACCOUNTarrow-10x10.png of relations between the administration of Barack Obama and the government of Bibi Netanyahu, and his thesis is overwhelming, authoritative, and damning: For the last six and a half years the president of the United States has treated the home of the Jewish people more like a rogue nation standing in the way of peace than a longtime democratic ally. Now the alliance is “in tatters.”
Oren is not a conservative looking to make a political issue of support for Israel. Indeed, by Washington Free Beacon standards, he’s something of a squish. The author of a classic history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and a sometime professor at Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown, Oren served for five years as a contributor to the New Republic, has contributed to the New York Review of Books, and supports what he calls a “two-state situation” focused on institution-building and economic aid to the West BANKarrow-10x10.png. He’s a member of the Knesset, but not of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. He joined the comparatively dovish Kulanu Party last December.
Oren’s credentials and relationships make him hard to dismiss. “The Obama administration was problematic because of its worldview: Unprecedented support for the Palestinians,” he told Israeli journalist David Horovitz, another centrist, this week. Obama and his lieutenants, including Hillary Clinton, have often behaved as if the Palestinians don’t exist—Palestinian actions, corruption, incitement, campaigns of de-legitimization and terrorism are overlooked, excused, accommodated. Oren tells the story of what happened when Vice President Joe Biden asked Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to “look him in the eye and promise that he could make peace with Israel.” Abbas looked away. The White House did nothing.
It was Israel that had to agree to a settlement freeze before the latest doomed attempt at peace negotiations; Israel that had to apologize for possible “mistakes” against the Gaza flotilla; Israel that had to close Ben Gurion airport; Israel that faced a “reevaluation” of her diplomatic status after Bibi’s reelection. Obama addresses the bulk of his lectures on good governance and democracy and humanitarianism not to the gang that runs that West BANKarrow-10x10.png, nor to the terrorists who rule Gaza, but to Israel. During last year’s Gaza war, the State Department was “appalled” by civilian casualties inflated and trumpeted by Hamas propagandists. Oren points out that in the past the president had used the word “appalling” to describe the atrocities of Muammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi and the IDF—two peas in a pod, ACCORDINGarrow-10x10.png to this White House.
What Obama wanted was to create diplomatic space between America and Israel while maintaining our military alliance. Oren says military-to-military relations are strong, but the diplomatic fissure has degraded Israel’s SECURITYarrow-10x10.png. America, he says, provided a “Diplomatic Iron Dome” that shielded Israel from anti-Semites in Europe, at the U.N., and abroad whose goal is to delegitimize the Jewish State and undermine her economically.
This rhetorical missile shield is slowly being retracted. The administration threatens not to veto anti-Israel U.N. initiatives, Europe is aligning with the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, and anti-Israel activism festers on U.S. campuses. Obama’s unending criticism of Israel, and background QUOTESarrow-10x10.png calling Israel’s prime minister a “chicken-shit” and a “coward,” provide an opening for radicals to go even further.
The diplomatic rupture endangers Israel in another way. It preceded Obama’s quest for détente with Iran, Israel’s greatest enemy and most pressing threat. Oren was outraged in 2013 when he learned that the administration had been conducting secret negotiations with the mullahs. Now, with the United States about to clear the way for Iranian nukes and flood the Iranian economy with cash, Israel is all the more at risk.
“Obama says Iran is not North Korea,” Oren said, “and Bibi says Iran’s worse than 50 North Koreas. It all comes down to that.” Fixated on striking a deal, Obama is preparing to concede the longstanding demand that Iran disclose its past nuclear weapons research, is ignoring the issue of Iranian missile development, and is standing idle as Iran props up Assad, arms Hezbollah with rockets, and promotes sectarianism in Iraq. Israel is hemmed in—by Iranian proxies and Sunni militants on its borders, by the threat of a third intifada on the West BANKarrow-10x10.png, by global nongovernmental organizations, by a condescending, flippant, and bullying U.S. president whose default emotional state is pique.
As if to make Oren’s case for him, the Obama administration responded to the publication of Ally with neither silence nor a reiteration of American policy toward Israel but with vituperation, demanding that both Kulanu Party chairman Moshe Kahlon and Prime Minister Netanyahu apologize for criticisms Oren had made. Kahlon sheepishly distanced himself from Oren, and Netanyahu won’t comment publicly, but the episode illustrates precisely the model of U.S.-Israeli relations outlined in this book: A “family” argument where the criticism runs in only one direction. On the one hand, when the supreme leader of Iran calls John Kerry a liar and details plans to destroy Israel, the Obama administration brushes it off. On the other, when a former ambassador writes a memoir based on a diary he kept while in office, the administration loses its mind.
The alliance has faltered to such a degree that Oren is morose. He wonders whether Israel is in the same precarious position it was in 1967, before the Six Day War, or in 1948, when it came close to never being born. Neither option is comforting. David Horovitz asked him, “Are people going to look back in a few years’ time and say, ‘This is what they were talking about in Israel as Iran closed in on the bomb and they were wiped out?’” Oren’s response: “It’s happened before in history, hasn’t it?”
It has. And it may happen again. But whatever happens, thanks to Michael Oren, history will know that an inexperienced and ideologically motivated president drove a lethal wedge between the United States of America and the young, tiny, besieged Jewish State.

Friday, June 19, 2015



Iran Task Force Report Summary Chart: Necessary Safeguards for a Final Deal with Iran

The following chart summarizes the Iran Task Force report, released yesterday, on the necessary elements of a verification and monitoring regime that would ensure a final deal closes off Iran's pathways to nuclear weapons capability. Click the link provided at the bottom of the chart to download as a pdf.

b34d5cff-1da7-4da7-9c76-f2ce5a473e25.jpg

http://www.jinsa.org/files/Iransummarychart.pdf


THE NATURE OF THE ABBAS REGIME
Yoram Ettinger  6-19-15




The nature of President Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority has turned most Palestinians against the PA president and has led most Jerusalem Arabs to prefer Israeli sovereignty. It has also catapulted Hamas to prominence on the Palestinian street.
The Abbas regime has been characterized by a rare combination of endemic corruption, kleptomania ("Mr. 20%" is Abbas' nickname), nepotism, hate education, incitement, terrorism, an anti-U.S. and pro-Venezuela, Russia and China worldview, noncompliance with internal and external agreements, and egregious violations of civil liberties. All this has fueled Muslim emigration and the FLIGHTarrow-10x10.png of Christian Arabs from Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Ramallah.
The nature of the Palestinian Authority has been shaped since its establishment in 1993 by the late Yasser Arafat, by Abbas and by other Palestinians imported from terrorist camps in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Tunisia, imposing themselves ruthlessly upon the indigenous Arabs of Judea and Samaria. In 2003, I was rebuked by a prominent Palestinian: "We shall never forgive the Jewish state for imposing upon us the Tunisia-based PLO Sodom and Gomorrah."
Irrespective of the nature of the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. has been, by far, its largest single-state donor (averaging $500 million annually, in economic and SECURITYarrow-10x10.png assistance). In addition, the U.S. has led the pack of donors to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency ($250 million in 2014), which has not reduced the threat of incitement or hate-education-driven Palestinian terrorism. It has not inclined Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state, nor has it advanced the cause of democracy and human rights in the Palestinian Authority.
In September 1993, on the eve of the conclusion of the Oslo ACCORDSarrow-10x10.png, Elias Freij, the Christian mayor of Bethlehem, and other Christian leaders from Bethlehem and Beit Jala (unsuccessfully) implored then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to refrain from transferring both towns -- which were included in the Jerusalem District during the Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule -- to the emerging Palestinian Authority. They expected severe oppression of Christian Arabs by the Palestinian Authority, which would cause Bethlehem and Beit Jala to be "top heavy on churches, but very low on Christians." And indeed, Bethlehem's Christian majority has been reduced to a 15% minority.
Before the signing of the Oslo Accords, I introduced the New York Times' William Safire to a former mayor of Beit Jala, Farah al-Araj, who predicted that "the current state of affairs will produce a larger community of Beit Jala Christians in Belize than Christians left in Beit Jala." In 2015, Christian emigrants from Beit Jala achieve prominence in Belize, politically and FINANCIALLYarrow-10x10.png, while those remaining in Beit Jala are oppressed religiously and physically.
Abbas' stashed accounts and nepotism were highlighted by the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Stephen Lendman, who accused Abbas of "bribes, secret investments and hidden BANK ACCOUNTSarrow-10x10.png ... earning $1 million monthly. ... Abbas holds several Jordanian accounts ... not under any national or international scrutiny. ... Abbas urged Moscow to supply him with a new advanced presidential jet. ... His sons, Tarek and Yasser, profit handsomely from all PA projects."
ACCORDINGarrow-10x10.pngto Jonathan Schanzer, "The conspicuous wealth of Abbas' own sons, Yasser and Tarek, has become a source of quiet controversy in Palestinian society. ... Yasser enjoys a monopoly on the sale of U.S.-made cigarettes ... chairs a Palestinian engineering conglomerate ... boasting $35 million annual revenues. ... Tarek is just as ambitious in the business world."
Bassam Eid, the founder of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, concludes that "the Palestinians need strong democratic institutions and an end to human rights violations. ... [However], Abbas runs a corrupt dictatorship, using international funds to consolidate his own administration, rather than to develop the Palestinian economy. In east Jerusalem, the PA is so mistrusted that most Palestinians would prefer to live under Israeli rule."
American interests, morality and common sense should prompt the U.S. Congress to condition further foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority on dramatic transformation of its conduct.

