May 13, 2003

CHEWING THE FATWA

Washington has delivered to Osama bin Laden one of the suspected terrorist mastermind's key demands, reports Eric Ellis

Politicians sometimes get handed victories when least expected.

Like the one George W. Bush has given his nemesis, terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. Washington’s announcement that its military is pulling out of Saudi Arabia for Iraq and Qatar delivers Osama one of his key demands.

The Pentagon has stationed forces in Saudi since 1990, a response to the invasion of Kuwait by the now-toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein – which prompted the first Gulf War. Riyadh was then happy to have Americans running around their deserts, indeed it invited them – even if some of the soldiers were, shockingly for strict Saudi sensibilities, women.

But it was the presence of these “infidels” in Saudi Arabia that most radicalised the Saudi-born bin Laden, who had recently arrived back victorious after several years fighting with the mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

That campaign, backed by Washington, may have made him notionally a US ally but as Osama saw it, the Al-Sauds, who have ruled Saudi Arabia since 1932 in an uneasy alliance with the peninsula’s Wahhabi majority, had committed a greater sin than Moscow’s mere takeover of a fringe Muslim country. By allowing infidels on Saudi sands, the Al-Sauds were abusing Islam’s holiest responsibility, their custodianship of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina.

Thus a terrorist was born, and a raison d’etre for the recruitment of thousands of disaffected Muslims created. Indeed, some of al Qaeda’s first targets were American bases in Saudi, the campaign perhaps culminating – it’s probably too early to make that call – in the September 11 attacks in the US itself. Some 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi. Even Paul Wolfowitz, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s number two at the Pentagon, concedes that resentment over the stationing of US forces in Saudi Arabia was “Osama bin Laden’s principal recruiting device”.

So will the pull-out placate the cranky Osama? Will he trump GWB and end the terror war? Most analysts contend probably not – and anxiously await his next video on al-Jazeera for his reasons why.