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Bin Laden turns
heat on Saudi Arabia
By Michael Scheuer
11/01/08 "Asia Times" -- -- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden's latest message is one of the richest, most comprehensive
and starkly realistic he has issued since the start of the Iraq
war. This essay considers al-Qaeda's dour recognition of its
inability to control post-occupation events in Iraq as a small
vanguard organization and a non-Iraqi presence in the country.
On December 29, 2007, bin Laden issued a 56-minute statement
that addressed Muslim insurgents in Iraq [1] and built on his
earlier message from October 22 [2]. The new statement was
ssued via al-Qaeda's media arm, al-Sahab,
and appeared on several Internet sites without pre-publication
excerpts on al-Jazeera television. Al-Jazeera's editing of the
October 22 audiotape distorted bin Laden's message, incorrectly
giving the implication that he was saying "all is lost" for the
mujahideen in Iraq [3]. Al-Jazeera customarily deletes anything
critical of the Saudi regime from bin Laden's messages. This
occurred in the case of the October 22 tape and al-Qaeda
apparently did not want to take a chance on al-Jazeera's
penchant for politically correct editing with its most recent
message [4].
Focus on Iraq
The latest bin Laden tape is - like its October 22 predecessor -
pre-eminently a post-Iraq war tape. In both tapes, bin Laden
declares that the United States recognizes that its Coalition
has been militarily defeated in Iraq and predicts that US and
other foreign forces will leave. Bin Laden does not provide the
date US-led forces will withdraw; he focuses his attention on
working with Islamist insurgents in Iraq to ensure the Americans
and their Arab-government allies cannot build a national unity
government that is an "agent to America", dominated by
non-Islamists and ready to permit the US basing rights and
access to Iraqi oil.
Because US-led forces have accepted military defeat, bin Laden
argues, Washington and its allies must look for other means to
prevent the consolidation of an Islamic state in Iraq. "My talk
to you," bin Laden explained, "is about the plots that are being
hatched by the Zionist-Crusader alliance, led by America, in
cooperation with its agents in the region, to steal the fruit of
the blessed jihad in the land of the two rivers, and what we
should do to foil these plots."
History's lesson
As always, bin Laden speaks as a product and close observer of
the Afghans' jihad against the Soviet Union. In appealing for
unity among the Iraqi mujahideen, he makes no demand that they
join al-Qaeda and follow its instructions. He points rather to
the failure of the Afghan insurgents to consolidate victory
after the Red Army's 1989 withdrawal: "It would be useful here
to recall an effort in the past to unify the leaders of the
Afghan mujahideen, which includes important lessons that are
related to our topic," bin Laden tells the Iraqi fighters in an
almost avuncular tone.
We had made these efforts with
Sheikh Abdullah Azzam [bin Laden's late Palestinian mentor
in Afghanistan], may God have mercy on him. After months of
seeking to achieve unity among [the Afghan leaders] and
removing the obstacles that some of them used to claim that
they obstruct unity, [but then] after removing these
obstacles...they [would] claim that there was another
obstacle [preventing unity], and so on and so forth... One
of the mujahideen had a strong opinion about these
[obstructing] leaders. He was an old wise person who had
long experience in life with people. At the time we used to
reject his strong-worded statement about them. I will try to
convey to you some of what he said. The conclusion is that
those leaders are tradesmen who care more about their
leadership and give priority to their personal interests
over the cause. We used not to believe what he said about
them. This has delayed our realization of the sound
conception of persons and events [presented by this
mujahid]. The harmful consequences of this are no secret ...
In fact, developments have come to confirm things that we
had never expected due to the fact that we were young and
lacked experience at the time.