Monday, June 15, 2015


Top World Generals: No Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
Monday, June 15, 2015  Today Staff

http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/26792/Default.aspx



  • Israel at the weekend published the findings of 10 of the world’s top generals who concluded that, contrary to widespread allegations, the Jewish state had not committed war crimes during last summer’s Gaza war.
The delegation, headed by Chairman of the NATO Military Committee General Klaus Naumann  said in a statement that its “mission to Israel was unprecedented. We were the first such multi-national group of senior officers to visit the country. We were granted a level of access to the Israeli government and Defense Force that has not been afforded to any other group…”
After vigorously investigating the Israeli army’s conduct during the war, the group found that “Israeli forces acted proportionately as required by the laws of armed conflict and often went beyond the required legal principles of proportionality, necessity and discrimination.”
In fact, the foreign generals noted that on many occasions “the measures taken were often far in excess of the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.” For instance, Israel repeatedly put off a major military response despite escalating terrorist rocket fire. And once war had begun, the IDF routinely paused military action to spare civilians, even though doing so allowed Hamas and its allies to re-group and replenish.

Addressing the high number of Palestinian civilian casualties, the generals said this was the sad, but inevitable reality of conducting war from such a densely populated area.
“We recognize that some of these deaths were caused by error and misjudgment… But we also recognize that the majority of deaths were the tragic inevitability of defending against an enemy that deliberately carries out attacks from within the civilian population,” read the findings.
Earlier this year, Israel invited two leading American legal experts, Michael Schmitt and John Merriam, to likewise probe its conduct during the 50-day conflict that devastated much of Gaza.
Both Schmitt and Merriam lecture on the law of armed conflict at the US Naval War College, and Schmitt also advises on the topic at NATO, Harvard and Exeter.
Their survey took a sympathetic, if not uncritical, look at Israel’s “siege mentality” and the various other factors that create the “specific operational and strategic environment in which the IDF must fight.”
And while Israel’s aggressiveness in some scenarios and the resulting collateral damage might be viewed by some as excessive and contentious, the authors determined that Israeli military policy and practice fell within legally acceptable boundaries.
“While there are certainly Israeli legal positions that may be contentious, we found that their approach to targeting is consistent with the law and, in many cases, worthy of emulation,” read the survey’s concluding sentence.



Why Is Obama Abandoning 70 Years of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy?By Matthew Kroenig|June 15, 2015 

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/191495/obama-iran-nonproliferation?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=060f61fa0f-Monday_June_15_20156_15_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-060f61fa0f-206799761


Never mind the finer points of the bargain being struck with Iran. Here’s why the entire premise is faulty—and dangerous.




As the June 30 deadline for striking a comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran looms, discussions quickly get bogged down in debates about numbers and types of centrifuges, schedules for sanctions relief, and procedures for international inspections. These arcane issues cause many people’s eyes to glaze over, but, in reality, the details of the ongoing negotiations are acutely irrelevant to the merits of the deal that the Obama Administration wants to strike.
Indeed, one can assess the merits of the outlined nuclear deal without any reference whatsoever to its finer points. The framework deal does not even come close to qualifying as an acceptable nuclear agreement, and the reason is simple and easy to understand: Since the beginning of the nuclear era, scientists have understood that the exact same technology could be used to produce fuel either for nuclear energy or for nuclear weapons. The two methods for producing nuclear fuel, uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, therefore, became known as “sensitive nuclear technologies.” The United States has always opposed the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies to all states, including its own allies, and it should not make an exception for Iran.
I personally worked on nuclear issues both in and out of government (including at the Pentagon and other agencies) for over a decade, and I and many of my colleagues had always assumed that the only way to prevent nuclear proliferation in Iran would be to eliminate its uranium enrichment capability. For over a decade, U.S. policy reflected this assessment. Throughout the 2000s, the Bush Administration engaged in international negotiations with Iran, but its bottom line never changed: The only deal worth having was one that stopped enrichment in Iran. Senator and U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama also supported this goal, saying at a 2007 meeting of AIPAC, “The world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.”
The policy that both Democratic and Republican presidents and presidential candidates have supported for the past seven decades is a sensible compromise that encourages the peaceful uses of nuclear technology while managing its proliferation dangers: Countries can operate nuclear reactors for power or research purposes, but they are not permitted to make their own fuel. The vast majority of countries on Earth with nuclear programs do not possess sensitive nuclear facilities. Rather the fuel is provided by a more advanced nuclear power, such as Russia, France, or the United States. This eliminates the need for the spread of dangerous enrichment or reprocessing programs to new countries. Countries like Iran that insist on developing their own sensitive technologies for “peaceful purposes,” therefore, are tipping their hand and revealing a likely intention to build the bomb.
To stop determined proliferators, the United States and the rest of the international community have worked hard to halt the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies, a campaign that has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The enforcement of this policy began even before nuclear weapons were invented, when Norwegian saboteurs and allied bombing runs knocked out a heavy-water production facility necessary for the plutonium path to the bomb (and similar to Iran’s heavy-water production facility under construction at Arak) located in Nazi-occupied Norway. It continued after World War II as the United States tried to prevent the leaking of dangerous nuclear know-how. In 1946, the U.S. Congress passed the McMahon Act, which made it illegal for the United States to cooperate with any country, including its closest allies, on sensitive nuclear technologies. Even countries that had worked with the United States to invent the bomb at the Manhattan project, like Canada and Great Britain, were cut off.
Several advanced industrial countries, including Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, were able to develop sensitive nuclear technologies early in the nuclear era without Washington’s assistance, but this only reinforced the United States’ understanding about the potential dangers of these dual-use nuclear technologies.
When America’s Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and China, began enrichment and reprocessing programs, the United States immediately interpreted these as the building blocks of a nuclear weapons program, and high-level U.S. decision makers seriously considered military strikes against these facilities to keep these countries from the bomb. (In the end, they refrained only because they feared starting a superpower war, something that has not been a concern since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989.)
Not even Israel, America’s longstanding security partner, was spared from America’s deep commitment to nonproliferation. When the U.S. government suspected that Israel was building a secret reprocessing plant beneath its reactor at Dimona in the early 1960s, U.S. President John F. Kennedy demanded that Israel allow inspectors on the site. Kennedy wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, threatening that if Israel were not more forthcoming about an issue as important to international security as the possible existence of a secret plutonium reprocessing plant, then “America’s deep commitment to the security of Israel” could be “jeopardized.”
The United States soon understood that it would need a multilateral framework for managing the spread of nuclear weapons, and in 1968 it led the negotiations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). All nonnuclear weapon state signatories, including Iran, agreed never to build nuclear weapons in exchange for several benefits, including the “inalienable right to peaceful nuclear technology.” Iran insists that this treaty grants it a “right to enrich,” but the NPT does not explicitly mention uranium enrichment, and the United States has never interpreted Article IV as providing an inalienable right to sensitive nuclear technologies.
To further strengthen multilateral bulwarks against the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spearheaded the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 1975. This international cartel of capable nuclear supplier states places tough restrictions on the transfer of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technologies.
The strength of the United States’ nonproliferation approach can be seen in the vast majority of countries that never attempted to develop sensitive nuclear technologies, but when these measures were not enough, Washington went to work on a case-by-case basis to put an end to sensitive nuclear programs, even taking the gloves off in standoffs with friends. In 1975, when Germany planned to build enrichment and reprocessing plants for Brazil in the so-called nuclear “deal of the century,” Washington intervened to slow and eventually kill the deal. In the late 1970s, it also convinced France to cancel the sale of a plutonium reprocessing plant to Pakistan and in 1985 it blocked the transfer of reprocessing technology from Argentina to Libya. When U.S. allies Taiwan and South Korean began reprocessing programs in the late 1970s, the United States threatened to withdraw America’s security guarantee if the programs continued and the countries relented. As one Taiwanese scientist said, “After the Americans got through with us, we wouldn’t have been able to teach physics here on Taiwan.” In a 2008 nuclear deal with the United Arab Emirates, Washington developed a new “gold standard” for peaceful nuclear cooperation, requiring that in exchange for American nuclear assistance Abu Dhabi agree to forswear any future enrichment and reprocessing regardless of the source of the material.
Washington has bargained with rogue states over disputed nuclear programs in the past, but its terms were always clear and uncompromising: Sensitive nuclear technologies would not be allowed. The 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea permitted light-water nuclear reactors, but not plutonium reprocessing. When it became clear that Pyongyang had been cheating on the deal from day one by secretly enriching uranium, Washington sought to shut that program down, demanding nothing less than “complete, verifiable, and irreversible disarmament.”
In an agreement with Libya in 2003, a textbook example of successful nuclear diplomacy, Moammar Qaddafi agreed to give up everything. U.S. military aircraft transferred over 55,000 pounds of nuclear equipment out of the country, including its stockpile of centrifuges and centrifuge parts, within weeks of concluding the deal.
Which brings us to Iran. Throughout the 1990s, suspicious procurement patterns led the United States to believe that Iran was building a secret enrichment program. In 1995, Moscow agreed to provide Iran with a uranium enrichment plant, but Washington intervened and convinced Russia to cancel the deal. The United States could live with Iranian nuclear reactors at Bushehr, but uranium enrichment was out of the question. Then, in 2002, a dissident group in Iran announced that Tehran was building a secret enrichment facility at Natanaz. The United States immediately demanded that Iran halt its enrichment program. The position was not harsh or unexpected: It was simply a continuation of decades of U.S. nonproliferation policy.
The United States, under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, worked to bring the rest of the world on board. In six separate U.N. Security Resolutions, the international community demanded that Iran “suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.”
Then, suddenly, in what can only be described as a desperate attempt to get a deal with Iran regardless of the terms, the Obama Administration abandoned this 70-year-old bipartisan mainstay of U.S. nonproliferation policy—a policy that has stopped many countries from getting the bomb and thereby reduced the global threat of nuclear war. In the interim deal with Iran in November 2013, Washington and the rest of the P5+1 recognized a de facto right to enrichment in Iran. Over the past 18 months, the United States has engaged in the unprecedented act of haggling over the size and scope, not the existence, of an illegal enrichment program in a rogue state.
Some of my colleagues argue that a deal that places limits on Iran’s enrichment program would be a logical extension of U.S. nonproliferation policy. They claim that in the past, when the United States has failed in its initial goal of preventing the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies, it has negotiated to place pragmatic limits on other aspects of nuclear programs. In confidential understandings with South Africa, Pakistan, and Israel, America contented itself with limits on nuclear testing, weaponization, and public declarations of nuclear weapons capabilities, respectively. Therefore, they argue, Iran should be no different.
There are several problems with this line of argumentation but foremost among them is that all the examples these critics cite are of countries that were already de facto nuclear powers and that eventually went on to build the bomb. If Washington’s goal is to simply manage Iran’s entry into the nuclear club, then the proposed nuclear deal can be rationalized. But that is not the case that the Obama Administration is making to Congress and the public, where there is a bipartisan consensus in favor of a policy of prevention.
A deal that allows Iran to keep a uranium enrichment program will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Instead, it will make an Iranian bomb more likely. It also increases the risk of a nuclear arms race in the region. Then there is the matter of setting a dangerous precedent: It will be impossible for Washington to argue that it trusts Iran with sensitive nuclear facilities but not its friends and allies. To make matters even worse, in the wake of a deal, all of this will happen with the international community’s stamp of approval. Seventy years of successful U.S.-led nonproliferation policy will have been trashed.
In sum, if to this point you have been confused about the arcane technical details in the Iran nuclear negotiations, save yourself some trouble. Unless the negotiators return to insisting on zero enrichment, their efforts deserve zero support.
***

