Bin Laden turns heat on Saudi
Arabia By Michael Scheuer
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
issued 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.
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