History of Modern Saudi Arabia
by Mitchell G. Bard
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, a
member of the puritanical Muslim Wahhabi
sect conquered central Arabia at the beginning
of the twentieth century. Ibn Saud stayed
neutral during World War I while his rival
in the peninsula, Sharif Husain, led the
Arab revolt against the Turks in alliance
with the British. Afterward, Hussein’s
forces were dissipated as many were dispatched
with his son Faisal to Damascus. He also
found that Britain was less supportive than
he’d expected, and he soon found himself
vulnerable to attack from ibn Saud.
Over the course of two
years, between 1924 and 1926, the Wahhabi
forces defeated Husain’s warriors,
forced him to abdicate, and proceeded to
conquer the principal parts of Arabia. Ibn
Saud subsequently tried to move closer to
the British — in large measure to protect
his kingdom from the possibility of Hussein’s
sons, Abdullah and Faisal (who were now rulers
themselves of Transjordan and Iraq and
British clients), seeking revenge against
him. He later signed treaties with the Hashemite
brothers.
Oil!
The fortunes of Saudi
Arabia changed dramatically when the
Standard Oil Company discovered oil in
1933. The following year, the Texas Company
joined the oil drilling and refining operation
that took the name Arabian American Oil
Company (Aramco). The American companies
were given the rights to develop a petroleum
industry, and the Saudis received much
needed money to bolster their economy during
the Great Depression.
Initially, the oil operation
was strictly a commercial enterprise, with
no U.S. government involvement. In fact,
the United States did not have any diplomatic
representation in the country until World
War II. As Nazi Germany began its march
through Europe, the economic situation worsened,
oil production in Saudi Arabia had to be
curtailed, and the major source of income
from Muslim pilgrims dried up because few
people could travel at that time. Ibn Saud
did not view either Japan or Germany as friends
and sought help from the United States in
the form of a loan to avert the kingdom’s
bankruptcy. President Roosevelt agreed to
provide a loan to the Saudis through the
British. Now the Saudis had cast their lot
with the Allies.
After the United States
entered the war, it became more urgent to
establish bases closer to the European theater,
and, in 1943, a secret deal was negotiated
to build an air base in Dhahran. The Dhahran
base was not completed until after the war,
in 1946, and it was enlarged over the years
to the point where it is now one of the largest,
most sophisticated air bases outside the
United States. Americans also were sent to
train the Saudi army. This military relationship
grew after the war as the United States began
to sell military equipment to the Saudis
and provide them with financial aid.
The Saudi relationship
with the American government became progressively
more friendly, but hit a speed bump over
the question of Palestine.
Like other Arab leaders, ibn Saud was vehemently
opposed to the creation of a Jewish state
and sought to persuade President Roosevelt
not to support the Zionists.
In a letter written to the king shortly before
he died, Roosevelt was noncommittal, saying
only that decisions would be made in consultation
with both Jews and Arabs.
Money
Starts to Flow
Saudi support of the Palestinian
cause helped make him popular in the Arab
world, but he did not begin to gain wider
influence until the 1950s when commercial
oil production began to reach significant
proportions and Saudi Arabia became second
only to Iran among
oil producers in the Middle East. Moreover,
the income generated by oil sales gradually
turned the country from an impoverished nation
to one of the wealthiest.
The growing prosperity
of the kindgom did not immediately filter
down to the masses. Over the years, as the
wealth grew, more and more services were
provided to the public, especially education
and health care; but a wide gap remains to
the present day between the average Saudi
and the royals, many of whom have become
billionaires.
The country was an absolute
monarchy that ruled according to rigid Islamic
guidelines. Ibn Saud dealt with opposition
within the kingdom the old fashioned way,
by marrying members of the royal family off
to rival families. This created a huge family
of princes and princesses that all had an
interest in the perpetuation of the monarchy.
The Saudis were also especially
sensitive to foreign influence and rarely
allowed outsiders to visit the country unless
they were Muslims on pilgrimage. The only
Americans typically permitted into the country
were diplomats, military officials, and people
with direct business interests in the kingdom.
Still, the American military presence at
Dhahran would become an irritant as many
Saudis objected to the degree of U.S. influence
on the kingdom and the presence of infidels
on their soil. This antagonism would ultimately
spawn the al-Qaida terrorist
group under the leadership of Osama bin Laden,
the son of a billionaire Saudi businessman.
Saudi Arabia was never
comfortable with the Pan-Arabism of Nasser
and did what it could to frustrate his efforts
to unite the Arab states. The most dramatic
incident was the revelation that King Saud
tried to bribe Syria’s security chief
in 1958 to carry out a coup to prevent the
union with Egypt.
A
New King
The tension with Egypt and
the other revolutionary Arab governments,
combined with growing dissatisfaction with
King Saud’s rule, began to shake the
monarchy’s hold on the country. The
king was accused of mismanagement and incompetence,
and the profligate spending of the royal
family had become an embarrassment. The king’s
health was also declining.