Sunday, June 14, 2015


ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the West

by Salim Mansur
June 14, 2015 
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5956/isis-saudi-arabia-iran


What principally mattered in accepting Christian support was whether such support served the followers of Islam in spreading the faith. The same thing could also apply to an alliance with the Jews and Israel in defending Saudi interests.
In the age of totalitarianism -- which in the last century flourished under the various headings of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Hitler's National Socialism and Maoism -- Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb added Islamism. Shariah, as God's law, in covering and monitoring every detail of human conduct, as Qutb insisted, is total; its enforcement through jihad made for an ideology -- Islamism -- consistent with the temperament of the totalitarian era.
American support in the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 was crucial. The transformation of imperial and militaristic Japan into a peaceful democracy was testimony to how American support can make for a better world. In the Korean Peninsula, American troops have held the line between the North and South since the end of the Korean War in 1953; this has made the vital difference in turning South Korea into a democracy and an advanced industrial society.
In a hard-hitting essay on ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) for The Daily Mail, the 2001 Nobel Prize winning author, V.S. Naipaul, wrote: "ISIS could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich." Among the writings on Islam and Muslims in recent years, Naipaul's, as in the books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, have been perhaps the most incisive and penetrating in exploring the extremist politics of the global Islamist movement from inside of the Muslim world. And that ISIS on a rampage, as Naipaul observed, revived "religious dogmas and deadly rivalries between Sunnis and Shi'as, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant step into darkness."
Ever since the relatively obscure Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stepped forth on the pulpit of the Great Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, on June 28, 2014 to announce the rebirth of the Caliphate (abolished in 1924 by the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), with al-Baghdadi himself assuming the title of Caliph Ibrahim, the ruling head of the ummah, or worldwide community of Muslims, many might agree with Naipaul, despite the hyperbole -- he has left out a potentially nuclear Iran -- that "ISIS has to be seen as the most potent threat to the world since the Third Reich."
It is baffling to read about or watch the sweep of terror spawned by ISIS in the name of Islam -- a world religion with a following approaching two billion Muslims. It is insufficient merely to point out that the barbarism of ISIS reflects its origins in the fetid swamps of the Sunni Muslim insurgency of post-Saddam Iraq. But ISIS is neither a new presence in the Arab-Muslim history, nor is the response to it by Western powers, primarily Britain and the United States, given their relationship with the Middle East over the past century.
We have seen ISISes before, and not as al-Qaeda's second coming.
The first successful appearance of an ISIS in modern times was the whirlwind with which the Bedouin warriors of Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876-1953) emerged from the interior of the Arabian Desert in 1902 to take hold of the main fortress in Riyadh, the local capital of the surrounding region known as Najd. Some twenty-four years later, this desert warrior-chief and his armies of Bedouin raiders defeated the ruling Sharifian house in the coastal province of Hejaz, where lie Islam's two holy cities, Mecca and Medina.
Husayn bin Ali (1854-1931), Sharif of Mecca and Emir of Hejaz, had joined his fate with the British against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. One of his sons, Prince Feisal, led the "Arab Revolt" for independence from Ottoman rule made famous by T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935). But in the aftermath of the Great War, which brought the Ottoman Empire to its ruin, Bedouin tribes in the interior of the Arabian Desert were jostling for power, and the House of Sharif Husayn proved inept at maintaining its own against threats posed to its rule over Hejaz, and as the khadim [steward] of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Another Englishman, a counterpart to T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), was Harry St. John Philby (1885-1960), sent as a British agent during the Great War into the interior of the Arabian Desert. Philby would get to know Abdulaziz ibn Saud; eventually he worked for Ibn Saud as the warrior-chief rose in power and prominence. Philby chronicled the emergence of Abdulaziz ibn Saud as "the greatest of all the kings of Arabia," and wrote the history of Ibn Saud's tribe and people under the title Arabia of the Wahhabis. In the West, ironically, Philby is better known as the father of Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent, instead of the confidant of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. Philby apparently became Muslim, took the name of Abdullah, and lived among the Arabs.
The defeat of the Sharifian forces in Hejaz in 1925 cleared the path for Abdulaziz ibn Saud's eventual triumph in creating the eponymous Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The fall of Mecca to the Bedouin warriors known as the Ikhwan, or the Brethren (to be distinguished from the movement known as Ikhwan al-Muslimin [Muslim Brotherhood] founded by the Egyptian Hasan al-Banna in 1928), ended the ambition of Sharif Husayn and his sons to rule Arabia with the support of the British. The Sharifian defeat also meant that Britain would not have to referee the conflict between two of its allies -- Sharif Husayn and his sons on one side, and Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Ikhwan warriors on the other -- competing for mastery over Arabia.
Philby's loyalty to Abdulaziz ibn Saud restrained him from mentioning the terror and havoc Ikhwan warriors perpetrated in the occupation of Hejaz and the capture of Mecca and Medina.[1] But he was effusive in describing what he viewed as the renewal of Islam's original revolution in the desert soil of its birth. He became the premier salesman of Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his family to the outside world, as T.E. Lawrence was of Prince Feisal and the Sharifian claims to rule the Arabs.[2] Philby wrote,
"Ibn Sa'ud made it clear from the beginning that he would tolerate no criticism of or interference with God's law on earth... On Friday, January 8th, 1926, in the Great Mosque of Mecca after the congregational prayers, Ibn Sa'ud was proclaimed King of the Hijaz with all the traditional ceremony prescribed by Islamic precedent. It was at once an act of faith and a challenge to the world: to be made good in due course, without deviation from the principle on which it was based, to the glory of God, of whose sustaining hand he was ever conscious amid all the vicissitudes of good and evil fortune, which in the long years to come were to lead his people, under his guidance, out of the wilderness into a promised land flowing with milk and honey. The great fight, of four and twenty years almost to the day, was over; and a greater span, by nearly four years, yet lay before him to develop the fruits of victory for the benefit of generations yet unborn: generations which 'knew not Joseph', nor ever heard the war-cry of the Ikhwan."[3]
ii.
The objective of the ISIS is apparently to remake the map of the Middle East, which was drawn by Britain and France as victorious powers in World War I, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The goal is to unite the Fertile Crescent -- the region between the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf -- under the newly resurrected Caliphate's rule, where "God's law" will rule without anyone's interference -- much Saudi Arabia's founder, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, announced in 1926 on entering Mecca.
ISIS's self-proclaimed leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in announcing the re-establishment of the Caliphate, have set for ISIS a hugely ambitious program, even if it seems anachronistic for Muslims in the twenty-first century.
But ISIS's gamble to engineer the creation of the Caliphate and obliterate the post-WWI settlement is not entirely far-fetched when considered in the context of the making of Saudi Arabia.
There is also the shared doctrine of the Wahhabi-Salafi interpretation of Islam, which Abdulaziz ibn Saud insisted, and ISIS insists, is the only true Islam; all other versions and sects of Islam among Muslims are denounced as heresy or, worse, as apostasy, to be violently punished.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire let loose forces in the Middle East, some of which were contained by Britain and France, as victorious powers, in accordance with their Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
In the Arabian Peninsula, Britain kept in check the forces let loose, preventing their spillover into the Fertile Crescent, until one coalition of Bedouin warriors led by Abdulaziz ibn Saud emerged as clear winner over the territories previously held by Turkey in the Fertile Crescent.
The deep forbidding interior of the Arabian Peninsula consists of the highlands and desert of Najd, far removed from what were once the major centers of the Islamic civilization at its peak. Inhabited by Bedouin tribes, deeply conservative in their customs and manner of living, and disapproving of the ways of the outside world, Najd was a primitive backwater of the Middle East and was left on its own.
The emergence of Abdulaziz ibn Saud as the ruler of Najd and Hejaz in the 1920s, and then as the monarch of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under the watchful eyes of Britain as the hegemonic power in the Middle East after the World War I, was not merely the result of one coalition of Bedouin tribes trouncing its opponents for the spoils of war. It was also the victory of a doctrine -- of Wahhabism,[4] to which Abdulaziz ibn Saud was wedded as a legacy of his family and tribal history, and which provided the religious and ideological legitimacy for the so-called "conservative revolution" or the Wahhabi version of Islamic "reform" he heralded in establishing his kingdom.
iii.
In the nine decades between the triumph of Abdulaziz ibn Saud and the rise of ISIS, Wahhabism emerged from the margins of the Muslim world to become the dominant face of Sunni Islam, which claims the allegiance of the vast majority of Muslims. This occurred as a result of Ibn Saud's instincts and the discovery of oil in his kingdom. As a warrior-chief, he knew his limits on how far to push against the interests of Britain; and negotiated the subsequent embrace of his kingdom and leadership by the United States, which replaced Britain as the protector of the regional order.
History is full of surprises, and so it is with the history of Wahhabism. Muslims who heard about it or encountered its practitioners during the nineteenth century, viewed it with disdain, yet it came to almost represent and somewhat define mainline Sunni Islam towards the end of the twentieth century. According to the historian Hamid Algar, "Wahhabism is essentially a movement without pedigree; it came out of nowhere in the sense not only of emerging from the wastelands of Najd, but also its lack of substantial precedent in Islamic history."[5]
The founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab (1703-1791), was a Najdi born in a small town called 'Ayaina. His grandfather had been the town's religious elder and qadhi (judge), and his father followed him. The founder was reputedly precocious in his religious education and, according to Philby's account, based upon what he learned in the service of Abdulaziz ibn Saud, "some of his forbears may well have known or heard the preaching of the famous Unitarian Ibn Taymiyyah, who was the main source of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab's inspiration."[6]
By 1745, Abdul-Wahhab had acquired a reputation as teacher, preacher, and reformer, with religious training acquired by spending time in the holy city of Medina. Apparently committed to the moral and spiritual reform of fellow Muslims, he announced a program of commending virtue and condemning vice in his native city. While he acquired some followers, he also generated controversy and opposition among those who viewed his preaching as too literal and harsh. Eventually when asked to leave 'Ayaina, he headed for Dar'iya in the neighbourhood of Riyadh, and there sealed a relationship with the local chief, Muhammad ibn Saud (?- 1765). Thus was born the historic alliance between the founder of what became the Wahhabi movement and the chief of the Saudi clan of central Arabia, whose progeny was Abdulaziz ibn Saud.
