[A-List] US imperialism: Saudi Arabia

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

'Liberating' Saudi's Shi'ites (and their oil)
By Ashraf Fahim
Asia Times, March 18 2004

If the rulers of Saudi Arabia held out any hope that the post-September 11,
2001, demonization of their kingdom was finally waning, then someone in
Riyadh should pick up a copy of An End to Evil, a recently published
neo-conservative roadmap for "winning" the "war on terror". In it, David
Frum, an ex-speechwriter for President George W Bush (and inventor of the
term "axis of evil"), and Richard Perle, the eminence grise of the neo-con
fraternity, suggest that the United States should bring Saudi Arabia to heel
by threatening to support independence for the country's Eastern Province or
Al Hasa (also known as Ash Sharqiyah), where much of Saudi Arabia's minority
Shi'ite population and, coincidentally, most of its oil is situated.

While the continuing turmoil in Iraq might inhibit lesser souls even to
consider tinkering with the map of the world's most important oil producer,
Frum and Perle are made of sterner stuff. Lamenting the discrimination
suffered by Saudi Arabia's Shi'ites at the hands of the Sunni elite, whose
power base lies in Najd and Hijaz in the center and west of the Arabian
Peninsula, they deduce that "it is not bigotry alone that explains these
Saudi actions, but also their fear that the Shi'ites might someday seek
independence for the Eastern Province - and its oil". If this fear were
somehow brought to fruition it "would obviously be a catastrophic outcome
for the Saudi state. But it might be a very good outcome for the US."

There is, of course, nothing new in the suggestion that, in extreme
circumstances, the United States might seize strategically important
oilfields in the Persian Gulf region. Such a step was contemplated at an
advanced level by the administration of president Richard Nixon during the
1973 Arab oil embargo. But some observers believe that the events of
September 11, as well as the frailty of the House of Saud and the Shi'ite
awakening in Iraq, have given this contingency new life.
Dr Sa'd al-Fagih, head of the London-based Saudi opposition group the
Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA), says the military plan to
"liberate" Al Hasa is already in place but would only be considered if the
US-friendly House of Saud falls. In that event, he claims, the US "has made
preparations to isolate the Eastern Province militarily". US bases in Qatar
and Kuwait are aimed, he says, "at the north end of the Eastern Province and
at the south end of the Eastern Province. So the scenario is, America will
take over in a line extending from Kuwait, down to Dammam [the capital of Al
Hasa] or down to Qatar." With the oilfields secure, they will "leave Najd
and Hijaz to their fate".

Whether or not al-Fagih's claims are accurate, other observers of the
situation in the Gulf are dismissive of neo-con fantasies about partitioning
Saudi Arabia. Professor Gary Sick of Columbia University, who served on the
National Security Council staff under presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford
and Ronald Reagan, calls the idea typical of the kind of "irresponsible
dreaming about the types of changes that can be brought about in the Middle
East" now commonplace. However, he says, "admittedly some of those dreams
have come true in these last few years".

The current plan to "liberate" Al Hasa has its genesis in the post-September
11 bipartisan Washington consensus that Saudi Arabia is, to some degree, a
problem in the "war on terror". Many in Washington allege that the kingdom
has financed, offered ideological inspiration to and provided the manpower
for al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. The more extreme ideologues such as
Frum and Perle say that Saudi Arabia "deserves its own place on the axis of
evil", and have zeroed in on the ethnic peculiarities in the Eastern
Province as a possible trump card in pressuring the kingdom.

That perspective gained voice at an April 2002 panel discussion at the
Hudson Institute, an influential conservative think-tank, titled "Saudi
Vulnerability: The Source of Middle Eastern Oil and the Eastern Province".
On the panel were Ali al-Ahmed, head of the Saudi Institute, a
Washington-based Shi'ite opposition organization, and Max Singer, co-founder
of Hudson. No transcript was available for the event, but the tone can
perhaps be discerned from an article Singer subsequently authored titled
"Free the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia".

For Singer, the diffusion of Sunni Wahhabi "extremism" abroad could be
eliminated by severing its source of funds - oil. A conference at Hudson in
June 2002, titled "Oil, Terrorism, and the Problem of Saudi Arabia" and
hosted by Republican Senator Sam Brownback, allowed various anti-Saudi
luminaries to expand on that theme. "One has to think in terms of
intervention in the oilfields, which are conveniently all on one side,"
noted panelist Simon Henderson, a British writer on Saudi Arabia. "And I
dare say there are at least a few people in the Pentagon who plan this one
day by day."

