By Inge Fryklund
After the carnage in Paris, Western
governments turned immediately to debating the usual tactics for “bringing the
terrorists to justice.” Should we employ drone strikes, they wonder? Boots on
the ground? Police?
The much more
important matter, however, is identifying and stopping the source of the
nihilism, misogyny, and sectarian animus that’s found fertile breeding grounds
in the civil wars of the Middle East. Unless the source is addressed, there
will be an endless supply of terrorists wreaking havoc. And we in the West will
continue wringing our hands and responding impulsively rather than
strategically.
While
virtually all Islamic scholars dispute the theological soundness of the ISIS
ideology, the group’s roots lie in fundamentalist Sunni Islam, specifically the
Wahhabi strain officially espoused by Saudi Arabia — our “ally” — which views
Shiites as apostates and seeks to turn Islamic societies back to an intolerant
(and imagined) medieval past where women are stoned for adultery and reporters
are lashed. Since the 1970s, the Saudi government and its allied religious
establishment have exported their extremist version of Sunni Islam around the
world — all financed by their oil money.
During the
1970s and ‘80s, Saudi Arabia financed Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services
Intelligence) in support of the anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan that
became the Taliban. The U.S. matched the Saudi contribution to ISI, but
abdicated its responsibility to see where the money was going. Anxious to avoid
overt provocation of the Soviets, Washington allowed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia
to choose the recipients of American taxpayer dollars, and these were the most
fundamentalist insurgent factions — like the Haqqani network, which plagues
Afghanistan even today and has targeted American soldiers serving there.
Saudi money
financed the Pakistani madrassas that provided the only available “schooling”
for a generation of young Afghan male refugees. In camps devoid of women, the
extreme separation of the sexes resulted in young males detached from any
experience of women or family life. They were taught to memorize the Koran (in
Arabic, having no idea what it said), use weapons, and hate the West. They were
otherwise illiterate about both secular subjects and Islamic jurisprudence.
Since the
1990s, Saudi money has similarly financed mosques and Wahhabi-inspired teaching
throughout the Balkans as well, contributing to the instability of that region.
It appears
that the connection between Saudi Arabia and the Paris bombings is even more
direct. Many of the plotters came from the Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels.
In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries funded Wahhabi religious
schools there, displacing or taking over the more moderate mosques founded by
the Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the district and helping to thwart their
children’s potential for cultural integration.
ISIS’ extreme
misogynistic worldview was starkly on display in its statement after the Paris
massacre. It referred to a “profligate prostitution party” at the Bataclan
Conference Center. This should be a red flag. The equation of women out to a
concert and prostitution reflects the same mindset animating the Saudi
insistence that women cannot drive, cannot leave the house unless escorted by a
male relative, and must be covered head to toe. (In fact, I would argue there’s
an insufficiently explored thread of distorted sexuality in hardline Wahhabi
belief and practice.)
Our “ally’s”
religiously mandated intolerance was displayed to the world in the hatred that
we witnessed on Nov. 13th, with hundreds dead and many more maimed in Lebanon
and Paris. Why do we put up with this aggressive medieval proselytizing from
Saudi Arabia? With allies like this, who needs enemies?
Well, the
simple answer is oil: We’ve chosen to buy our oil from Saudi Arabia and boycott
the Shiite Iranian source.
But cheap oil
may have been purchased too dearly when the mayhem in the Middle East and now
Europe is the result. Accepting higher oil prices in the interests of
containing Sunni nihilism could be a worthwhile bargain.
We’ve also
boxed ourselves in diplomatically by a generation of demonizing and isolating
Iran, the major Shiite power, leaving no counterweight to the Saudi Sunni
ideology. Yes, we cite the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, but
forget that Iranian anti-American sentiment was a predictable result of the CIA
overthrowing the elected and more or less democratic government of Prime
Minister Mossadegh in 1953. (The U.S. acted at a British request; they wanted
to control Iranian oil and Mossadegh nationalized it.) We condemned Iran to a
generation of brutal dictatorship under the Shah’s notorious secret police.
Should we have been surprised when the revolution that came in 1979 brought
payback to the Americans?
While Iran
does indeed support violence in other countries, its efforts seem rationally
related to political objectives (supporting Hezbollah against the Israeli
occupation, and Assad as a fellow Shiite power) and might be resolved as such.
They have thus far not included assaults on uninvolved civilians and barbarism
for its own sake.
So what to do
at this point? We have leverage over Saudi Arabia if we choose to use it. We
should stop supplying weapons — which are currently being used to attack Shiite
factions in Yemen — and insist that Saudi Arabia cease financing
fundamentalists throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and the Balkans. It’s
pointless to apply tactical solutions to the problems of the Middle East while
Saudi Arabia is free to (almost literally) pour oil on the fires.
About The Author:
About The Author:
Ms. Inge
Fryklund, JD, PhD, has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with USAID,
UNDP, and with the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.
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Publication Details:
This article was first published at Foreign Policy in Focus Website on November 20, 2015
This article was first published at Foreign Policy in Focus Website on November 20, 2015
This work is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 by the original publisher.