The main thrust of Abdul-Wahhab's "reformist" teaching was to purge his people's Islam observance of superstitions, devotion to holy men as saints, tomb-worship and reverence of the dead. He insisted on the literal and explicit meaning of the Quranic text, and of applying Quranic penalties, such as the cutting off the limbs of thieves and stoning of adulterers. He declared those who violated what he understood to be the teachings of the only true faith to be mushrikin (idolaters), against whom jihad (holy war) was not merely permissible but obligatory: "their blood could legitimately be shed, their property was forfeit, and their women and children could be enslaved."[7]
At the time, Abdul-Wahhab's inclinations were reformist. According to one of the most respected Western scholars of Islam, Sir Hamilton Gibb, there remained those "pagan Arabs who accepted the dogmas of the Koran without completely giving up their old beliefs. What Muhammad [the prophet] did for them was to superimpose upon the deposit of Arabian animism a supreme controlling power in the personality and activity of an all-powerful God."[8] Abdul-Wahhab's "reformist" concerns seem motivated by a loathing of the practices he railed against, as shirk (idolatry), which contaminated the purity of Islam's strict monotheism.
Abdul-Wahhab's doctrinal solution was to "purify" Islam by insisting that any practice that detracts from -- or interposes itself between -- the unquestioning submission to God, was shirk and, therefore, haram (forbidden). His uncompromising insistence on tauhid (Oneness or Unity of God) set the stark division between Islam and kufr (disbelief), and between Islam and shirk.
Abdul-Wahhab's precursor in this respect was Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), whose theology was shaped by the calamity of the Mongol invasion of the Arab world.
Ibn Taymiyyah blamed the weakness and corruption of the Arab world on the borrowings from non-Muslims of un-Islamic ideas. These, he believed, had prepared the ground for the devastation brought upon Muslims by the Mongols. He saw the Mongol calamity as God's punishment visited upon Muslims for deviating from the true path of Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah's enmity towards the Shi'ite Muslims as heretics, and his polemics against Christians as Trinitarians and, therefore, not strictly monotheists, laid the basis for the even more narrow and intolerant doctrine Abdul-Wahhab later preached in the arid and isolated environment of Najd.
Ibn Taymiyyah's emphasis on tauhid, which inspired Abdul-Wahhab, was a warning for Muslims to beware of Christians and Shi'ite Muslims, whom he denounced as falsifying the true belief.
Abdul-Wahhab extended Ibn Taymiyyah's polemics and bigotry also against the Sufis, who are devoted to the spiritual and mystical dimension of Islam, labeling them as deviationists or polytheists. In the end, Abdul-Wahhab's theology, mimicking that of Ibn Taymiyyah, was characterized by the tendency to pronounce takfir on Muslims: accusing them of apostasy or disbelief. As these accusations of apostasy spread, they provoked among Muslims irreparable disagreements, which the followers of Abdul-Wahhab would seize upon as casus belli for their jihad.
The "reform" of Abdul-Wahhab to "purify" Islam was a return to the imagined simplicity of the early years, when the prophet Muhammad preached against idol worship among the Arabs. Abdul-Wahhab spurned the traditional consensus of the ulema (religious scholars) and the fuqaha (jurists) that had been worked out between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries, referred to as the classical period of Islam.[9]
This consensus reflected the highest achievement of Muslims. Through cultural exchanges, Islam was emerging from its native and backward environment of Arabia, far removed from ancient civilizations of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) and Persia. Despite wars, the Islamic civilization was being shaped over the remains of empires that Arab armies had defeated. Gibb explained:
"After the end of the Arab-Muslim conquests there was a period of three centuries during which the territorial spread of Islam, though vast indeed, remained practically stable. This gave time and opportunity for a thorough interpenetration of the religious attitudes and beliefs of the original Arab immigrants and of the peoples with whom they mixed to form the medieval Muslim nation. In the course of these centuries, after a long stage of theological disputes, a certain equilibrium was reached. The theology of Islam was established in logical and rational terms, and this achievement did something to counteract the influence of grosser superstitions."[10]
After the death of Muhammad in 632, Arabs and Muslims had swept forth into the world. The prophet had accomplished his mission of implanting among the pagan Arabs the worship of One God, in Arabic Allah, the God of Abraham as the Quran repeatedly affirms. Upon his death, the future of Islam and Muslims was an open book with blank pages to be filled in. But there was no heavenly mandate for the role of Caliph (khalif in Arabic, meaning successor), or for wars of conquests or empire. These came about as innovation, and as military offensives defeated far superior and more cultured adversaries. Justifications for such innovations (for instance, the office of Caliph) and military conquests were found in retrospect, or discovered, or invented -- all based on the Quran or on the oral reports of the life and practice of the prophet (hadith), which Muslims came to accept as normative.
Within a generation of the prophet's demise, his successors, under the title of Caliph, became rulers of empire. Their pomp and power rivaled, and often exceeded, those of the Byzantine and Persian rulers.
Islam, as a faith and submission to the idea of One God, evolved into Islam as a civilization, and there arose the necessity of reconciling the two. Devising the administration of empire became the task of the early generation of learned Muslims. In the context of the ancient world, their achievements were significant. The high standing the Islamic civilization achieved during the classical period of Arab and Muslim history later acquired a near-sacred status in the imagination of generations of Muslims up to the present times.
As centers of the high Islamic civilization, except for the revered status of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, became located outside of Arabia, the rest of Arabia once more became the backwater of civilization. From the remoteness of Najd, the contents of the high Islamic civilization could be thought of as departures from the prophetic era, and as corrupting Islam.
Abdul-Wahhab came to consider developments that distanced Muslims from the simplicity of early Islam as innovations, and since innovations (al-bid'ah), in his austere view, brought corruption, he denounced any innovation unacceptable as deviation or heresy.
Abdul-Wahhab's doctrine was thus a repudiation of traditional Islam as represented by the highest authority in the Caliphate, and of the shared consensus of the mainline Muslim scholars of his time. His alliance, cemented in 1745, with Muhammad ibn Saud, started the jihad he evidently wanted to wage against those Muslims he denounced as deviants for refusing to accept his doctrine. For the next half-century, the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance nearly succeeded in the conquest of most of Arabia.
Muhammad ibn Saud died in 1765. He was succeeded by his son Abdul-Aziz who waged the jihad zealously, with the approval and blessings of Abdul-Wahhab until the latter's death in 1791.
In 1803, Abdul-Aziz's warriors, under the command of his son, Sa'ud, took Hejaz and entered Mecca. There they repeated what they had done earlier in Iraq. In Philby's account,
"[Sa'ud] suddenly appeared before the holy town of Karbala [the site where Husain, the grandson of the prophet and venerated by the Shi'ites as their third Imam, was brutally killed by the Arab army of the Caliph in Damascus in 680 A.D.] in March 1802. After a short siege it was carried by storm, and given over to slaughter and pillage; the inhabitants were killed without mercy in the streets and houses; the great dome of the tomb of Husain was demolished, and the bejeweled covering of his grave carried off as spoil; and everything of value in the town was collected and taken off to the watering of al Abyadh, near Samawa, where Sa'ud settled down for a space to count his gains and distribute them in the traditional manner. He then returned to Dar'iya to receive the congratulations of his father and his people on the first doughty blow struck in the service of the true faith against a dispensation which was regarded in Wahhabi eyes as the incarnation of infidelity. It was certainly an act that shocked the world far beyond the limits of the Shia' persuasion: and may be regarded as the starting-point of a general revulsion against Wahhabism, which was to have disastrous consequences for the Wahhabi State. But there was only joy in Dar'iya without reserve; and the pattern set at Karbala was soon to be copied in the holy cities of the Hijaz before the tide of retribution began to flow."[11]
Revulsion against Wahhabism, as Philby wrote, eventually moved the Ottoman Empire to act. The sack of Mecca by the Wahhabis was a mighty slap on the face of the Caliph in Istanbul and, despite the strains on the resources of the Ottoman rulers since the French invasion of Egypt under Napoleon's command in 1798, an Ottoman army was raised and sent by Egypt's governor, Muhammad Ali Pasha, into Arabia.
The Saudi-Wahhabi warriors were driven out of Hejaz by the soldiers of the Caliph, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire; and Mecca was re-captured in the early months of 1813, bringing an end to Wahhabi rule in the two holiest cities of Islam. The Ottoman army then pushed forward by stages into the interior of Arabia. The Saudi-Wahhabi stronghold of Dar'iya capitulated in September 1818. The power of the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance was broken; Hejaz was restored to the rule of the Ottoman Caliphate; and Mecca returned to the stewardship of the House to which Husayn bin Ali [Sharif Husayn] belonged.[12]
The defeat of Saudi-Wahhabi power confined Wahhabism to the interior of the Najdi desert.
The restoration of Ottoman rule in Hejaz also meant restoring in Mecca the traditional Islamic consensus reached by the ulema during the classical period of Muslim history. Wahhabism -- as an aberration of primitive minds far removed from, and suspicious of, civilization -- was destined to pass into history as a footnote, but for the fatal error of the Ottoman rulers in entering the Great War in 1914 on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
iv.
The conquest of Arabia by Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Ikhwan warriors in the first quarter of the twentieth century was cruel and bloody. It also occurred under the gaze of the British in the region, and the material support Britain provided at critical stages of the march of the Saudi-Wahhabi warrior-chief, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, to power.
The English created a myth that Abdulaziz ibn Saud was a great unifier of the tribes of Arabia. Philby was at the head of those who spun their tales of the Saudi warrior as among the greatest of the Arab leaders, even going to the absurd length of comparing him to the Prophet of Islam. "Like the Prophet Muhammad," Philby wrote, "'Abdul-'Aziz ibn Sa'ud was also a man of destiny."[13]
The facts were alarmingly opposite. Abdulaziz ibn Saud massacred his way to conquering Arabia. In towns such as Taif, Bureida and Al Huda, the Wahhabi Ikhwan slaughtered the townspeople. They tried to destroy the tomb of the prophet in Medina and desecrated cemeteries in Mecca. They also spread death and devastation among the Shi'ite Muslims in the eastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Hatred for Shi'ism as a heresy is deeply rooted in the Wahhabi doctrine. Wahhabis believe that the Shi'a reverence for Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet, as Imam (religious leader) has made Ali co-equal to the prophet or placed Ali even ahead of the prophet, thereby committing an unforgivable transgression of shirk, or polytheism.
The Ikhwan of Abdulaziz ibn Saud were checked from raiding what is now called Iraq -- and pillaging the Shi'ite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, as the Wahhabi warriors had done in the early nineteenth century -- by the frontier marked out between Arabia and Iraq by Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner in the Persian Gulf region.
Despite the efforts of Saudi apologists, both native and Western, to airbrush out the horrors perpetrated by Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his army in subduing the tribes of Arabia, the memory of that gory history persists. Saïd K. Aburish, an Arab historian and journalist, wrote,
