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QUITE apart from the monumental hypocrisy of US president Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, standing on Saudi soil while berating Iran for its human rights deficiencies and sponsorship of terrorism, their timing was appalling.
After all, the Iranian electorate had just a few days earlier turned out on a scale much larger than its American counterpart to return the reformist-minded Hassan Rouhani to power in a hotly contested presidential race. Sure, Iranian democracy is deficient in many ways and Rouhani’s room for manoeuvre will continue to be constrained by the very nature of the theocratic state. Yet the contrast with Saudi Arabia is nonetheless stupendous.
There are few parallels, even among its closest allies, to the kingdom’s disrespect and distaste for human rights. And as for sponsorship of terrorism, it isn’t necessary to repeatedly cite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers who perpetrated the atrocities of Sept 11, 2001 were Saudi nationals in order to make the case for its key role in disseminating the retrograde ideology that facilitates Salafist violence.
There are few parallels to the kingdom’s distaste for human rights.
After all, long before 9/11, Pakistan was among the earliest beneficiaries of Saudi munificence when a chain of madressahs sprang up in the 1980s to indoctrinate Afghan refugees, and in due course spawned the Afghan Taliban. When the latter eventually conquered Kabul, apparently with plenty of Pakistani assistance, it was considered a huge success. Saudi Arabia was one of only three states, alongside Pakistan and the UAE, to recognise the ‘emirate’ of Afghanistan.
It was quick to recant in the wake of 9/11: alienating the US had never been on its agenda. Lest we forget, though, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi gift to the Afghan jihad. The US was keen on a member of the royal family, someone who could be designated as a ‘prince’ in its propaganda, to join the anti-Soviet crusade. Understandably, no ‘prince’ — and there have always been plenty of those, given how prolific Ibn Saud and his progeny have been in terms of progeniture — was keen to volunteer. The scion of a leading industrialist family would have to do.
It’s also worth recalling that when Sudan offered to hand Bin Laden over to the Saudi authorities, they demurred. That is how he ended up back in Afghanistan. The rest, as they say, is history.
It did not end there, though. Many of the ‘home-grown’ terrorists who have perpetrated deadly violence in countries such as France and Britain have been associated with Saudi-financed mosques and preachers. The trend is unlikely to be coincidental, yet all too many Western countries besides the US continue to pander to the Saudi regime. The weapons the Saudis and their collaborators have deployed in claiming huge numbers of civilian lives in Yemen, perhaps the poorest Arab state, originate from Britain and France as well as the US.
There is little evidence that Iran was particularly keen on the Houthis when the Saudis embarked on their assault against Yemen. Things may have changed somewhat in the interim, but one constant has been the bolstering of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an outfit that hates the Houthis as much as Riyadh does.
And as far as Syria is concerned, it’s all very well to criticise Iran for standing by the despicable regime of Bashar al-Assad, but are the outfits that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf mates, notably Qatar, have allegedly been backing any less atrocious? Their attitude towards Christians and other minorities is, if anything, considerably worse.
As a sponsor of instability in the region, Riyadh deserves considerably more credit than Tehran. And on the domestic front, Iran, for all its severe limitations, is almost libertine in comparison with Saudi Arabia. What other country beheads people with such gleeful abandon? Or constrains women’s rights to quite the same extent?
We are frequently bombarded with news reports suggesting that Saudi Arabia is changing. King Salman’s favourite son, the deputy crown prince, is said to be a would-be reformer. Women may soon be permitted to drive. Hurrah. Even cinemas might be allowed. Yippee. But the most intriguing aspect of the coming transformation, necessitated by the sharp decline in oil revenues, will be the dismantling of the welfare state that has hitherto constrained open dissent to a considerable extent.
Of course, there’s no holding back on investments in weaponry, as Trump was delighted to note: $110 billion can immediately be spared, with further hundreds of billions over the coming decade — a “massive investment in America, its [military] industry and its jobs”, as the US president so eloquently put it. And as we all know, the only deity he worships is Mammon.
But his unequivocal commitment to the Middle East’s sectarian hostilities means the region could be paying for it for a very long time to come.
Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2017
