Samuel Albert
2016-01-11, Issue 757
cc DN
The
latest executions in Saudi Arabia should make it very
clear that the Western powers' "war on terror" has
nothing to do with opposition to chopping off heads
and sectarian religious fanaticism. Instead of
condemning this crime, the US, UK and other Western
powers have continued to give the Saudi regime, if not
their public political blessing, at least their
practical backing – in the name of the necessary
alliances they claim flow from that "war on terror".
These crimes were part of the beleaguered Saudi royal
family's efforts to defend its rule by wielding state
violence and religious authority, both represented by
the executioner's sword. The most prominent of those put
to death was Nimr al-Nimir, a leading Shia cleric tried
in secret and convicted of supporting the protest
movement that swept the Shia population in eastern Saudi
Arabia and neighbouring Bahrain in 2011, especially
among youth influenced by the Arab Spring. Several
people accused of participating in political rallies at
that time, arrested when they were young teenagers, are
set to be executed next.
Nimir's execution, along with that of several other
Shias, was a heinous response to legitimate protests
against discrimination in employment, education and
other fields – proof, if any is needed, that the Saudi
regime, rather than moving away from religious
fanaticism under the year-old reign of King Salman and
his princes, is escalating its use of
religiously-justified murder against any political
challenge.
Even more, it was a deliberate provocation against Shia
political forces internationally, especially the Iranian
regime, very likely with the hope of forcing the Iranian
ruling clergy – themselves notorious for mass executions
– to react in such a way as to complicate the endeavours
of those within the Iranian regime seeking agreements
with the US and those in the American ruling class who
believe that US interests now require such agreements.
It was also meant to put an end to challenges to the
legitimacy of the House of Saud coming from Al Qaeda,
Daesh and the like, inside as well as outside the
kingdom and even among the myriad members of the royal
family, seizing the role of leader of all Sunni
believers with overtones of a religious showdown.
The executions were a barbaric act but not a deranged
one – they served very clear political goals, the same
goals behind the Saudi-led war on Yemen and Saudi
efforts to confront the Assad regime and its Iranian
backers on religious grounds and contend with Daesh
sharia by imposing Saudi sharia. These are goals which,
in some aspects, converge with thinking among the
Western powers about how to shape the chaos in the
Middle East to their advantage.
The difference with Daesh is not that the Saudi regime
is more "moderate" or in any way less cruel. The
monarchy's relationship with the US is complex and
potentially volatile – the US has played both sides of
the Sunni/Shia divide, including working with the
Iranian Shia fundamentalist regime in some places at
some times. But the fact is that the US and its allies
would not have been able to dominate the Middle East
without their alliance with Saudi Arabia, as fraught as
that alliance might be for both sides right now.
That's why US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister
David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande
have kept silent in the face of these executions. At
first deputies were deployed to click their tongues
about the general atmosphere of "sectarian tensions in
the region", as if Western intervention itself were not
the biggest factor churning the voracious whirlpool of
religious conflict in the Middle East. As shock waves
mounted, their governments expressed concern solely
about the possible political inconveniences arising from
the killing and not the injustice of it.
The 4 January editorial in the UK Independent could not
have been more explicit: while distancing itself from
the Tory Party's shameless enthusiasm for the Saudi
regime – noting that PM Cameron recently supported the
successful Saudi bid for the chairmanship of the UN
Human Rights Council – the newspaper concluded that "it
is not in our interest to see, let alone provoke, the
fall of the House of Saud." This is also, of course, the
policy followed by Obama, who a year ago proclaimed "the
importance of the US-Saudi relationship as a force for
stability and security in the Middle East and beyond."
The Western imperialists have always known what the
Saudi regime is like. It has always practised
decapitating alleged apostates (accused of abandoning
Islam) – the young Palestinian poet and artist Ashraf
Fayadh is still scheduled to be executed for this
"crime". Many of the 153 people executed in 2015 and the
total of at least 2,200 people over the last three
decades were migrant workers from South Asia and
elsewhere, who have constructed the Gulf region's
palaces, palatial shopping malls, museums, sports
stadiums and other architectural marvels in virtual
bondage enforced by the sword.
The Saudi rulers are beholden for their swords, in the
broadest sense, to the Western powers. In November, not
long before the executions and long after the Saudi
government announced its plans to carry them out,
Obama's State Department approved a Saudi request to buy
$1.29 billion worth of bombs and missiles. The State
Department Website gives a chilling itemization of the
purchases, the kinds of munitions that Saudi Arabia and
its Gulf allies have been raining down on the Yemeni
people in a war that has killed at least 5,700 people,
half of them civilians, since the air and land invasion
began in March 2015. This war of aggression against a
country Saudi Arabia has traditionally considered its
rightful "back yard" could not be carried out without
the logistical support, air refuelling and targeting
teams provided by the US – this latter aspect making
Washington directly responsible for the bombing of
schools and hospitals.
Although the factors are complex, this war, like the
executions, is being carried out in the name of the
Saudi royal family's religious authority against Shia
and other disbelievers. (The Houthi rebels in Yemen,
whose Zaydi religious banner makes their faith a cousin
of Shiaism, are backed by Iran – which is far from the
main factor in the rebellion by Houthis and others
against the Saudi-backed regime.) This is another
example of how the Saudis are seeking to escalate the
religious dimension of the region's conflicts – with
concrete US support.
