What would the
world look like without the radical, dictatorial Saudi regime? One can only
dream.
By
Gal Luft
Last
week's hullabaloo over Barack Obama's seeming bow before King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia centered mainly on the question of whether it was appropriate for a U.S.
president to pay obeisance to a foreign dictator. But the real problem lies
deeper than that. King Abdullah's alliance with the United States, combined
with his oil wealth, has allowed his radical breed of Islam, Wahhabism, to
flourish, poisoning the Middle East. With so much at stake, is it irrational to
yearn for a world in which the Saudi regime just miraculously ceased to exist
and there was no King Abdullah to bow to (or not) at all?
The
House of Saud affects the world in three main ways: It is the world's largest
producer of oil and holder of most of the market's spare production capacity;
it acts as custodian of Islam's holy places and the religious center of Sunni
Islam; and it maintains Wahhabism as a state-sponsored sect. When it comes to
the first two elements, a world without the Saudi kingdom would not necessarily
be a better one. As long as petroleum continued to fuel the global
transportation system, energy security would still remain a distant goal even
without Saudi Arabia guiding production. Iran and Venezuela, the two countries
first in line to succeed Saudi Arabia as the de facto leaders of OPEC, would certainly
not be more accommodating to consumers. Nor would the Saudis' disappearance
calm religious tension in the Middle East. On the contrary, a vacuum in which
various sects within Islam vied for control over Mecca and Medina would only
allow Iran to materialize its ambitions to establish a Shiite hegemony in the
Persian Gulf.
But when it comes to the third element -- Wahhabism -- a
world without the Saudi regime is hardly an upsetting thought. Years after the September
11 attacks, the kingdom is still a center of ideological indoctrination,
incitement, and terrorist financing. "If I could somehow snap my fingers
and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,"
Stuart Levey, U.S. Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence,
told ABC News in 2007. Thanks to the kingdom's policies, countless young boys are
brainwashed to hate Christians, Jews, and other "infidels" in Saudi-funded
madrasas from Bangladesh, to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Indonesia, Uzbekistan,
Spain, and even in the United States. Pakistan, perhaps of the most concern,
has some 12,000 madrasas, many of which are Saudi-funded. Wahhabism provides
not only the breeding ground on which Islamist terrorism flourishes, but it
also threatens to overshadow other, more moderate traditions within Islam. As
Lawrence Wright described in The Looming
Tower, with a little over 1 percent of the world's Muslim population, the
Saudi Wahhabis support 90 percent of the entire faith's expenses, radicalizing
many bastions of moderate Islam beyond recognition.
Despite
all that, because of the kingdom's chokehold over the global economy, Washington
has had to accept its abysmal human rights record, its treatment of women and
non-Muslims as second-class citizens, its brutal attitude toward gays, and its
financial support for radical Islamist institutions. Without the Saudi state,
the veneer of political correctness that has characterized the U.S. attitude
toward Wahhabism would quickly dissolve, and the United States would be free to
fight back against radical Islam openly and decisively. Such a world might not
be free of terrorism, but at least it would spare Americans the indignity of
paying for both sides in the war on radical Islam, classifying 28 pages in the
congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia's role in the September 11
attacks, and watching one U.S. president after another, Democrat and Republican
alike, bend a knee before a human rights-abusing tyrant.
Gal Luft is
executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
JOHN STILLWELL/AFP/Getty Images
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