M.D. Nalapat
MANIPAL, India, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The
origins of al-Qaida can be traced to the decision taken by the British sometime
in 1911 to back the raggedy assembly of Bedouins led by the al-Saud clan
against the Turks. The add-on to this was the support it gave to Wahabism, a
creed that had originated two centuries before, and which sought to smother the
Muslim faith in its primitive desert beliefs and practices.
In 1932, London served as midwife to the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a Wahabi outpost in a sea of moderate Sufi peoples,
and has backed it ever since, being joined by the United States soon after
World War II. If then the reason for this support was Turkey, from the 1960s
till 1979 it was Arab nationalism, exemplified first by Gamal Abdel Nasser in
Egypt and by the secular if thuggish Baath regimes in Syria and Iraq.
That year, Moscow made the mistake of
invading Afghanistan, and then-CIA Director William Casey, followed by Zbigniew
Brzezinski, accepted the Saudi suggestion that they use Pashtun Wahabis trained
in Pakistan to drive out the Soviets, rather than the far more numerous Pashtun
nationalists. Of course the nationalists loathed Pakistan, while the Wahabis
were dependent on that state's jihadi army.
If U.S. forces are gasping for breath in
Iraq, it is in large part due to the deliberate decision of previous U.S.
administrations to see Arab nationalism as a threat to Western primacy, whereas
in fact, the principal target of this ideology is what may be called the
"Wahabi International." In Iraq, the skeletal clusters of al-Qaida
are able to operate on the present scale only through their opportunistic
alliance with Iraqi nationalists, most of whom loathed Saddam Hussein for his
clannish and cruel rule, even as circumstances forced them to join the Baath
Party.
Today, however, U.S. policy in the Middle
East is in danger of igniting a threat that in its future effects could dwarf
that posed by Wahabi terrorism. This is the Shiites. Unlike Sunnis and even
Wahabis, who need to be nudged toward "martyrdom," believing Shiites
would need far less motivation to persuade them to put on human bomb jackets.
The war on terror would face a new front, and the modern Napoleons in the White
House their Moscow winter.
Conspiracy theorists among the Shiites
believe that it is Saudi links with the Bush family and well-connected others
that are fuelling what is unmistakably a U.S. policy that places Saudi Wahabi
interests above those of the West.
For example, U.S. ambassador to Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad has been unrelenting in demanding of the Shiites in the south
that they agree to give a "fair" proportion of Iraq's oil revenue to
the Sunni regions in the center and west. However, as yet, no Bushman has
demanded of the Saudis that they transfer any share of the wealth created by
oil flowing overwhelmingly from the Shiite-populated regions in the east and
south of that country ruled by an absolutist monarchy.
And if Washington is concerned about the
marginalization of the Shiites even in countries such as Bahrain, where they
form the bulk of the population, that is yet to be communicated, even as the
Khalilzads bully the Shiites into giving a disproportionate share of power to
the Sunni, especially that faction owing allegiance to the Wahabi faith.
Unless George Bush shows as much concern
for the Shiites in countries where they are disenfranchised and discriminated
against, their anger against the country he leads will grow to levels that could
tip them toward a Wahabi-style jihad against the West, an outcome that would
spell catastrophe for the globe.
In order to retrieve the situation,
policymakers in Washington and elsewhere need to act on the evidence that the
primary threat to their interests comes from Wahabism, and that the
sheet-anchor of this retrogressive faith is the Saudi royal family. Rather than
pull away from the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, George Bush needs
to expand his vision to cover the country where his family has such substantial
business experience -- Saudi Arabia -- and work toward giving the Shiites and
other non-Wahabis in that country the same rights that he is demanding from the
al-Maliki regime for Iraqi Sunnis.
Ultimately, it is not the West that is the
foe of the Shiites, but the Wahabi, and it is to that direction, not toward the
West, that the attention of this long-persecuted people needs to turn.
But that can happen only in a context in
which (a) the Wahabis are isolated, together with the Khomeinists and (b) the
United States follows an even-handed policy between the Shiites and the Sunni,
not just in Iraq but in the region.
The present borders of the countries
there reflect only the perceptions of France and Britain in the early part of
the last century as to what their interests were. By seeking to preserve the
poisonous legacy of their 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, President George W. Bush
may leave for his successors a foe even more lethal than that left by Casey and
Brzezinski to their successors.
The Shiites have, in Mao Zedong's words,
"stood up." It is time to show that the West is their ally and not
part of the ongoing Wahabi campaign to batter them back into submission.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is director of
the School of Geopolitics at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India.)
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