"It was an atmosphere where the sword of the executioner had a recognizable name, the rakban, or "necker," and it was well known and feared as the guillotine during the French Revolution... No fewer than 400,000 people were killed and wounded, for the Ikhwan did not take prisoners, but mostly killed the vanquished. Well over a million inhabitants of the territories conquered by Ibn Saud fled to other countries: Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait."[14]
Fortune, however, would smile on Abdulaziz ibn Saud, as the discovery of plentiful oil transformed the status of his kingdom in the sight of Western powers and the newly formed states in the region. But first he had to settle the tensions within his coalition of Ikhwan warriors, grown suspicious that he might be turning his back on them. The intolerance of others is one of the defining characteristics of the Wahhabi doctrine and its adherents. They saw his increasingly close relationship with the British, even willingness to be instructed by them as their paid agent, disapprovingly.
Abdulaziz ibn Saud sought to pacify the leaders of the Ikhwan in his entourage with gold and other forms of wealth. He told them to go back to their women and their homes, and enjoy the largesse he readily offered them. He advised them that with the conquest of Arabia attained, there could be no further role for ghazzu (the customary Bedouin practice of raiding), as in the past. Yet, as he failed to win over the hardliners among the Ikhwan, a showdown became unavoidable. In March 1929, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud and his loyal warriors confronted the dissident Ikhwan veterans outside the village of Sabila, and offered them one final gesture of reconciliation by asking them to surrender peacefully and return to their homes. The offer was refused, and the king ordered his men to mow down the opposition with their British-supplied machine guns. Some five thousand Ikhwan mutineers were killed; the rest fled to Iraq and Kuwait, only to be pushed out in the open by the authorities and bombed by Britain's Royal Air Force.[15]
This explosive tension at the heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi partnership remains; it is essentially irresolvable. Although it may be managed or contained, there is no moderation, nor any allowed. The Wahhabi doctrine is fundamentally intolerant of others, especially of Muslims who reject Wahhabism. This doctrinally-based bigotry leaves Wahhabis at unease with anyone who does not share their creed, and fearful of alien cultures contaminating or undermining their own closed tribal ways. According to Hamid Algar, there is "a fear of perceived deviation at the very heart of Wahhabism and helps to explain its intrinsically censorious nature."[16]
Abdulaziz ibn Saud dealt with the Ikhwan mutineers in the customary manner of the tribal code of justice: he executed them. Those among the Ikhwan warriors who remained loyal, he recruited into what eventually became the National Guards, the trusted militia of the Saudi-Wahhabi partnership.
However, the ghosts of the Ikhwan mutineers mowed down in the plains of Sabila haunt the kingdom. Their grievance against the ruling House of Saud is occasionally aroused by what is sometimes regarded as its too intimate embrace of the Western powers.
In the second half of the twentieth century, oil made Saudi Arabia and its rulers unimaginably wealthy. It was also a double-edged sword: threats to the Saudi kingdom mounted. The earnings from oil were "rental" income, received from sale of a natural resource that required very little native ingenuity or work. As the earnings mushroomed, the headache for the Saudi rulers came from the dilemma of how to administer this massive infusion of petrodollars without disrupting too flagrantly the Wahhabi-approved customs of the kingdom. This felicitous headache was compounded by the envy of non-Saudi Arabs; by the appeal of secular nationalism across the Arab Middle East; and by the migrant foreign workers needed in large numbers to meet the labor shortage triggered by the construction boom. Native Saudis, who received a subsidy, lacked incentive to work. Consequently, the kingdom had to cope with the presence of foreign workers who wanted equitable treatment based on international standards, in a country wary of all things foreign.
Change is both unavoidable and disruptive, irrespective of how it is managed or checked. In awakening to the modern world with its pressures for change, Saudi Arabia was set on a collision course between the old and the new. But despite being in the news since emerging as a central player in the global economy, due to its immense oil reserves and potential new discoveries, the kingdom has remained mysterious to the outsiders. As John R. Bradley, a Western journalist who lived and worked there, observed, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so extraordinarily introverted and completely closed to outsiders, is perhaps the world's last great, forbidden country."[17]
Hence, those whom Saudi largesse would not appease grew loud in their denunciations of the corrupting influence of the new ways. The ghosts of the Ikhwan mutineers worked their spell, and Juhayman al-Utaybi, a hardline Wahhabi who had served in the National Guard, gathered others around him to strike at the heart of Islam's sacred institution, the Grand Mosque of Mecca, which the Saudi dynasty is sworn to protect.
Al-Utaybi came to believe that since the House of Saud was corrupt, it had lost its legitimacy to rule Arabia. His father and grandfather were Ikhwan warriors who had participated in the rebellion against Abdulaziz ibn Saud on the battlefield of Sabila. He recalled the grievance of the Ikhwan against their king for turning soft on Wahhabi principles; by the time he plotted his own rebellion, the signs of Saudi deviation appeared to many devoted Wahhabis to be too pronounced.
The evening of November 20, 1979 marked the beginning of the year 1400 in the Islamic calendar. On that night, al-Utaybi led his supporters to incite a general Wahhabi-led uprising against the Saudi rulers by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca, where Muslim pilgrims from around the world gather for their annual pilgrimage, the Hajj.
The rebellion was crushed and al-Utaybi was executed, along with those of his followers captured with him in the Grand Mosque. But the rebellion, although it was likely doomed to fail, revealed that the most lethal threat to the kingdom was and remains internal. It arises from the contradiction at the heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi partnership: the Wahhabi fear of deviation as the Saudi rulers seek to administer the kingdom awash with petrodollars and pressed by the forces of change on all sides.
v.
Al-Utaybi's rebellion against the House of Saud was hushed up by the Saudi-Wahhabi authorities, and pushed down the memory hole of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. According to Yaroslav Trofimov, author of The Siege of Mecca, "In the years after the Mecca uprising, the Saudi government tried its best to erase these bloody events from public memory. The subject of Juhayman remains taboo in the kingdom, strenuously avoided by Saudi historians and ignored by official textbooks."[18]
There were, however, other events in the Middle East and beyond in 1979 of even greater immediate consequences than the siege in Mecca. In February of that year, the Shah of Iran left Tehran in the wake of a revolution that turned Islamic, and which brought an old Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-89), back from exile to become its leader. Then, on November 4, two weeks before the siege of Mecca occurred, hardline student followers of Khomeini stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took American diplomats as hostages. The Americans would be held for 444 days, before their release in January 1981.
Additionally, in December 1979 came the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. It would spark a near decade-long Soviet-Afghan war, which also became -- at the beginning of Islam's fifteenth century -- a holy war or jihad of Muslims against infidels. It set the stage for the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, bringing to an end the Cold War, which for nearly half a century, had defined the main security tension between East (communism) and West (capitalism) in global politics.
The making of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Middle East upset the regional equilibrium between monarchies and republican states. The ruling Shi'ite clerics in Tehran broadcast their intent to export the Islamic revolution, and provocatively gestured to Shi'ite Muslims in neighboring Arab states to create a common front with Palestinians and other disenfranchised segments of the population, against Israel and undemocratic regimes headed by Sunni dictators and dynastic rulers.
Saddam Hussein, the Sunni despot in Baghdad, felt the tremors of the Iranian revolution most intensely. His "republic of fear," as the Iraqi Shi'ite author and dissident, Kanan Makiya, described Saddam's Iraq, was a narrowly based autocratic regime drawing upon the sectarian loyalties of Sunni tribes in a state where Shi'ite Muslims made up two-thirds of the population.
Iran's revolutionary threat, although also feared by the Sunni rulers of the Gulf states, including the House of Saud, was left to the Iraqi leader to countermand. Saddam Hussein viewed himself as the leader and defender of the "Arab nation," and as the rightful successor to the place that Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser once held in the imagination of Arabs. In his view, and in the opinion of most Arabs, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had betrayed Nasser and the "Arab nation" by going to Jerusalem in November 1977 and making peace with Israel.
Saddam Hussein launched a pre-emptive war against Iran in September 1980. He hoped that by striking at Iran, still unsettled after the upheavals of the revolution, a regime change in Tehran might be brought about. It was a huge miscalculation. After the initial shock, Iran went on the offensive. The Iran-Iraq war turned into a nearly eight year, grinding waste of men and materiel, finally ending in August 1988 with a UN-brokered ceasefire.
vi.
History is full of unintended consequences. In retrospect, the Soviet-Afghan war and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s prepared the conditions for the explosive events of 9/11 and after.
The Iran-Iraq War left the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein, in terrible dilemma. His recklessness exposed him as vainglorious and foolish. It also left him in severe debt to those Arabs, in particular to the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, who had bankrolled with their petrodollars his war against Iran. When Saddam Hussein requested debt forgiveness, the ruling house of Kuwait declined.
Saddam Hussein could not stomach the response of the Emir of Kuwait -- it rankled him as ingratitude. He had taken Iraq to war against Khomeini's Iran in defense of Arabs and Sunni Islam against the Persians and their Shi'ite heresy. The Kuwaiti Emir's ingratitude could not go unpunished; so Saddam Hussein dispatched his army to take over Kuwait. The raging folly of Saddam Hussein set the stage for the U.S.-led first Gulf War of February 1991 -- Operation Desert Storm -- to liberate Kuwait and defend Saudi Arabia.
vii.
Abdulaziz ibn Saud, whose career had spanned the first five decades of the twentieth century, died in 1953. His legacy was to leave the second Saudi-Wahhabi state, named the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia -- the first Saudi-Wahhabi state was launched by Muhammad ibn Saud and Abdul-Wahhab, in the mid-18th century -- in the care of the House of Saud he had restored, by ruthlessness and cunning, to power. Since his death, his sons Saud, Feisal, Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah, and Salman have successively ruled the Kingdom.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, when founded, was hugely anachronistic, a throwback to the values and customs of the seventh century in an age defined by science and man's quest for knowledge and adventure beyond his planetary home. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains a bundle of contradictions held together from within by a religious doctrine -- Wahhabism -- violently imposed and maintained, defended from the outside by the protective shield the United States has provided.
The famous photograph of Abdulaziz ibn Saud meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1945 aboard the U.S.S. Quincy symbolizes the incongruity of the Saudi-American "special relationship." About the meaning of this relationship to the Saudi rulers, Prince Feisal, Abdulaziz ibn Saud's son, remarked to President John Kennedy in 1962, "After Allah, we trust the United States."[19]


