by Robert Lacey
Appalled at his youthful presumption, the local “government” sheikhs reported Mansour to the royal court in Riyadh. Within days the teenage preacher was arrested by the Mabahith and taken to their notorious Al-Haier prison south of Riyadh.
“I sobbed—I was just terrified,” he recalls. “I thought I was going to get hanged.”
But when the eighteen-year-old found himself released after little more than two weeks, he continued his crusade against what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Wahhabi establishment. A year later, in 1989, he issued a fatwa condemning the World Youth Soccer Cup, which was being held in Saudi Arabia. Soccer was haram (forbidden), in his view, like many sports, and there should be no infidels competing in the holy land. Back Mansour went behind bars, this time to Riyadh’s Alaysha prison. After fifty-five days he signed the Mabahith’s standard “get out of jail” card, a promise that he would, in future, be a good Saudi citizen and do nothing to annoy the wali al-amr—the country’s authorized leadership. When he got back to Buraydah, he discovered that his congregation was larger than ever.
As the 1980s drew to a close, the Saudi Sahwah (Islamic Awakening) was going from strength to strength. It caught a widespread mood of dissatisfaction, while providing activity and a sense of purpose for the Kingdom’s many unemployed young men. It was also boosted by the spectacular triumph of its fighting arm in Afghanistan. In 1988 the Russians started withdrawing, and on February 15, 1989, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its soldiers had left the country.
It was an extraordinary defeat—Russia’s own humiliating Vietnam, as the U.S.-Saudi alliance had hoped. But the victors interpreted its roots and reasons in different ways. Within months the West was celebrating the scarcely believable collapse of the entire Soviet monolith. Europeans danced on the Berlin Wall, and the exact details of how and by whom the Afghan victory had been accomplished were swallowed up in a generalized tale of Cold War triumph—free enterprise, capitalism, deterrence.
But Saudis remembered their prayers at school assemblies. They had shaken their collecting boxes, and had sent off the bearded young heroes to jihad. The photos and film footage of the bandolier-slung fighters in the mountains was compelling. Afghanistan had been their triumph—and it certainly owed much to the massive injections of Saudi government funds via Pakistan, along with private, charitable cash.
Khaled Batarfi remembers the celebratory gatherings in Jeddah’s grandest homes, with groaning buffets, trays of fruit juice, and the guest of honor, Osama Bin Laden, doing the rounds to be embraced and kissed. Thirty-two years old in March 1989, the young man was as quiet and soft-spoken as ever, but he was clearly gathering a sense of destiny. After the meal the room fell silent as the victorious mujahid rose to tell tales of caves and of the mountains, of battles won and of brave companions who had not returned, but who were now, of course, all sitting beside God as martyrs in heaven—“Al-hamdu lillah,” “God be praised,” murmured the room in unison.
Invited to look into the future, the warrior came up with an unusual prediction that he derived from the war between Iraq and Iran, which had just petered out. Both sides had fought themselves to a standstill. But now, warned Osama, Saddam had a huge army on his hands—hundreds of thousands of young men for whom he had no peacetime jobs. The Iraqi dictator was feeling humiliated, and, with the continuing oil glut, he was desperately short of cash. Far from being grateful to the countries that had helped him out, he was angry and full of blame. Having been brushed off by Iran, he would be casting around for another target.
PART TWO
KINGDOM AT WAR
A.D. 1990 -2001 (A.H. 1411-1422)
So intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.
—Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
CHAPTER 14
Desert Storm
“It was a Wednesday night, going into Thursday morning,” remembers Ahmed Badeeb, who received a call in the small hours from the director of the Saudi intelligence bureau in Kuwait. “He told me he was up on top of the office with his binoculars—the Iraqis had driven over the border, and he was watching them. They were heading into the city with armored cars and tanks.”
Helicopters were landing special forces troops in the city, guided down by men on the ground waving flashlights—a group of Iraqi air-traffic controllers, it was later discovered, that had come to Kuwait pretending to be a football team.
