Al Jazeera: "The Kingdom that exports terrorism is also the Kingdom of the terrified!"

"... The export of the battle keeps expanding: sectarian violence has become ubiquitous in countries where it had been non-existent.

Colonial powers may have engineered sectarian strife into the geography of countries like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, but what of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and even Bahrain? The expanding battle field tells us something about shifts in Saudi ambitions, and the anxieties that shape them. The Kingdom that exports terrorism is also the Kingdom of the terrified.

Before walking out of the "Friends of Syria" conference in Tunis, citing a "lack of resolve" on the part of other attendees, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, opined that arming the Syrian opposition "… is an excellent idea". High-end shopping for military equipment is not a new thing for the Kingdom, but there seems to be a new urgency to consume.

Fortification has become the governing idiom of Saudi foreign policy: It spends over 10 per cent of GDP on defence, more than double the proportion spent by the United States. In 2011 alone, the Kingdom bought weapons to the tune of $30bn from American suppliers.

In light of the fact that the US has habitually taken down heavily armed Muslim countries that, by virtue of bad luck, are located anywhere near Israel, the spending seems senseless. 

Saudi Arabia has never fought a war. In fact, as the embarrassing flight from Al Khafji well ahead of a badly battered Iraqi brigade demonstrated, the Saudi army is not capable of managing even a scrimmage. However, the government has been engaged in proxy wars more or less continuously since 1962. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia has long perceived itself as being surrounded by hostile powers. Encircled and besieged, first by the "radical" "Pan-Arab" regimes of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and then by Iran and its Shia offshoots in the Arab world and beyond, Saudi Arabia's weapons have never been used for wars it has waged itself. ....  ........ 

Desert Storm signalled that henceforth, the Gulf Arabs were under the American military umbrella and no longer needed to justify themselves to their less affluent brethren.... The new freedom from the myth of Arab brotherhood reshaped the form that Saudi Arabia's proxy wars took. The Afghan-Soviet war became the template for the future. Most striking in the new doctrine is its preferred organisational form, namely, indoctrinating, arming and funding small groups of disgruntled, impoverished, largely underage young men and then setting them free to form their own networks, appropriate to their cultural codes, circumstances and idiosyncratic goals.

Auto-deploying themselves globally, making their own connections and contacts, these groups morphed (and continue to mutate) into organisations that are no longer (and cannot be) controlled by Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, anyone else. The prime example of such a metamorphosis, of course, is the progression that went from the Afghan refugees in Pakistan, to the pan-Islamic Mujahideen, to the regional Taliban, to al-Qaeda (and then to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), back to Iraq, now Syria, and so on. 

It is a sweet fiction, believed only by audiences of American network television, that there are definable "terrorists" who are permanent "enemies", destined to be defeated by the innate superiority of American "values". Not only in the past, but right now, the Saudi government, dozens of Saudi waqfs, "NGOs", private individuals, clerics and princes create and fund their own clients, whose goals and instructions are often at odds with each other. ... Saudi policy is doomed to backfire - repeatedly. Sometimes, however, the US and Saudi Arabia collaborate effectively.

And the armed "insurgents" have goals of their own, ultimately at odds with those of any of the states involved. Put bluntly, these are insurgencies that cannot be controlled but by creating new insurgents to fight the ones that already exist. Sadly, this logic is built into the strategy - or the "non-strategy". 

On the face of it, the Kingdom's self-defeating foreign policy could be a mismanaged effort to achieve some form of ideological hegemony in the Muslim world - the fantasy ascent of a worldwide Wahhabi Islam, presided over by Saudi Arabia. If this is the goal, someone else is going to have to do the fighting. 

The Saudi military was engineered not to be a fighting army. The Pan-Arab leaders taught the Kingdom that militaries, like politics, are dangerous; .... 

The covert, behind-the-scenes style of foreign policy, in brief, had a domestic analogue. Saudi dissidents, whether the "Free Princes" of the 1950s or returning war-hardened Mujahideen/Taliban/al-Qaeda operatives who no longer (to put it mildly) "fit in", are not punished. They are bought out and then socially "rehabilitated" in formal state institutions that de-educate them of their radicalism and remind them of the virtues of the placid life in a safe place as detailed in a "true" reading of the peaceful teachings of the Quran.... .......

The sense of being under siege in the company of other nations was replicated and reinforced by a lived experience of being surrounded by foreign labourers who were culturally and linguistically alien, in addition to being, in most cases, more educated than the locals. 

The pre-existing cultural vertigo of Saudi citizens was inflected, then, with a very visibly organised hierarchical socio-economic order in which the division between labourer and citizen was literally built into the structure of the oil economy, but was inoperative abroad.Saudi citizens that travelled, accustomed to viewing its huge multi-national labour force as inferior, subordinate ingrates, were themselves first treated like objects of curiosity and then with a resentment reserved for the undeserving rich....   The anxiety of the outside and the comfort of the familiar combine to form a structure that, as amorphous as it is, is strong enough to hold the government in place. This is unfortunate for the fighters of the proxy wars and for those living in the geographical space where they operate.

On account of this symbiosis, and in light of the Kingdom's capacity to deploy conflict elsewhere while maintaining peace at home, the prospects that the "Arab Spring" will reach the Kingdom are minimal. Why, any reasonable person would ask, would one want to invite a violent attacker into one's home, when you can send him to centre-city Detroit? 

I, like others, am deeply ambivalent about the sources and potential results of the "Arab Spring", but it is too early to tell. The hopeful side of missing out on the dubious change of regional weather is anecdotal. Describing the impact of text messaging, a friend giggled: "We are becoming a very funny society." He was referring to the relentless nationwide distribution of jokes about Al Saud."