The famous photograph of Abdulaziz ibn Saud meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1945 aboard the U.S.S. Quincy symbolizes the incongruity of the Saudi-American "special relationship." (Image source: U.S. Navy)

In the absence of oil, it is unlikely there would be any relationship of the sort which the United States cultivated with the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian state under the banner of Allah, and protected, as if Allah arranged it, by the United States. This special relationship, however, rests uneasily upon the minds of those Saudis who take their Wahhabism seriously and are offended by any real or perceived dilution of, or deviation from, their creed.
Fahd (1922-2005), the fourth son of Abdulaziz ibn Saud, succeeded his brother Khalid as king in 1982. With Saddam Hussein's army driving into Kuwait in August 1990, the threat to Saudi Arabia seemed imminent. Fahd approved the deployment of American forces inside the kingdom with the consent of the blind Sheik, Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, the Chief Mufti and the highest juridical authority in the kingdom, and other leading Wahhabi clerics.
Approval for stationing American forces inside Saudi Arabia carried a certain amount of risk, despite the support of the Wahhabi religious leaders. In one of his many private conversations with Philby, Abdulaziz ibn Saud had confided his views about Christianity and Christians; his remarks also revealed the strange thinking of his people. On the basis of Philby's private papers, his biographer, Elizabeth Monroe, repeated those conversations between Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his English confidant, Philby:
"He [Abdulaziz ibn Saud] told Philby that by his standards Christians were of a kindred faith because they were 'people of the Book'; being believers according to their lights, they were less abhorrent to him than lax Muslims -- mushriqin, or people who associate other beings such as saints with the worship of God. Purity of faith was more important to him than all else; the easy-going habits of the Hijazis and the Turks, with their acceptance of corruptions unknown to early Islam, their deviations into heretical byways, their veneration of shrines and their tolerance of music, smoking, and strong drink were anathema to him and to his people... By no means all believers agreed with him about Christians or about the possible wisdom of helping the British. To some of his men, all Christians were dogs, unfit to eat with or even to speak to, and he, by dealing with them, was as reprehensible as the Sharif... But he was not lax; he was a reformer and by extending his territory he was spreading the faith as first conceived. Christian allies were permissible if alliance served Islamic ends."[20]
What principally mattered in accepting Christian support, therefore, was whether such support served the followers of Islam in spreading the faith, or whether it corrupted those followers and besmirched Islam. This same thinking could also apply to an alliance with the Jews and Israel in defending Saudi interests, should such need arise.
There were, all the same, those Saudis who viewed the American military as a Christian-Jewish Crusader army, violating the purity and sacredness of the land with the two holiest cities of Islam. To hardline Wahhabis, the sight of American soldiers on Saudi soil was intolerable. The unintended consequence of the American-led liberation of Kuwait and defense of Saudi Arabia was the hardening of denunciation of the House of Saud by dissident Saudi Wahhabis.
In May 1991, a body of dissident Wahhabi theologians sent a letter to Sheikh Bin Baz. The main thrust of the letter was that the dependence of the kingdom for its security on foreign non-Muslim armies was evidence that the House of Saud had renounced true Islam. The letter was alarming: the criticism had come from within the Saudi society, and it revealed a widening gap between those Wahhabi theologians defending the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance, and those increasingly critical of the House of Saud for laxity.
Among the Wahhabi critics of Saudi rulers, Bin Baz heard from Osama bin Laden. In an open letter published in mid-1990s, Bin Laden rebuked the Wahhabi religious leaders for approving the decision of King Fahd to invite American forces into Saudi Arabia. He denounced this as a recipe for disaster for the Muslim umma or community, and condemned the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance as apostates collaborating with Western powers.[21]
By the time Osama bin Laden wrote to Sheik Bin Baz, a profound change in the radical discourse of religion and politics within the Muslim world had occurred. Two apparently separate currents of extremist Muslim or Islamist thinking had merged; ironically, the House of Saud had been instrumental in bringing them about.
One current was the Wahhabi doctrine, from its inception onwards doctrinally located at the margins of Sunni Islam. The vast majority of Sunni Muslims viewed Wahhabism with disdain, as an extremist, life-denying perversion of traditional Islam, and as inherently bigoted and violent. But as Saudi money poured forth, spreading Wahhabi theology across the Muslim world and into the West, the House of Saud, flush with petrodollars, gradually altered the mainstream Sunni Muslim view of Wahhabism.
The other current was the innovation in Muslim thought presented by the Egyptian, Hasan al-Banna (1906-49), as the founder of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood). Another Egyptian responsible for the brand of extremist theology associated with the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayyid Qutb (1906-66); his influence as the ideologue of radical Islam, or Islamism, among a new generation of Muslims born in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, would exceed that of al-Banna.[22]
While Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb were contemporaries and were both influenced by political developments in Europe between the two world wars, Qutb, unlike al-Banna, also experienced military rule in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and drew upon this experience -- he was eventually imprisoned and hanged by Nasser's regime -- to deepen the Islamist critique of secular regimes in the Muslim world.
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Great War, followed by the abolition of the Caliphate, had left pious Muslims at a loss. For the next half-century, politics in the Muslim world was primarily driven by secular nationalism and the pressures to modernize traditional societies in imitation of the West. But there were also persistent questions raging below the surface, in opposition to those in power, on how to return -- "reform" -- Muslim societies back to their authentic Islamic roots.
The Islamist answer was that corrupting influences had taken hold of the Muslim umma long before the Western powers conquered Muslim lands. The writings of Ibn Taymiyyah were revived, and his theology updated as an explanation of why the Muslim umma in modern times was broken and distraught. Hasan al-Banna saw himself and the movement he founded as deepening and broadening the "reformist" ideas inherited from an earlier generation of thinkers and activists, Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905) and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935).
Rashid Rida was an advocate of Islamic reform through critical reading of the Quran and return to the prophetic traditions of the earliest, or the first three generations of Muslims -- al-salaf al-salih (pious ancestors). From this advocacy emerged the idea of "Salafism," which in turn became the hallmark of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots across the Muslim world.[23]
Salafism and Wahhabism were doctrinally convergent; members of the Muslim Brotherhood, once the Saudi kingdom was established, found their staunchest ally and financiers in the House of Saud and among the Wahhabi clerics.
As the Canadian scholar of Islam and Muslim history, Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, noted, the Salafiyah movement, led, in "willingly accepting Wahhabi influence, to a reinvigorated fundamentalist activism" in the twentieth century.[24]
Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, in turn, further deepened the Wahhabi doctrine pertaining to the notion of jihad, and broadened its appeal for Muslims by turning jihad into an obligatory duty for the believer. This duty was not, as Sayyid Qutb described in Milestones (the most widely read ideological text of Islamism), merely a matter of personal striving for self-improvement; it was, instead, engagement in the holy war to establish God's law on earth.
In Sayyid Qutb's description, "Islam is the way of life ordained by God for all mankind... and orders practical life in all its daily details. Jihaad in Islam is simply a name for striving to make this system of life dominant in the world."[25] For Qutb, jihad as holy war was not simply one of the central pillars of Islam; it was inseparable from the meaning and practice of Islam.
For Hasan al-Banna, the allure of death and dying for Islam was ennobling. He wrote about the "art of death" (fann al-mawt), and how "God grants a 'noble life' to that nation alone which 'knows how to die a noble death.'"[26]
In Hasan al-Banna's preaching of jihad, to be truly Muslim required accepting martyrdom. With such preaching, which made martyrdom a desired goal for Muslims, the path was paved for homicidal acts carried out by individuals willing to die in jihad for spreading Islam.
In the age of totalitarianism -- which in the last century flourished under the various headings of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Hitler's National Socialism and Maoism -- Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb added Islamism.
Shariah, as God's law, in covering and monitoring every detail of human conduct, as Qutb insisted, is total; its enforcement through jihad made for an ideology -- Islamism -- consistent with the temperament of the totalitarian era.
Islamism in its Shi'ite version, as Khomeinism, triumphed in Iran with the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Among Sunni Muslims, Islamism spurred the jihadist activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots within Egypt, among Palestinians, and in North Africa among Algerians. Armed jihad became a freelancing activity of Muslims wherever many, or even a few, gathered and raised the banner of fighting for the honor, or for the spread, of Islam.
In October 1981, a cell of jihadi soldiers within the Egyptian army killed President Anwar Sadat for his "betrayal of Islam" in embracing Israeli leaders, and for signing a peace treaty with the Jewish state.
It was in Afghanistan, during the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, that jihad as a theology and totalitarian ideology, in other words as Islamism, came to its own. That jihad was the result of a collaborative effort of Salafist-Wahhabi warriors and volunteer recruits, financed by the House of Saud, Saudi citizens, and Gulf petrodollars, and armed with weapons from friendly states, including the United States.
viii.
The Soviet-Afghan war, or the Afghan jihad as it came to be known, hugely emboldened the Islamist movement. In Osama bin Laden, this movement found its figurehead, its chief organizer, and its principal financier. In March 1997, Bin Laden gave an interview to Peter Arnett of CNN in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. In response to Arnett's question about the significance of the Afghan jihad, Bin Laden answered:
"The influence of the Afghan jihad on the Islamic world was so great; it necessitated that people should rise above many of their differences and unite their efforts against their enemy... As for the young men who participated in jihad here, their number was quite big, praise and gratitude be to Him, and they spread in every place in which non-believers' injustice is perpetuated against Muslims. Their going to Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan and other countries is but a fulfillment of a duty, because we believe that these states are part of the Islamic world."[27]
Bin Laden organized al Qaeda as the base for supporting the network of Islamist warriors in the global jihad he planned to ignite.
The unfolding confusion in world politics after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the crack-up in the Middle East that followed the Gulf War of 1991, and the effects of the Balkan wars on Muslim opinion all assisted Bin Laden's plan to keep increasing jihadi pressure on the American presence inside Saudi Arabia and within the Middle East, by striking at American installations and personnel. By the time he gave his CNN interview, he had figured out the dynamics of a "virtuous circle" in the tactics and strategy of the global jihad. According to the journalist Jason Burke:
"Successful attacks would bring in recruits, money and prestige and mobilize and radicalize the 'Arab street.' [Bin Laden's] enhanced capability would then allow more successful attacks, which would accelerate the process. His aim had always been to instigate. When the situation had become sufficiently radicalized, his own interventions would be unnecessary. The Muslim youth would have cast off their illusions, embraced the true Islamic path and launched their own attacks against the tyrannical oppressors."[28]
In giving the 1997 CNN interview, Bin Laden and his inner circle of al Qaeda militants also understood the importance of the media in the dynamics of the "virtuous circle." As news organizations broadcast terrorist attacks claimed by al Qaeda, it would generate new recruits and funds for the jihadi terrorist network; and the greater or more outrageous the terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets, more time the media would spend on reporting them, further raising the profile of Bin Laden and al Qaeda among Muslims worldwide.
The 9/11 attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, were spectacular in planning and execution; and the visual effects stunning to the global audience, as the world media broadcast the towers brought down in flames after al Qaeda jihadi terrorists had flown hijacked airplanes into them.
A few weeks after 9/11, Bin Laden spoke with Taysir Alluni, reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, for the Qatar based television news, Al-Jazeera. Bin Laden volunteered, "I say that the events that happened on Tuesday September 11 in New York and Washington are truly great events by any measure, and their repercussions are not yet over."[29]
Osama bin Laden had exceeded even his own expectations to instigate the United States as the "Great Satan" -- the appellation used by Iran's Khomeini -- to go to war in the Muslim world.
Bin Laden had instigated two wars: the second Afghan war and the war in Iraq for regime change. He had drawn American troops into the vortex of the Middle East, to be the catalyst for radical change at the center of Arab Islam and to raise the stakes for the House of Saud as apostate collaborator with the "Great Satan." He may have suspected that the hunt for him might lead to his being killed, as it eventually did, when U.S. Navy SEALs killed him at his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011. But to his followers, he had blazed the path of martyrdom.
In December 2004, Osama bin Laden had posted, on the website of the Global Islamic Media Front, the most damning indictment of the House of Saud. There was no longer any ambiguity in his message to his jihadi followers, and no effort was made to soften his critique of the rulers of Saudi Arabia. He declared,