Badeeb put in a call to King Fahd, who was cruising in the Red Sea on his yacht.
“Nonsense, Ahmed” scoffed the king. “You’re making it up. I was on the phone just five minutes ago with the emir of Kuwait.”
But Fahd called the Saudi ambassador just the same, and Badeeb listened on the line as the ambassador climbed the stairs to report from his own roof.
“There’s nothing at all, tal omrak [may your life be long]. I can’t see anything. Wait a minute—wallahi [by God], I am mistaken! I can hear bullets!”
“Escape at once!” Badeeb heard the king shouting. “Line up the cars! Get yourself out of there now!”
“Sons of the Arabian Gulf!” ran a plaintive and unsourced statement issued on a Kuwait radio frequency that was picked up by the BBC that morning. “Men of the desert shield . . . an Arabian Gulf country is asking for your help. How could an Arab occupy the land of his Arab brother? . . . Kuwait of Arabism, which has never abandoned its pan-Arab duty, today appeals to Arab consciences everywhere. God is above the aggressor . . .”
And with that pious expression of hope, the BBC’s monitors could pick up no more.
A few hours later Prince Mohammed bin Fahd was awoken in Al-Khobar by a call from the captain of the Al-Khafji frontier post on the Saudi-Kuwait border—the emir of Kuwait had just driven in and wanted to speak to him.
In fact, the emir wanted to speak to Mohammed’s father, the king, but no one knew his number in Jeddah. For two hours Fahd and his son tried to persuade Emir Jaber, a timid and depressive man, to stop waiting at the border and drive down the coast to Dhahran. In the end, Fahd told his son to drive up and get him.
Mohammed bin Fahd and his guards jumped into a 4x4 and headed northward up the coast road, past a long stream of Kuwaitis heading south.
“The emir did not want to leave the border,” he recalls. “He kept looking across at his country and phoning to Kuwait City to try and find out what was going on.”
Fahd was phoning his son every half hour.
“ ‘You’ve got to bring him south,’ he told me. ‘It’s not safe! You’ve got to move! Now!’ ”
Eventually Mohammed bin Fahd persuaded Jaber to leave the border. The prince drove the now stateless ruler south and delivered him to Dammam late that afternoon.
If Saddam’s invasion surprised the Saudis, they were still more shocked by the reaction of countries they had considered their friends—especially that of the biggest client on their payroll, Yasser Arafat, who came out for Iraq. By one estimate, the Saudi government had paid $1 billion or more to the Palestine Liberation Organization in the course of the 1980s. Then, as now, Saudi Arabia was by far the largest financial supporter of the Palestinians.
“We watched the Palestinians chanting against us on television,” remembers Princess Latifa bint Musaed. “I couldn’t believe what they were shouting: ‘With chemicals you must kill them, Saddam!’ I was so angry. Ever since I could remember I had been sending riyals to help support the poor oppressed Palestinians every month. So did my friends. Helping the Palestinians was a thing that good Saudis did.”
King Hussein of Jordan also came out in support of the Iraqi invasion, telling CNN that Saddam could be forgiven for assimilating Kuwait—the little emirate, he said dismissively, was “a British colonial fiction.” This was rich coming from a man for whose family the British had invented the Kingdom of Transjordan only two generations previously, but Hussein seemed to have forgotten that particul
ar episode in Hashemite history.
“Even if I were not a king, I would still be the ‘shareef ’ [descendant of the Prophet],” he told a gathering of Jordan’s tribal and parliamentary leaders, referring back to the title his ancestors had borne for the seven pre-Saudi centuries during which they had ruled in Mecca. “Indeed, now you may call me shareef.”
To emphasize his claim to rule on Saudi soil, the king chose this moment to grow a beard that made him look remarkably like the last but one shareef, his great-grandfather Hussein, who had packed up his gold and fled from Jeddah in 1924 as the Saudi armies approached. Sixty-six years later, it seemed, the great-grandson was ready to return.
