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Fact Number 4: Artificial Borders in the Middle East, including the Kingdom of Jordan

The concepts of citizenship and nationality are not perceived in the Middle East as they are in the Middle West. Indeed, to a large degree these concepts are unknown. This is based on the history, mentality, religion, and social structure of the area - ethnic and religious groups, tribes, clans, as contrasted to citizens. And the entire picture is complicated by the fact that the nations and international borders in the Arabic speaking Middle East are nothing more than lines drawn in the sand to satisfy the contradicting imperialistic goals of the nations that defeated the Turkish Empire in World War I.

Indeed, the nation/states in the Middle East are a crazy quilt created by the Allies, particularly Great Britain and France, who were victorious over the Ottoman Empire in World War I. There is nothing natural about the borders of Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Arab Emirates since they represent the results of power plays and squabbling among the victors who divided up the spoils. Iraq, for example, is a colonial creation built upon ancient Mesopotamia and composed of Sunni, Shi'ia, Kurds, and Turkmen held together by an iron hand in Baghdad.

Nineteen twenty-two was the pivotal year in which the fate of the Middle East for the rest of the 20th century established. The Ottoman Sultan was deposed and the Turkish National State (confined to the Turkish-speaking portion of the dissolved empire) came into being; The rest of the former Ottoman domains in the Middle East were partitioned between Britain and France by such documents as France's League of Nations Mandate to rule Syria and Lebanon, Britain's League of Nations Mandate to rule Palestine including Transjordan, and the treaty with Iraq which Britain intended to serve as affirmation of a Mandate to rule that newly created country in what had been Mesopotamia. Arabia was to remain independent under British-influenced monarchs.

Britain, France, and to a lesser extent Russia, established states, appointed persons to govern them, and drew frontiers between them.

Just to provide a taste of the artificiality of the borders in the Middle East, consider the following two (of many) piquant historical facts:

(1) When the borders between modern Iraq and modern Saudi Arabia were drawn by British diplomats, what began as a straight-as-an-arrow line ended with a bump that is still known as Churchill's Bump. That Bump created Kuwait. In fact, Winston Churchill personally created not just Iraq, Kuwait, and their mutual border, but he was also responsible for many of the current geopolitical land divisions within the Middle East. William Manchester, in his 1983 biography of Winston Churchill, reported on the British politician's diplomatic mission to the Middle East in 1921. On March 12 of that year, the Cairo conference opened, and "Winston's real purpose in Cairo was ... the choosing of two kings, proteges of the British to rule over Iraq and Transjordan." At the conference, where "of the thirty-eight participants, thirty-six were British," Lawrence (of Arabia) suggested that "Faisal be crowned head of Iraq.… His motion, with Churchill's approval, carried without dissent." But the amir Faisal had a brother, the amir Abdullah, and as Manchester relates, "Churchill announced his intention to appoint Abdullah in Palestine, and in later years he would say: 'The Emir Abdullah is in Transjordan, where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.'"

(2) At the end of 1922, in a meeting at a port called 'Uqair, Sir Percy Cox imposed upon Ibn Saud an agreement defining the Saudi kingdoms' frontiers with Iraq and Kuwait.

Thus, the European powers, in addition to slicing up the former Ottoman Empire, also wanted to ensure that the governments of these puppet nations be compliant to their needs and wishes. This required that the appropriate persons be the leaders of these new nations.

It is impossible, in a short article, to describe the all the Byzantine dealings, intrigue, scheming, double crossing, double dealing and general bad faith that characterized the relationships among the leaders of the Arabic speaking people, between them and the European powers during World War I, and at the peace conferences that took place in the period immediately after the war ended. However, a brief outline of the facts pertaining to Iraq, Jordan and Palestine is necessary for purposes of this article, particularly the history and fate of the Hashemite clan in Iraq and Jordan.

The Hejaz is the western section of the Arabian Peninsula bordering the Red Sea; it contains the two Moslem holy cities, Mecca and Medina. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the area was ruled on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan by Hussein Ibn Ali who was known as the Sherif of Mecca. Hussein, like Mohammed himself, was a member of the House of Hashem and referred to himself as a "Hashemite." Two of Hussein's sons, Feisal and Abdullah were active politically and were deputies in the Ottoman Parliament. T.E. Lawrence, a British officer, convinced the British High Command that Arab irregulars could assist British forces in the Palestine and Syria campaigns which Allenby, the head of the Allied forces in the Middle East, was planning to launch in the autumn of 1917. Feisal was deputized as a British general under Allenby's command and was transported by sea from the British-held coast of Arabia to Aqaba with a small band of Bedouins. Feisel's army, at its height, consisted of about 1000 Bedouins supplemented by about 2500 Ottoman ex-prisoners of war. When the invasion of Palestine took place along the Mediterranean coast, Feisel's forces harassed the Turks on the British right flank on the east bank of the Jordan River. Their effectiveness is still debated since much of their exploits were the product of Lawrence's vivid imagination and self-aggrandizement. (He became famous as Lawrence of Arabia). Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the head of Allenby's intelligence wrote that "it is safe to say that Lawrence's Desert Campaign had not the slightest effect on the main theatre west of the Jordan."