"The Saudi regime has committed very serious acts of disobedience -- worse than the sins and offenses that are contrary to Islam, worse than oppressing slaves, depriving them of their rights and insulting their dignity, intelligence, and feelings, worse than squandering the general wealth of the nation... It has got to the point where the regime has gone so far as to be clearly beyond the pale of Islam, allying itself with infidel America and aiding it against Muslims, and making itself an equal to God by legislating on what is or is not permissible without consulting God."[30]
Since 1945, at the end of the Second World War, conflicts of varying sorts and intensities had raged across the Middle East. The creation of Israel in 1948 launched a set of Arab-Israeli wars that have persisted despite the efforts of the great powers to find an acceptable settlement for both Jews and Palestinians. The Arab-Israeli wars, however, have paled in intensity and casualty figures beside the conflicts within the Arab world and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Through the decades, during these intra- and inter-Arab conflicts, Saudi Arabia remained more or less protected with American support.
The rebellion led by al-Utaybi in November 1979, however, had revealed the internal fissures in Saudi society, which if ignited could lead to bigger conflagration. Osama bin Laden understood this internal reality of the country of his birth. In striking at the distant enemy -- the United States -- on 9/11, he lit the fuse inside Saudi Arabia. One of the most insightful scholars of Arab politics, Professor Fouad Ajami (1945-2014), an Arab-American, wrote in 2004,
"It was a matter of time before the terrible wind that originated in the Arabian Peninsula returned to its point of origin. The jihadists had struck far and wide. They had taken the Wahhabi creed, stretched it to the breaking point, and turned it into an instrument of combat. Where the creed had once taught obedience to the rulers, it now turned its wrath on the 'infidels' defiling the sacred earth of Arabia. In Arabia, it was a time of denial. In the year behind us, the bubble in which the Saudi kingdom was sheltered burst, and today there is a running war between the forces of order and zealots who have put down roots in a realm that once thought car bombs and kidnapping were the lots of other lands."[31]
Few in the West, and even fewer in the United States, had any inkling of Ajami's reference in describing what Osama bin Laden had set in motion. The founder of al Qaeda had awakened the ghosts of Ikhwan, the Bedouin warriors and Wahhabi zealots who once rode with Abdulaziz ibn Saud in spreading terror beyond their arid inner sanctum of Najd. When the Ikhwan warriors threatened the House of Saud in the making, Abdulaziz ibn Saud had mowed them down with weapons supplied by the British. Years later, like the forgotten Ikhwan warriors, Salafi-Wahhabi jihadists, raised for holy war by Osama bin Laden, still threaten the House of Saud and the entire post-WWI order in the Fertile Crescent.
ix.
ISIS is "the Islamist phoenix," in the description of the oil and energy specialist, Loretta Napoleoni. It has arisen from the depredations of the Iraq War and the worsening conflict inside Syria following the "Arab Spring" uprising of 2011. The difference between al Qaeda and ISIS is that the former remained a network of jihadi warriors and the latter is a state in formation.
Osama bin Laden had spoken about the restoration of the Caliphate, and Mullah Omar of Afghanistan had taken for himself the title of Amir al-Mu'minin ("Commander of the Believers") in the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghan war.
But when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the Caliph and announced the rebirth of the Caliphate, he turned the nostalgia of a broad segment of Muslims into a practical reality to defend. As Napoleoni writes, "Though al Baghdadi's men are willing to die for the Caliphate, their dream, by contrast, is positive and contemporary: they want to experience the Caliphate on this earth, not only in the afterlife."[32]
The question in the struggle over the Fertile Crescent, over a dozen years after the 2003 American-led regime change in Iraq, is whether the United States will hold the line between Saudi Arabia and the ISIS-hatched Caliphate, or let that struggle spill over into the kingdom. In the 1920s, the line was held by Britain, but after the Second World War, Britain was an exhausted power and retreat from her vast overseas empire became an imperative. In the wake of Britain's retreat, the United States took upon itself the burden of maintaining regional order in the Middle East.
In defending the regional order (as shaped by the Sykes-Picot cartography from the Great War) against Saddam Hussein's brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush ironically brought into the open the nightmare scenario of what might follow once the tyrant in Baghdad was removed. The terrible uncertainties of post-Saddam Iraq deterred President Bush from sending American forces all the way into Baghdad after they had routed the Iraqi army in Kuwait during the first Gulf War in 1991.
The states of the Fertile Crescent and the Gulf were, as Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir had once remarked, "tribes with flags." Iraq was an entity created by Britain, in which Shi'ites and Sunni tribes were to share power with the Kurds. It was eventually held together by the Sunni-dominated military and by appeals to Arab nationalism, which was a fiction. The Sunni Arab Muslims were a minority within an Iraq with a Shi'ite Arab majority, and the Sunni Arab fear of Shi'ite revanchism was fuelled by the awareness of how they had abused the Shi'ite Muslims.
There was no mistake about the nature of Saddam Hussein's brutal despotism, and the extent to which his tyranny rested upon the fears of his Sunni clansmen. Soon after the Iraqi army was expelled from Kuwait, Kanan Makiya imagined what could occur if the tyrant were removed:
"After Saddam is gone, when people's lives and those of their loved ones look as if they are on the chopping block, Sunni fears of what the Shi'a might do to them in the name of Islam are going to become the major force of Iraqi politics. The more Iraq's Shi'a assert themselves as Shi'a, the greater will be the tendency of Iraq's Sunni minority to fight to the bitter end before allowing anything that so much as smells of an Islamic republic to be established in Iraq. They see in such a state -- whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant -- their own annihilation."[33]
Makiya knew the tribal and sectarian nature of his country, as did the jihadi warriors associated with al Qaeda, who moved into Iraq in the wake of regime change in 2003. Their deliberate assault on Shi'ite centers and shrines, masterminded by the ruthless al Qaeda associate in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was designed to launch the Sunni-Shi'a war in the Fertile Crescent. It worked: While American forces tracked and killed al-Zarqawi in June 2006, ISIS has praised his deeds with remembrance of him as one of its founding fathers.
The Salafi-Wahhabi holy warriors also sensed that the American public would turn against a long and ugly war of attrition in the Middle East, just as it had done with the war in Vietnam. Under President Obama began America's military disengagement from Iraq, after the American public had gradually turned sour with military involvement in Iraq and the broader Middle East -- just as the Salafi-Wahhabi jihadi warriors had sensed would happen.
Regime change in Baghdad had led to the formation of a Shi'a dominated majority government. What Makiya prophesied after the first Gulf War eventually came horribly true, as Iraqis became trapped in the spiral of sectarian killings. The Sunni-Shi'a schism has been the main divide in Muslim history since the early years of Islam, and in recent years Sunni Arabs in Iraq began to perceive their respective interests as under siege.
The Sunni insurgency in Iraq has been fuelled by the desire to restore Sunni pride and identity, and to reverse the slippage of Sunni power.
With the rise of ISIS, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the Sunni rebellion in Syria against the minority Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad became linked, and with this linkage the frontier between the two states ceased to exist. ISIS has disrupted the Iranian arc of influence and power that came out of Tehran and had passed through Baghdad and Damascus into Beirut.
Although the rise of ISIS might be threatening to the House of Saud's rule in Arabia, doctrinally the two are natural allies in the Sunni-Shi'a conflict, which has the likelihood of escalating into a new version of the 1980s' Iran-Iraq war. Saudi relations with ISIS are shrouded in mystery, as have been Saudi relations with al Qaeda, despite the public break with Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks.
The Saudis have, moreover, redirected the internal opposition of hardline Wahhabi zealots into support for jihadi politics abroad. The Sunni-Shi'a conflict provides ample opportunity for the Saudis to co-opt ISIS in waging jihad against Iran and its allies in the Fertile Crescent.
In Funding Evil, Rachel Ehrenfeld documented Saudi funding of al Qaeda -- despite the special relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. As the history of the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance in developing the kingdom is filled with bigotry and terror, Saudi Arabia remains a state devoted to the cause of jihad in spreading Wahhabism within the Sunni Muslim world and beyond.
In a report about a leaked briefing on Saudi Arabia by the late scholar Laurent Murawiec, given in July 2002 to a Pentagon advisory committee, the Defense Policy Board, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post reported, "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader."[34]
Murawiec's book on Saudi Arabia, Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West, published in 2005, was an explosive account of the insidious ways in which the House of Saud has been an incubator of Islamism and has funded the enemies of the United States, such as the various affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Hamas -- all while the House of Saud depended for its own security on American protection. A Pentagon spokeswoman, after the briefing by Murawiec, went on record to state that it did not reflect the official views of the Department of Defense. This swift denial indicated the sensitivity inside Washington on the questionable nature of American-Saudi relationship, which in the context of 9/11 required the most serious reassessment, and which the American leadership has resisted.
In the circumstances of American military disengagement from Iraq and the investment in time and effort made by President Obama to try and reach an agreement with Iran, the Saudi rulers will support the ISIS-led war against the Shi'ite population in Iraq and Syria. It was reported in the British press that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi ambassador in Washington and former chief of Saudi intelligence, told Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British MI6, "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shi'a'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."
ISIS's campaign to consolidate its hold on its captured territories has been marked by the deliberate ethnic cleansing of minorities in the region, and destruction of ancient sites and artifacts found in the regional museums. As V.S. Naipaul noted, "ISIS is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust."
The Saudi silence in the face of mounting atrocities signifies, in the view of this author, acquiescence and an embrace of ISIS.
There is method in the genocidal violence perpetrated by ISIS against minority Christians and Yazidis, and the majority Shi'ite Muslims in the region. It is to spread fear, to weaken the opposition, and by the force of ideology and terror to reconfigure the Fertile Crescent. As the Islamist ideologue Abu Bakr Naji has written, "One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening [others], and massacring." [35]
Abdulaziz ibn Saud, at the head of his Bedouin Ikhwan warriors, would have heartily agreed with Naji and would have approved the sweep of terror perpetrated by ISIS.
x.
The war for regime change in Iraq after 9/11, launched by President George W. Bush, cannot be re-litigated or undone. It was waged for reasons well-considered at the time, and the expectation that regime change would eventually lead, with American support, to the remaking of Iraq as a functioning democracy, was not unreasonable.
American support in the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 was crucial. The transformation of imperial and militaristic Japan into a peaceful democracy was testimony of how American support can make for a better world of nations. In the Korean Peninsula, American troops have held the line between the North and the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953; this has made the vital difference in turning South Korea into a democracy and an advanced industrial society.
But America changed in the intervening decades since the Second World War. The immense burden of securing the post-1945 world order through the Cold War decades and beyond has taken its toll. The war in Vietnam stretched to its breaking point the public support for indefinite overseas military engagement against hostile populations that seemingly posed no immediate or existential threat to the country. In the Iraq war, such public support for defeating insurgency and terror, for assisting in nation-building, and for keeping secure the post-WWI settlement for the region, eventually got drained.
It is crucial for the future of the free world and for the security of America that fresh American leadership would educate the American public about how desperately important it is to support a return of the American military -- at least in the numbers reached during the Iraq war between 2003 and 2009. This may perhaps sound unlikely, given the public mood in an America tired of overseas military involvement. Yet without American leadership, it cannot be expected that the European Union will step into the breach to keep Western values and a free way of life from being overwhelmed.
America's disengagement from the Middle East has been a prelude to the likely reconfiguration of the Fertile Crescent. Consequently, the world may soon find a new Middle East in which Iran, especially with nuclear capability, and the Islamic State as a Caliphate -- both openly expansionist powers -- will likely emerge as the new Shi'ite and Sunni Islamic behemoths.
The broader Sunni-Shi'a war, in which Saudi Arabia and ISIS together are pitted against a nuclear Iran, is the ominous cloud that hangs over the Fertile Crescent and beyond. The potential for other countries -- and terrorist groups -- in the region to acquire nuclear weapons could turn the Sunni-Shi'a conflict into an apocalyptic war.
There is, however, another possibility. A Sunni Caliphate straddling the Fertile Crescent in partnership with Saudi Arabia and the Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran might seek a modus vivendi, after recognizing the futility of Sunni-Shi'a conflict in perpetuity. Such an arrangement between the Sunni Caliphs of the Ottoman Empire and the Shi'ite rulers of the Safavid Persian Empire once existed, despite their mutual antipathy. In this scenario, the world would not be any worse off than at present.