This combination of circumstances
led to a gradual changing of the guard, culminating
in the king’s younger brother, Faisal
ibn Abdul Aziz, assuming the throne in 1964.
Faisal immediately set about modernizing
the country, spending the kingdom’s
newfound oil revenues to create roads, hospitals,
airports, and schools. He also sought to
build up the military and began to spend
lavish amounts on the most sophisticated
weapons he could get, primarily from the
United States.
Saudi Arabia sent 20,000
troops to Jordan to
participate in the 1967
war and suspended oil shipments to the
United States and Britain. Ties were never
broken, however, and the oil began to flow
again soon after the war. Also, after the
war, Saudi Arabia finally reached an agreement
with Egypt over Yemen,
and the Saudis pledged money to compensate Egypt for
revenue lost from the closing of the Suez
Canal during the war. The two countries became
closer after Sadat took
power and changed Egypt’s orientation
away from Pan-Arabism and the Soviet Union
and toward the West. The Saudis then aided
the Egyptian-Syrian war effort in 1973 and
declared the oil embargo against the United
States, Portugal, and Holland.
Saudi-Egyptian relations
soured again after the Israeli-Egyptian
peace treaty, with the Saudis cutting
off aid and severing diplomatic relations.
After Sadat’s assassination, the two
countries reconciled.
Fence-Sitting
The Saudis have long pursued
a delicate balancing act. They were fiercely
anticommunist because the atheism of the
Soviet Union conflicted with their Islamic
values. The kingdom maintained close relations
with the United States, but was constantly
irritated by the U.S.-Israel
relationship. The king was opposed to
Pan-Arabism, but backed Egypt after it became
clear Nasser would not achieve his goals.
The Saudis also became financial backers
for Palestinian terrorist groups, but they
were also uncomfortable with the factions
under the PLO umbrella
that espoused Marxist principles. Tensions
also briefly grew when a Palestinian faction
kidnapped the Saudi oil minister and other
Arab officials at an OPEC meeting
in Vienna in December 1975. (They were later
released.)
In March 1975, King Faisal
was assassinated by a nephew and was succeeded
by Prince Khalid. Khalid, however, was in
poor health and his half brother, Crown Prince
Fahd, actually ruled the country. One of
Fahd’s principal changes was to assert
greater control over Aramco, culminating
in the 1980 announcement that the government
had taken full control of the company’s
assets. With complete control of the nation’s
oil industry, and a succession of price hikes
through OPEC,
the kingdom amassed a huge reserve of money
that it began to spend on additional modernization
steps within the country, aid to other Arab
states and the terrorists fighting Israel,
and, especially, on sophisticated weapons
such as American fighter planes and its AWACS
radar system.
Arab
Threats
The Saudi concern with
security was heightened by the Iranian revolution
in 1979 and the explicit threat of Khomeini
to export his brand of Islam to the Gulf.
It was ironic that Khomeini would be hostile
toward the Saudis given their puritanical
form of Islam.
But the Wahhabi sect is viewed as heretical
by the Shiites,
and the two nations have been longstanding
rivals in the region; Iran never
directly threatened Saudi Arabia and recently
has improved relations.
The more serious threat
to the kingdom came just over a decade later
when the secular Saddam
Hussein's army invaded Kuwait and
had his forces in place to move into Saudi
Arabia. The United States came to the rescue
in 1991 and made clear its commitment to
insure the kingdom’s survival. The
cost of the Gulf
War (the Saudis agreed to pay $51 billion
to cover American costs), combined with the
country’s history of profligate deficit
spending, and declining oil prices created
an economic crisis that provoked the Saudis
to cut spending and secure loans.
The decline in spending
on social services, which the Saudi people
had come to expect, combined with dissatisfaction
weak word over the large American military
presence in the country, caused increasing
tension in the society and between the American
and Saudi governments. This was further exacerbated
by the 1995 and June 1996 terrorist attack
against a U.S. barracks at the Dhahran base
that killed 19 Americans and wounded more
than 300 people. The perpetrators were never
found, and U.S. officials complained that
the Saudi government would not cooperate
in the investigation.
King Fahd suffered a stroke
in 1995 and his half-brother, Crown Prince
Abdullah, subsequently became the country’s
de facto ruler. Under Abdullah, the nation
has continued its past policies and sought
to strengthen ties with the United States.
These were strained, however, by the attack
on September 11. Americans were disturbed
by the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved
in the September 11 attack were Saudis and
that Osama bin Laden is also a Saudi. Polls
in the kingdom indicate strong support for
al-Qaida, and a number of press stories began
to highlight the radical brand of Islam being
taught in many Saudi schools, the oppression
of women that resembles the treatment of
blacks under apartheid in South Africa, and
the lack of cooperation the Saudi government
was providing to investigators of the terrorist
attacks. It was largely in response to the
barrage of negative publicity that Abdullah
floated his peace
initiative in early 2002.
Sources: Mitchell G. Bard,The
Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict. 4th
Edition. NY: Alpha Books, 2008. |