In Iraq, Riyadh is the main
enemy
Bin Laden urges the Iraqi fighters to heed the lesson of the
Afghans' historic post-Soviet debacle because "the same thing
applies to Iraq today"; leaders are more interested in their own
power and status than in making Islam and the ummah
(Islamic community) victorious. And while bin Laden warns that
Washington is using promises of money, military training and
arms to entice the "Islamic Party and some fighting groups [to]
support America against Muslims", he leaves no doubt that the
Islamists' main enemy in Iraq is now Saudi Arabia, not the
supposedly militarily defeated United States. After the Soviets'
withdrawal from Afghanistan, bin Laden reminded the Iraqi
fighters that "America exerted great efforts ... to convince the
Afghan leaders through the governments of Riyadh and Islamabad
to join a national unity government with communists and
secularists from the West." Bin Laden explained that the Saudi
regime was then - and is again today in Iraq - the main enemy of
the mujahideen:
[In post-Soviet Afghanistan]
the government of Riyadh sought the help of its unofficial
scholars to infiltrate the ranks of the mujahideen. These
were influential speakers who incited the people to perform
jihad and collect huge funds for the leaders of the
mujahideen. At the set time, [the Saudi regime] asked the
Afghan leaders to unite with the communists and secularists
under the so-called national unity state. [The Saudis]
obstructed the plan to achieve unity among the leaders of
the mujahideen when they tempted one of them with a big
amount of money and promised him to be the president of
Afghanistan ... We do not have much time here for more
details. So the current situation [in Iraq] is similar to
the past one [in Afghanistan]. The government of Riyadh
continues to this day to carry out the same malicious roles
with many Islamic action leaders and commanders of the
mujahideen in our nation [5].
Bin Laden goes on to claim that the
Saudis are trying to co-opt some of the Sunni mujahideen in Iraq
by allowing "some groups to confidently move in the Gulf to
receive [financial] support". Riyadh is careful to avoid
officially funding its Iraqi insurgent favorites, so its support
"is channeled under the banner of raising donations by some
unofficial scholars and preachers". Bin Laden warns that "many
of them ... are loyal to the state and seek to implement
[Riyadh's] policy by pulling the rug from under the honest
mujahideen's feet" and forcing them to support a national-unity
government that is designed to be the agent of the United States
and Saudi Arabia.
He asks the Iraqi mujahideen how they can trust Saudi King
Abdullah, who is the "malignant foe" of Islam, the "main US
agent in the region" and a man who took it on himself "to tempt
and tame every free, virtuous, and honest person with the aim of
dragging him to the path of temptation and misguidance ... [and]
the path of betraying the religion and nation and submitting to
the will of the Crusader-Zionist alliance". The Americans are
defeated, bin Laden concludes, but to assure God's victory the
Iraqi mujahideen must reject Saudi overtures and direction if
they are "not to waste the fruit of this chaste and pure blood
that was shed for the sake of consolidating religion and
entrenching the state of Muslims".
A way out?
Bin Laden and his senior lieutenants are reliving what for them
is a familiar nightmare. In one of the greatest ironies of the
post-1945 era, Islamist fighters have proven that with great,
prolonged and bloody effort they can claim the military defeat
of superpowers - the USSR and the United States - but cannot
consolidate victory when confronted by the wiles, funds and
religious establishment of the Saudi leadership. While it is
clear in the December 29 tape that bin Laden rates the Saudis as
the main obstacle to God's victory in Iraq, there is little
indication of what he intends to do to destroy Riyadh's ability
to stymie the mujahideen there as it did in Afghanistan.
One possibility - though bin Laden did not allude to this -
would require a rethinking of al-Qaeda's grand strategy.
Although bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been consistent in their
three-fold grand strategy - to drive the United States from the
Muslim world, destroy Israel and incumbent Muslim regimes and
settle scores with the Shi'ites - they now face a situation
where the Saudi regime has not only so far prevented the
unification of Islamist leaders, but is allegedly preparing the
Sunni Iraqi insurgents it supports for a civil war with Iraq's
Iranian-backed Shi'ites.