The neo-cons discover 'Petrolistan'
Though the Saudi Shi'ite grievance has been newly championed by the neo-cons
for transparently realpolitik reasons, it does have a legitimate basis in
the religious and political discrimination the Shi'ites have suffered. The
Shi'ites have been excluded from positions of power and certain professions,
hindered from fully practicing their faith and subject to hostility by some
in the conservative Sunni religious establishment. In addition, though they
make up a large part of the workforce at Saudi Aramco, Shi'ites have watched
the oil wealth flow west to Najd and Hijaz. Thus intermittent uprisings have
erupted since Al Hasa was incorporated into the Saudi realm in 1913, most
recently after the Shi'ite Iranian revolution emboldened their
co-religionists throughout the Persian Gulf.

Various estimates put the Shi'ite population at 5-10 percent of the 17
million native Saudis, and it is possible they constitute a majority in Al
Hasa. Thus far, the priority for the Shi'ite opposition has been equal
rights within the Saudi state, and it is not at all clear that they would
welcome US intervention on their behalf.

The aspirations of the Shi'ite, however, are not the priority of the
advocates of a "Muslim Republic of East Arabia", as Singer dubbed it. And
this kind of neo-con grand strategizing, based largely on ethnic
number-crunching, strikes Sick as foolhardy. The notion of disrupting a
country "as important as Saudi Arabia requires a lot more serious thought
than the idea that there are just a bunch of Shi'ite running around the
Eastern Province", he says.

Neo-con scheming could also potentially stir sectarian strife inside Saudi
Arabia. Crown Prince Abdullah, the country's de facto ruler, recently took
the unprecedented step of accepting a petition from prominent Shi'ites,
titled "Partners in the Homeland", calling for greater rights. Such attempts
at reconciliation could be undermined if the Shi'ites, unjustly or not, are
seen to be conspiring with outsiders to break up the Saudi state.

The Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia is not the only place where the
Sunni-Shi'ite divide plays out atop large reserves of black gold. A
sectarian power struggle simmers throughout the Gulf, and some see in the
Shi'ite revival in Iraq the makings of a significant shift in power. "Now
that the dust of the Iraq war has settled, it is clear the Shi'ites have
emerged, blinking in the sunlight, as the unexpected winners," wrote Mai
Yamani, a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in
London. "[The West has] also woken up to the accident of geography that has
placed the world's major oil supplies in areas where they [Shi'ites] form
the majority: Iran, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and
southern Iraq. Welcome to the new commonwealth of 'Petrolistan'."

The concept of an emerging "Petrolistan" feeds into the growing paranoia in
the region that the Shi'ites are conspiring with the United States to
dismantle Sunni hegemony across the Middle East. But Sick says such paranoia
is misplaced. "I don't think there is a Shi'ite policy," he says. In fact
"the US tends to be very nervous about Shi'ite governance". He notes, among
other things, hostile relations between the US and revolutionary Iran, and
the US failure to topple Saddam Hussein in 1991 precisely out of fear of a
Shi'ite takeover of Iraq.

For the time being, the idea of liberating Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province
remains on the fringes of US policymaking, and in fashion among the
mandarins of think-tanks such as the Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies, the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI). But, says Sick, it "has acquired no significant following in the
administration".

Unfortunately for Riyadh, the fringes have become the nursery for future
policy, and the fashions of the neo-cons often become conventional wisdom
for the grown-ups in the Bush administration. Anyone who followed the policy
prescriptions of AEI's "black-coffee breakfast" seminars prior to the
invasion of Iraq, for example, would recognize a stunning similarity in the
way US policy in Iraq has evolved.

At present, however, Al Hasa's would-be liberators appear cognizant of the
limits of their influence and content to use the threat of partition to
browbeat the Saudis into obeisance in the "war on terror" and the
construction of a new Iraq. The threat is also intended to ensure that Saudi
Arabia doesn't think about using its own oil as leverage in the Arab-Israeli
conflict, the context in which invasion was first discussed in 1973.

Frum and Perle are frank about the strategic utility of their proposal. "We
would want the Saudis to know that we are pondering [partition]. The
knowledge that the US has options other than abjectly accepting whatever
abuse the Saudis choose to throw our way might have a 'chastening' effect on
Saudi behavior."

Some observers have suggested that the chaotic situation in Iraq signals the
waning of the neo-conservative star that rose after September 11. Whether or
not this is the case, political fortunes can change quickly in Washington.
Another Bush term could easily embolden the neo-cons, and if, as so many
predict, the House of Saud falls, they could undertake their grandest
delusion yet.