Yemeni television redrew its television weather map to relocate its borders hundreds of miles northward, painting vast swaths of Saudi territory in Yemeni colors. The electronic land grab crossed the peninsula just south of Riyadh. When the Saudi government revoked the favored-neighbor privileges extended to Yemeni workers in the Kingdom, the Yemenis walked off jauntily.
“We’ll be back,” chortled one group to their Saudi employers, “and when we come back, we’ll be occupying your houses.”
It was the revolt of the have-nots who had long resented the Saudi blend of windfall wealth and self-righteousness. Now they showed their true feelings. Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria, Mauritania—even the Afghan government recently installed in Kabul with Saudi money—all distanced themselves from Saudi Arabia. A leaked recording from the Cairo summit summoned to discuss the crisis exposed Arab leaders shouting insults at one another across the table.14 Saddam had not disclosed the direction he would be heading after he had swallowed Kuwait, but it did not sound as if his freshly declared friends would object too much if he staked his claim to the oil fields of the Kingdom.
Fahd said nothing—in public. Behind closed doors the Saudi king was on the phone constantly to his allies, particularly President Mubarak of Egypt, who, like Fahd, had accepted Saddam’s personal assurance that he would not invade Kuwait. Like Fahd, the Egyptian felt bitterly betrayed. But the king kept his counsel. As the days went by, it seemed possible to some observers that Saudi Arabia might be planning to accept the Iraqi occupation in some messy compromise that would be covered up with assurances of Arab brotherly love. The Desert Leopard, they insinuated, was in a funk.
“Not at all,” recalls a member of his kitchen cabinet. “He did not want to show his hand too early. It was a tactic he took from poker. Fahd never took any decision without running it right through the consensus—all his brothers, the main ministers, the military, the tribes, and the religious sheikhs.”
The sheikhs most of all. Faced with an armed threat on his border, Fahd obviously spoke to his military, but his most important calls were to the religious establishment, and to Abdul Aziz Bin Baz in particular. Would the ulema support him, asked the king, if he had to turn to America for military assistance?
The answer was a prompt and unanimous no. The Wahhabi tradition—upheld in the past by the “Son of the Tiger” and by Bin Baz himself when he was qadi of Al-Kharj—was to seek separation from nonbelievers: “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.” This well-known hadith was one of several authorities that fundamentalists liked to cite as prohibiting the presence of infidels in the Kingdom. There remained many a true believer in the towns of Unayzah and Buraydah who would walk the other way if he saw a foreigner in the street. Such cautious and fearful folk constituted the deep roots of the Kingdom’s believing community, and it was for them that the sheikhs now had to speak.
Fahd kept on trying, recruiting his brothers Salman and Nayef, who had more pious reputations. All the senior princes maintained close ties with the ulema, and with Bin Baz in particular, some of them visiting him in his home and seeking spiritual guidance. The keener princes rather enjoyed sitting in Bin Baz’s majlis to watch the blind sheikh conduct his teachings, when his students would read out sections of the Koran or Islamic writings, then earnestly scribble down the wisdom that the great man delivered at the end of every paragraph.
The scholar’s home was a little cluster of modern two-story buildings where he lived with his wives and children in the Shumaysi neighborhood of Riyadh. This was royal territory. Talal bin Abdul Aziz and other princes had palaces nearby. In fact, the compound had been a gift to Bin Baz from the royal family. This did not make it a bribe. All senior Saudi clerics lived in homes that were gifts from rich benefactors and foundations. Still, it was a reminder of the underlying reality of the royal-Wahhabi alliance. The Al-Saud needed the Wahhabi clerics for their legitimacy, but the clerics, for their part, depended equally upon the Al-Saud. In no other Muslim Arab country did senior religious figures enjoy such prestige and closeness to the government centers of power. There would be no more cars and plush houses for the sheikhs if Saddam Hussein marched into Riyadh.
It took a few days of arguing, but once the discussion had started, Fahd reckoned that the initial No would not stand.