Bin Laden, of course, is correct in arguing that Riyadh wants no
genuine national-unity government; the Saudis may be intending
to fund and equip a Sunni insurgent force that could join forces
with the US-armed and trained Sunni Awakening Councils to battle
for control of post-US Iraq against the Shiites and seek the
establishment of a Saudi-like Sunni theocracy in Baghdad. If
this occurs, the third step of bin Laden's grand strategy -
settling scores with the Shi'ites - will immediately become the
top priority of the Islamic world, as both Sunnis and Shi'ites
focus on assisting their brethren in the Iraqi civil war. This
scenario would severely erode bin Laden's ability to keep Sunni
militants focused on the "far" US enemy.
If bin Laden's assertions are true, and Saudi Arabia's
Afghanistan-like intervention in Iraq continues to prevent the
mujahideen unity bin Laden advocates, the al-Qaeda chief and his
shura (consultative) council may soon confront the very
unpalatable necessity of having to break with their traditional
grand strategy and move to try to destroy the Saudi regime.
In such a scenario, al-Qaeda would abandon the pinprick
insurgency-and-terrorism campaign it has conducted in the
kingdom since September 11, and employ all the force it commands
and can incite there—and bring in from Iraq - to take on the
well-infiltrated Saudi military and security services. Such a
campaign probably would combine attempts to assassinate the
king, the interior minister and senior intelligence and military
officials with attacks to disrupt Saudi oil production.
The latter operations would be staged in the hope of forcing
Washington to a Hobson's choice between standing back and
allowing havoc to reign in the world's oil market - with the
immense damage it would entail for the US economy - and ordering
US military forces into action against Muslims in order to
restore oil production on the sacred soil of the Prophet
Mohammad's birthplace and what bin Laden refers to as "the land
of the two holy mosques".
The foregoing clearly is not an option that al-Qaeda is eager to
undertake; it is an option that amounts to an almost desperate
gamble. But that said, if such a campaign successfully triggered
a US military response in the kingdom, the focus and militancy
of the entire Muslim world - both Sunni and Shi'ite - would be
switched from Iraq to Saudi Arabia, and the enmity and weapons
of all Muslims would, at least temporarily, be refocused on the
"far enemy" in North America.
Notes
1. Osama bin Laden, "The Way to Foil Plots", al-Sahab Media
Production Organization, December 29, 2007. All quotes from bin
Laden in the text are from this statement unless otherwise
noted.
2. Osama bin Laden, "A Message to Our People in Iraq", Threat
and Claim Monitor, IntelCenter.com, October 22, 2007.
3. Al-Jazeera, October 23, 2007. By censoring bin Laden's
statement, al-Jazeera unwittingly seems to have done al-Qaeda a
great service. The "all-is-lost" message yielded by al-Jazeera's
editors has become the common wisdom among Western media and
governments, thereby obscuring for those entities the fact that
bin Laden was discussing how all Iraqi insurgents should proceed
to consolidate Islam's victory over the United States and its
allies in Iraq.
4. Al-Jazeera's editing earned it some outrage and condemnation
from Islamists. See, for example, Bilal al-Khaldi, "And thus
Osama's message has gone to waste. An invitation to a proactive
response." Islamic al-Fallujah Forums (Internet), November 16,
2007.
5. Bin Laden says that the Saudi effort to prevent post-Soviet
Afghan unity was led and managed by "the Riyadh intelligence
chief", who was at the time Prince Turki al-Faisal. This is the
same Prince Turki who - while serving as the Saudi ambassador to
the United States - unexpectedly and hurriedly departed
Washington in early 2007 when a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war seemed
imminent in Iraq. Not much has been heard from Prince Turki
since his departure, but if bin Laden's claims about the current
Saudi campaign to co-opt Iraq's Sunni mujahideen are true, it is
hard to imagine anyone more qualified by past experience to lead
the effort than Prince Turki.
Michael Scheuer served as the
chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Central Intelligence Agency's
Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is now a senior
fellow at The Jamestown Foundation.
This article first appeared in
The
Jamestown Foundation
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