The Next Shoe to Drop

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It looks increasingly like Saudi Arabia is going to flare up in revolt some time soon. There is a Facebook campaign underway to rally young protesters on March 11 to block the main traffic circle in Jeddah and to gather in other cities to voice their demands for change.  This in a country ruled by the Al Saud family where you go to jail for criticizing the King.

The founder of Saudi Arabia Ibn Saud literally screwed his country into existence.  He had 365 children and it was from that progeny that the princes and princesses proliferated into the thousands to create the Kingdom’s ruling family today who control the oil spigot that trickles down on them first so that what is left fuels the country’s economy.

Fortunately with oil prices at $100 a barrel there is still plenty to go around. But with 40% unemployment amongst the young, and Saudi Arabia has its youth bulge too, the Kingdom’s commoners are restless.  Meanwhile as King Abdullah throws money at “reform”, dissidents are careful not to make him the target of their festering political anger; that is mostly directed at the conniving courtiers, a clique of ageing princes waiting for the frail King to die. 

Prominent among them is the black Prince Nayef, head of the Interior Department, meaning the secret police. He along with his son Prince Mohammed, have been systematically jailing lawyers, professors, writers and students who dare suggest that the absolute monarchy allow for a semblance of a parliament instead of the hand-picked rubber stamp debating society the royals set up in the name of Democracy.

Nayef and the reactionary princes hide behind piety with their control of the pervasive religious police.  And just like Qaddafi, they use Al Qaeda as their bogeyman in their “war on terror” which has been a convenient fig leaf to arrest real reformers.  Meanwhile the Kingdom continues to export Wahabbism, its petro-dollar funded, reactionary and xenophobic form of fundamentalist Islam that has destabilized Pakistan and Afghanistan and inspires Jihadis around the world. 

Otherwise known as “the Taliban with oil”, the Saudis have done more than anyone to radicalize Islam and suppress the traditional diversity of religious practice within the word’s fastest growing religion.  The Wahabbis make the fundamentalists in the Vatican, who have captured the Catholic faith and purged it of liberal modernity, look like Quakers. 

Nothing controls a people more than if you control their bodies and their sex lives.  Like the theocracy our politicians who inflame the anti-abortion fundamentalists would wish to impose on us, the Saudi royals have perfected a system that unleashes theocratic vigilantes upon a population, who are so oppressed by the strictures; they have no time to think of revolution. 

But the cynical Al Saud’s, who use the Wahabbis as a shield so that they can live extravagant and decadent lives behind the palace walls, have this tiger by the tail.  Like a guard dog that could turn on its master, Wahabbism has a poster boy, and its name is Osama bin Laden.

When Saudi oil was first discovered in the thirties by a team of American geologists from Chevron, they were captured by tribesmen and taken to the King whose interpreter was an eccentric British Arabist, one Harry St. John Philby.  The King thought the Americans were looking for water but instead it turned out to be oil. When told of the potential wealth he was sitting on, the King weighed his choices; would he let his friends the British develop the oil fields or allow the Americans to exploit their discovery.

Philby advised the King that as the oil money poured in, the British would eventually expect him to adopt a parliament and a democratic façade whereas the Americans would not interfere in his domestic affairs.  They would only be concerned with commercial arrangements. 

Thus ARAMCO, the most successful company in the history of the world was born, and what the father Harry St. John Philby gave to the Americans, his son Kim Philby, the Soviet master spy, took back.  Now that’s called blowback.  So if the Saudi shoe is about to drop, we should expect a lot of blowback in the geopolitical pipeline.  And it’s coming soon to your neighborhood gas station.