“’Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds,” came the announcement, eventually, on August 13, 1990. “The board of senior ulema has been aware of the great massing of troops on the Kingdom’s border and of the aggression of Iraq on a neighboring country. . . . This has prompted the rulers of the Kingdom . . . to ask Arab and non-Arab countries to deter the expected danger.” It was the duty of the good Muslim ruler, continued the statement, “to take every means to deter aggression and the incursion of evil. . . . So the board thus supports all measures taken by the ruler.”
It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but it would do. In the meantime, the Saudi king had been talking to Washington. On Saturday, August 4, General Norman Schwarzkopf received a phone call from his boss, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“King Fahd is asking for someone to brief him on the threat to his kingdom,” said Powell. “When you get there, you’ll have to play it by ear.”
“Is the U.S. government saying we’re prepared to commit forces?” asked Schwarzkopf.
“Yes,” replied Powell. “If King Fahd gives his permission.”
The bulky figure of the Saudi king was waiting for the Americans in the far left-hand corner of the majlis in his Jeddah palace beside the Red Sea. Down one side of the plush green and gold room were lined the princes—Abdullah; Saud Al-Faisal, the foreign minister; Bandar bin Sultan, just in himself from Washington; Abdul Rahman, Sultan’s Sudayri brother and vice defense minister—all in robes, headdresses, dark mustaches and beards. Down the other wall, dressed in shirts, ties, and Western business suits and every one of them clean-shaven, were seated the American officials—Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Pentagon strategist Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates (later defense secretary to both George W. Bush and to Barack Obama), and Ambassador Chas Freeman, along with their bemedaled and uniformed military delegation.
Schwarzkopf strode forward with his array of charts and aerial photographs, and, since there was no seat available, he went down on one knee in front of the king to begin his presentation.
Embarrassed, Fahd called for a servant to bring a chair, so the husky four-star general found himself seated with his display materials in his lap, while the Saudi king looked over one shoulder and Crown Prince Abdullah peered over the other.
“I had imagined,” Schwarzkopf recalls, “that they would listen to my briefing politely, then go away to discuss it among themselves.”
In fact, he found himself in the middle of an animated discussion in Arabic, only snippets of which were translated into English by Bandar. The U.S. photographs, taken a few days earlier by surveillance planes and satellites, showed Iraqi armored vehicles and troops massed in the desert along the Saudi border, with a handful of tanks—no more than five—clearly inside Saudi territory. Schwarzkopf was inclined to think that this was unintentional. The Saudi-Kuwaiti border was not delineated on the ground at that point. But Fahd took it very seriously.
“I don’t care if it’s only
one tank!” said the king indignantly. “They’ve trespassed on Saudi sovereignty.”
Schwarzkopf said bluntly that America had no inside intelligence of Iraqi intentions, and he now laughs at the often-canvassed Arab conspiracy theory that the United States had doctored the aerial photographs to make the threat seem worse than it was.
“They were regular reconnaissance photographs, sharp and clear, taken on some very bright days, but they did not show a definite picture. If we had doctored them we could have done a much better job. I explained that we could only make an educated deduction from the facts on the ground: these were identifiably some of the Iraqi Army’s very best units; they were clearly pausing to rearm, refuel, and reequip as taught by their Soviet instructors. We had observed them regroup that way during the Iran-Iraq War. They might or might not be preparing to attack. But it could hardly be said that their posture looked defensive. The tanks were facing south.”
Schwarzkopf concluded with a presentation of the substantial forces that the United States could provide to protect the Kingdom, then he yielded the floor to Cheney for a final statement. President Bush was willing to make this military commitment immediately, said the defense secretary: “If you ask us, we will come. When you ask us to go home, we will leave. We will seek no permanent bases.”
This was the point at which Schwarzkopf had expected the Saudis to retire to conduct their deliberations privately. But the princes continued their discussion briskly and briefly in front of their visitors—with the turning point coming in a sharp exchange between Fahd and Abdullah.
“We must be careful not to rush into a decision,” said the crown prince.