Be that as it may, on the morning of October 1, an Australian cavalry brigade achieved Allenby's goal - it entered Damascus. By clever public relations, it was declared that Damascus had been liberated by Feisal's forces. This was part of a British plan to install Feisal as King of Syria, essentially a British puppet. Faisal, who was indeed proclaimed king of Syria by a Syrian national congress in Damascus in March 1920, was ejected by the French in July of the same year. At the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British set the parameters for Iraqi political life that were to continue until the 1958 revolution; they chose Faisal as Iraq's first King. To confirm Faisal as Iraq's first monarch, a one-question plebiscite was carefully arranged that had a return of 96 percent in his favor. The British saw in Faisal a leader who possessed sufficient nationalist and Islamic credentials to have broad appeal, but who also was vulnerable enough to remain dependent on their support. He never achieved legitimacy and died while undergoing medical treatment in Switzerland and was succeeded by his twenty-one-year-old son, Ghazi. Iraq then experienced a series of military coups, revolutions and political assassinations. In April 1939, Ghazi was killed in an automobile accident and was succeeded by his infant son, Faisal II. Ghazi's first cousin, Amir Abd al Ilah, was made regent. The government in Baghdad was pro-Nazi and anti-British during World War II and the British invaded in 1941 and reimposed the monarchy. From then on, the monarchy was completely divorced from the powerful nationalist trend and was viewed as an anachronism that lacked popular legitimacy. The country experienced continuous unrest until the Hashimite monarchy was overthrown on July 14, 1958, in a coup in which a new republic was proclaimed and King Faisal II was executed, as were many others in the royal family. Thus, the Hashemite regime in Iraq, an artificial creation of British imperial ambitions, came to a bloody end.

The other Hashemite monarchy, the second creation of Great Britain and the successor to Hussein's other son Abdullah, rules today in Jordan. This came about through Britain's attempt to resolve its growing problems in the Middle East.

At the time of the Cairo Conference, having opted for a Hashemite solution for Iraq, Churchill decided to do the same for Transjordan which was in disorder and the British did not have enough troops to control it. Faisel's brother Abdullah, accompanied by 30 officers and 300 Bedouin had arrived in the Transjordan city of Amman. Churchill decided, for the good of Great Britain and to establish order, to offer Abdullah authority in that region. Abdullah agreed to govern Transjordan for six months, with the advice of a British chief political officer and with a British financial subsidy but without British troops. After a few months as governor of Transjordan, Abdullah began to change his mind about leaving. The British Colonial Office's temporary and merely administrative set of arrangements for Transjordan in time hardened into an enduring political reality. Abdullah with his foreign retinue of British advisors and Bedouin troops settled into Amman. Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab in Jerusalem in 1951 and his son Talal assumed the throne. However, Talil was mentally unstable and he abdicated less than a year later in favor of his eldest son Hussein, the heir apparent.

The plan that Palestine, which stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Iraqi border, be partitioned between Arabs and Jews, as envisioned by the Balfour Doctrine and the League of Nations Mandate, ran up against the problem that 75 percent of the country had already been given to an Arab dynasty, the Hashemites, that was not Palestinian. The newly created artificial province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan then the Kingdom of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is almost totally forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine.

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Fact Number 5: Saudi Arabia ― A Special Case

To understand much of the world's problems today, particularly in the Middle East, it is necessary to have some knowledge of the history and character of Saudi Arabia.

At the end of World War I, Arabia was divided between two rival leaders, Hussein in the west (the Hejaz) and Ibn Saud in the center and east, who were fighting one another. Ibn Saud was the hereditary champion of the teachings of Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth century religious leader whose alliance with the House of Saud in 1745 had been strengthened by frequent intermarriage between the two families. The Wahhabis (also known as Hanbalis) are severely puritanical while the Hashemites were orthodox Sunni Moslems; thus, the two leaders were both doctrinal and political enemies. At the end of 1912, a movement of religious revival began that strengthened Ibn Saud and he gathered a large powerful army with the intent to take over all of Arabia. In a key battle in 1919, the Hejazi forces led by Hussein's son Abdullah were completely routed and by 1924, Ibn Saud had completed the conquest of Arabia and driven Hussein into exile.