[1] He is mentioned only in passing the pillage of the Sharifian palaces, and destructions of the domed tombs of pious men or Muslim saints found in the two holy cities of Islam.
[2] On Philby, see Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia (London: Faber and Faber, 1973).
[3] H. St. John Philby, Sa'udi Arabia (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955), pp. 290-291.
[4] For a brief study on the subject, see Hamid Algar's Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, NY: Islamic International Publications, 2002).
[5] Algar, p. 10.
[6] Philby, p. 33.
[7] Algar, p. 34.
[8] H.A.R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 181.
[9] See G.E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam: A History, 600 A.D. to 1258 A.D. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1970).
[10] Gibb, p. 182.
[11] Philby, 93.
[12] Husayn bin Ali, is Sharif Husayn, whose son was Prince Feisal, alongside T.E. Lawrence. The Sharif family was Sunni, as were the Ottomans.
[13] Philby, xi.
[14] S.K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 24.
[15] Aburish, p. 34.
[16] Algar, p. 33.
[17] J.R. Bradley, Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. xi.
[18] Y. Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 251.
[19] Cited in Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2009), p. 72.
[20] Monroe, pp. 69-70.
[21] See Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden. Edited and Introduced by Bruce Lawrence (London: Verso, 2005). For Bin Laden's letter to Sheik Bin Baz, see pp. 15-19.
[22] On the making and spread of Islamism see, for instance, Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, 1993); James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi', Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); and Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
[23] On Salafi, see the useful article by Bernard Haykel, "Salafis," in Gerhard Bowering (editor), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 483-84.
[24] W.C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 68.
[25] Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 2002), p. 76.
[26] See R.P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, p. 207.
[27] Messages to the World. The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, p. 49.
[28] J. Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p. 182.
[29] Messages to the World. The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, p. 111.
[30] Ibid., pp. 247-248.
[31] F. Ajami, "Reaping the whirlwind," in U.S. News and World Report, 28 June 2004.
[32] L. Napoleoni, The Islamist Phoenix: The Islamic State and the Redrawing of the Middle East (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), p. 36.
[33] K. Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 224.
[34] Thomas E. Ricks, "Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies," in Washington Post, Tuesday 6 August 2002, p. A01.
[35] Quoted in Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), p. 41.