Obama personally came to meet with King Salman after his
enthroning a year ago, and his reign has been hailed as
inaugurating an era of reform by Westerners like the
leading American liberal commentator Thomas Friedman
(New York Times, 25 November 2015 – written at a time
when these executions were already set to take place).
The main "reform" so far has been holding elections for
insignificant municipal bodies, and allowing women to
vote in them, although not to drive to the polling
places or anywhere else, or make any decisions without
the permission of their male guardian. Over the last
year the Saudi regime has stepped up its executions, in
some cases crucifying the decapitated victims and
leaving their body to rot on public display.
Members of the royal family (which, thanks to polygamy,
numbers in the thousands) and high-ranking members of
the regime itself have supported Al-Qaeda, and the
regime met Al-Qaeda's sharpest criticism of it, the
stationing of US troops in Moslem holy lands, with the
transfer of those troops to bases elsewhere in the Gulf.
In Syria, Saudi Arabia has armed and financed a shifting
constellation of Islamist fundamentalist alliances. As
for Daesh, which shares the Salafi (fundamentalist)
ideology that legitimises the rule of the House of Saud
and similarly centres its system of oppressive relations
on the extreme oppression of women, the group's name
change from ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater
Levant) to the Islamic State signalled a direct threat
to the Saudi regime's claim to hold authority over the
world's Sunni Muslims.
The Saudi absolute monarchy calls for obedience as the
earthly "protector of the Ummah" (the so-called
community of believers) and not on the basis of direct
religious rule like Daesh's caliphate, run by a
self-proclaimed descendent of Mohammed. This distinction
is both a danger to the Saud dynasty's existence, and at
the same time not much of a difference at all,
especially insofar as the Saudi's respond to Daesh's
particular signature, its determination to exterminate
Shias as apostates worse than infidels, by putting
itself forward as the greatest Shia slayers of all.
The Western imperialist powers knew very well what they
were getting in their relationship with the Saudi
monarchy. Britain helped establish the monarchy in 1932,
after encouraging the rise of Wahhabism (the specific
form of Salafism associated with Arabian tribal
authorities) in its campaign to absorb the Ottoman
empire into its own. In a 1945 treaty signed by Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the US promised to keep the Saudi monarchy
in power, a pact renewed by George W. Bush in 2005.
Although the US grabbed the country away from Britain,
as part of replacing British domination of the Middle
East, the UK continues to maintain close financial and
military ties with Saudi Arabia. France, under the
Socialist president Hollande, is now also forging new
political and military links with the regime.
Yet Saudi Arabia's association with imperialism has
deeply transformed the country and its ruling class.
Like other Gulf states, it has become a major site of
capital accumulation in its own right within the
globalised capitalist economy dominated by the Western
imperialist powers. This has happened both through the
exploitation in the Gulf of labourers from the Moslem
world and far beyond, on the one hand, and on the other
the investment of Saudi and other Gulf capital in much
bigger countries like Egypt, whose economy, politics and
religious life are conditioned by this relationship.
In many ways, such as political influence and subsidies
to regimes like Pakistan, the religious inculcation of
the millions of Arabs brought to work in the Gulf and
the sponsorship of enormous religious and "charitable"
institutions and hundreds of TV preachers and media
outlets, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies are the
main vectors bringing modern Salafism to the Sunni
Moslem world, even as all of these countries are
connected ever more tightly to the international market
and the global capitalist system, with all its
inevitable rivalries among ruling classes that can only
accumulate capital in deadly competition with one
another.
It is true, as Obama said, that "the US-Saudi
relationship" has been invaluable to the US and the West
as a "force for stability and security in the Middle
East and beyond". But at the same time that relationship
has played a major role in creating the conditions for
today's instability in the region, where the US's
continued domination is not secure at all. High stakes
require desperate measures.
A great many people, especially in the Middle East,
whose people are by far the main targets and victims of
Daesh and all forms of Islamic fundamentalism, think
that the US deliberately created Daesh and the rest.
That's not literally true. Although Washington, London
and Tel Aviv encouraged Islamism in opposition to more
radical trends in the region, and although the workings
of the imperialist system created the conditions from
which Islamists arose, today various forms of Islamic
fundamentalism are an intractable problem for the US and
other Western imperialists. Yet the reality underlying
the "war on terror" is not a neat line-up of two sides.
Instead, rival imperialists and regional powers are
moving to advance their own reactionary interests in
collusion and collision with one another on a very
complex battleground. At the same time, in a general
way, all the contending monsters are feeding religious
fundamentalism of every sort, both intentionally and as
a by-product of their political and military manoeuvring
and the backward economic and social relations they
represent.
Imperialist capital now represented by people like Obama
and his fellow "Western leaders" needs the rule of
people like Saudi King Salman and his murdering princes,
who call on ancient ideologies and social systems but
would be powerless without modern imperialism. The US
and its partners and rivals can't stop making Islamic
and other religious fundamentalisms an increasingly
major feature of the twenty-first century. The "war on
terror" is a fraud – it is a contest over who can impose
their interests and the most terror.
* Samuel Albert writes for A World to Win News
Service, where this article first appeared.
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