The fact that Arabia had been taken over by a clan of Moslem fanatics would not have made much impact on the world except for one item - oil. The fact that Saudi Arabia is the home of vast oil reserves has, for strategic and commercial reasons, enabled one of the most repressive and reactionary police states in the world to be immune from criticism. Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms controller, on a televised interview on C-Span, said Saudi Arabia is "a terribly barbaric society at the bottom of the human-rights list, worst of the worst, along with North Korea."

Further, since World War I, Ibn Saud and his descendants have depended on foreign troops - the Christians of Britain, France and the United States - to remain in power. From 1946 to 1962 the U.S. maintained an airbase in Saudi Arabia, and before that the British assisted the Saudis against both the Ottomans and the Hashemites. When the Saudis needed to clear the Grand Mosque in Mecca of protestors in 1979, they employed French paratroops to kill Muslims within the walls of the mosque. Although Saudia is a major client of the American arms industry, American troops were sent to protect this medieval autocracy as recently as during the first Gulf War in 1991.

The Wahhabi sect of Islam preaches violence not only against Christians, Jews, Hindus and others, but also against non-Wahhabi Moslems. The official theological organs of the state, exclusively held by clerics from the Wahhabi school of Islam, publicly castigate Shi'ites as non-Moslems; courts; controlled by the Wahhabi clerics do not admit testimony by Shi'ites; marriages between Wahhabi Sunnis and Shi'ites have been banned.

Wahhabism has been spreading since the early 1970s, when the Saudi government began using booming oil revenues to build mosques and finance Islamic charities from Morocco to Malaysia. Saudi-built mosques usually came with Wahhabi clerics who preach their puritanical message. Wahhabi ideology has inspired many radical Islamic movements, including Afghanistan's Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. In its most extreme form, Wahhabi doctrine supports permanent jihad to spread its interpretation of the faith. Some Wahhabis have a tendency to label all Western influences as "infidel," a term that invokes the use of holy war.

Details on the involvement of the government of Saudi Arabia in world terrorism, including the 9/11 attack on the United States, can be found in a recent study by Dore Gold. Fifteen of the 19 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. In Saudia, the Al Qaeda terrorist network enjoys vast resources in the ranks of the clerical hierarchy and the state. Anti-western sermons in government mosques, disseminated in the media and on the internet are continuous and intensive. The Saudis built and continue to support mosques, schools, student associations, and other religious institutions that preach the Wahhabi brand of Islam in Europe and the United States and throughout the Moslem world. Some highlights of the Saudi involvement in terror that were listed in an article in the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Schwartz include: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar ibn Sultan has donated funds that just happened to wind up in the hands of two of the September 11 suicide pilots…Among clerical hatemongers, Ayed Al-Qarni, an adviser to Prince Abdel Aziz ibn Fahd, the youngest son of King Fahd, stands out. Al-Qarni wrote a poem, repeatedly broadcast on Saudi media during the Iraqi intervention, in which he declared, "Slaughter the enemy infidels…" This lyric was supplemented by an interview in the Future of Islam - a monthly issued by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth- for April 2003. Therein, al-Qarni proudly affirmed that he prays daily for America's destruction…During the Iraq war, preacher Naser al-Omar called for suicide attacks on the coalition. Interviewed by a Saudi-backed TV station operating from Dubai, he said, "We should hope for more terror bombings to kill more of the enemies of God - Jews and Christians". A pro-Saddam Hussein fatwa signed by him and other clerics was distributed in Saudi government offices.

The above is just a sampling of the teaching and preaching that is supported by the Saudi government around the world. Their message is clear, in all languages, but primarily in Arabic. Their English pronouncements are more muted, taking western sensibilities into account. But the messages in Arabic in the media, the mosques and the madrassas (religious schools) now spread across the Islamic world from West Africa to Indonesia and in Europe and the United States where millions of Arab children study Islam, is virulently anti-Western.

Vast wealth from oil income has enabled this benighted monarchy to fund terrorism on an international scale. In essence, oil has been the tool that enables Saudi Wahhabi fanaticism to acquire petrodollars to use in activities aimed at undermining, attacking and ultimately subjugating the West. At the same time, the Saudi regime is undergoing a deep social crisis and movements of protest have been diverted by the ultra-Wahhabi faction of the royal family toward support of Bin Laden and his terrorists. In essence, supporting international terror is a form of protection paid by the royal family to prevent the terror being turned against itself. It's as simple as that.

A disturbing aspect of the Saudi tie-in to terrorism is the attitude of the Bush Administration. In July, 2003, Newsweek magazine published an article that exposed an apparent Bush administration cover-up of suspected Saudi governmental collusion with the 9/11 terrorists. Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi agent, met with two of the hijackers in 2000 right after he left the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles. He paid their apartment rent for two months and is suspected of having arranged for them to receive Social Security cards and flight training in Florida. The administration is currently insisting that 29 pages of Congress's 900-page report on intelligence failures that preceded the 9/11 attacks be expunged. These 29 pages deal with Saudi involvement in the attacks. Secretary of State Powell is one of the administration officials most associated with the Bush administration's policy of backing the Saudi government. The backing continues unabated in spite of the fact that Saudi citizens have provided al-Qaida with the bulk of its funding and soldiers. Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, wrote "…the West's enemies - notably an array of Saudi princes, charities, businessmen and front organizations - have been spending some US$70 billion to recruit, train and arm adherents around the world in the name of the central idea being wielded against us [the US] namely "jihad" or holy war." Gaffney quotes an article in the US News and World Report by David Kaplan. Entitled. "The Saudi Connection: How Billions in Oil Money Spawned a Global Terror Network". According to Kaplan, "US officials now say that key [Saudi government and affiliated] charities became the pipelines of cash that helped transform ragtag bands of insurgents and jihadists into a sophisticated, interlocking movement with global ambitions. Many of those spreading the Wahhabist doctrine abroad, it turned out, were among the most radical believers in holy war, and they poured vast sums into the emerging al-Qaida network."…"The Saudi funding program is the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted - dwarfing the Soviet's propaganda efforts at the height of the Cold War." Kaplan cites the Saudi weekly Ain al-Yaqeen as saying the funds produced "some 1500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 colleges, and nearly 2000 schools in non-Islamic countries." Gaffney notes that "unfortunately, many of these Saudi-bankrolled institutions are in the United States. The Saudi Kingdom's investments have produced the base for radical, intolerant and violent Muslims - known as Islamists - to mount a Fifth Column threat from within the United States."

If all of the above is not sufficient to provide an understanding of the threat posed by Saudi Arabia to world peace, consider what appeared in an article in the On Line Wall Street Journal (January 2, 2004), by Gopalaswami Parthasarathy a visiting professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and former Indian ambassador to Pakistan concerning Pakistan's nuclear program. He wrote that former prime minister Zulfigar Ali Bhutto stated that his aim as prime minister of Pakistan had been to put the "Islamic Civilization" at par with the "Christian, Jewish and Hindu Civilizations," by giving the Islamic world a "full nuclear capability." In a meeting of top scientists and advisers that he had convened on Jan. 20, 1972, just after assuming office, Bhutto made it clear that he was determined to achieve nuclear capability, not merely to neutralize India's inherent conventional superiority, but also to make his country a leader of the Islamic world.

But how was a cash-strapped Pakistan to get the financial resources to achieve these objectives? Bhutto's press adviser, Khalid Hasan, has since revealed how Bhutto sought and obtained financial assistance from Saudi Arabia and the mercurial Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to fulfill his ambitions. While Iran and Libya have agreed to comprehensive IAEA inspections of their nuclear facilities under international pressure, there has been little or no attention paid to the nexus between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on nuclear issues. Apart from the revelations of Khalid Hassan about Saudi funding of the Pakistan nuclear program, Mohammed al Khilawi, the senior Saudi diplomat who defected to the U.S. in 1994, has also given details about how Riyadh bankrolled Pakistan and then Iraq to obtain nuclear weapons capabilities.

More recently, eyebrows were raised when the Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan was provided unprecedented access to Pakistan's nuclear enrichment facilities in Kahuta in March 1999. During this visit he invited Dr. A.Q. Khan, the "Father of the Islamic Bomb" to visit Saudi Arabia. ..While Saudi Arabia actively uses "charities" to promote Wahhabi extremism across the world, Pakistan has been the recipient of huge direct economic assistance from the desert kingdom. The Saudis have bailed out Islamabad over the past decade by supplying Pakistan with an estimated $ 1.2 billion of oil products annually, virtually free of cost. Just after the visit of Dr. Khan to Saudi Arabia in November 1999, a Saudi nuclear expert, Dr. Al Arfaj, stated at a seminar that "Saudi Arabia must make plans aimed at making a quick response to face the possibilities of nuclear warfare agents being used against the Saudi population, cities or armed forces." After the departure of American forces from its soil, how does Saudi Arabia propose to deal with such nuclear contingencies? The 2,700-kilometer range CSS-2 missiles that Saudi Arabia obtained from China in 1987 are useless if fitted only with conventional warheads. One cannot, therefore, avoid the inference that like the Pakistan-North Korean nukes for missiles deal, there is an "oil for nukes" deal between the Saudis and Pakistanis.

Washington's response to these developments has been strange. When Mr. Al Khilawi made his revelations about Saudi nuclear ambitions in 1994, a senior official in the Clinton White House remarked: "Can you imagine what would happen if we discovered Saudi had a bomb? We would have to do something and nobody wants that. Best not to ask tough questions in the first place."

 

>>> Continued in Part 4