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sunday, july 24, 2005
Al Qaeda-Connected Prince Will Bridge the Gap with US
The Saudi royal family has appointed Prince Turki al-Faisal as their new ambassador to the United States, following the resignation of the super-slick Prince Bandar, and al-Faisal says hes going to bridge the gap with the US.
LONDON, 24 July 2005 The Kingdoms nominee for ambassador to the United States said he would try to bridge a gap in relations and defend compatriots accused of complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Opinion polls... suggest that there is a big gap between the two peoples resulting from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in which 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi, Prince Turki Al-Faisal said.
Hence, one of my top priorities there will be to bridge this gap between the two peoples... building on Crown Prince Abdullahs (April) visit to the United States, which was successful by all standards.
So whats up first on Prince Turkis gap-bridging agenda?
Prince Turki, who is currently ambassador to Britain, said he would seek to defend Saudis against whom lawsuits have been filed for alleged involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, and who number around 200 individuals and institutions.
We have to follow this up with the courts... The US judiciary, like the Saudi judiciary, is independent. If these courts closed these cases, we would have achieved what we are seeking. Otherwise, we will continue to exercise self-defense, he said.
Prince Turki al-Faisal is the former head of Saudi intelligence, and was a close friend of Osama bin Laden. He was reported to have attended a meeting with Al Qaeda and Taliban representatives in Kandahar in 1998, at which an agreement was made to pay Al Qaeda hundreds of millions of dollars in return for a promise not to attack Saudi Arabia.
Heres more on Turki al-Faisals connections to Al Qaeda: Saudi Intelligence Linked to Al Qaeda.
He looks like just the man to heal those rifts and bridge those gaps.
USViking said:Is there is source which could describe the nature
of these lawsuits?
I have yet to see any evidence which convinces me
the Saudi government was involved in 9/11.
I also wonder what individuals have been sued, and
what the nature of the allegations against them might be.
It might well be that Saudi Arabia supported Taliban
with that much money, since Taliban was reactionary
Muslim in accord with most Saudi views on religion.
I do not see how anyone is ever going to be able to
prove the Saudis bribed Taliban and AQ, although
the story is not unbelievable.
It's Still the Saudis
From the July 9, 2005 New York Post: Great Britain will have to get tougher with Saudi Arabia.
by Stephen Schwartz
07/12/2005 12:00:00 AM
A GROUP calling itself "the Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" has claimed "credit" for Thursday's deadly bombings in London. Some refer to the perpetrators of this latest horror as "an unknown group." But there is nothing mysterious about the background of the London atrocities.
First, and foremost, there is nothing secret, unknown, or hidden about the prime source of financing for the terrorists: Saudi Arabia.
As the leading Saudi human-rights activist, Ali al-Ahmed, of the Washington-based Saudi Institute, puts it, "all the roads lead to Riyadh."
The Saudi kingdom continues to channel money and recruits to terror operations in Iraq and everywhere else that al Qaeda, its allies, its imitators, and other supporters strike. Saudi clerics, devotees of the cult known to its critics as Wahhabism, continue to preach jihad against the world, targeting non-Wahhabi Muslims as well as non-Muslims.
Our own country has taken significant steps to curb the Saudi dedication to Wahhabi terrorism, but a great deal more remains to be done.
When she visited the desert kingdom not long ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice correctly protested against the repression imposed on democratic dissidents in that country. But she drew back from calling directly for major changes in Saudi Arabia, such as purging the educational system and state-run media of extremism and cutting off the Wahhabi clerics from state funding...
2004 June 21 Monday
Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, Democracy Promotion, And Energy Policy
What does it say about Saudi Arabia that the government there is just now shutting down a charity that the United States calls a one of the "principal" backers of Al Qaeda?
CAIRO Last week the Saudi Arabian government reversed years of policy when it promised to swiftly dissolve the operations of Al Haramain, a charity with close ties to the Saudi government the US alleges is one of the "principal" backers of Al Qaeda.
Though US officials have complained about the charity since at least 1998, the Saudi government's typical response had been that while some individuals within the sprawling charity might have ties to known terrorists, its operations were overwhelming peaceful and its problems not systemic.
The Saudis have already forced out the charity's leader Aqeel al-Aqeel in November 2003 but they have not prosecuted him for any crimes. This fits a larger pattern where the Saudis do not prosecute their own nationals for supporting terrorism elsewhere.
A report released this week by a high-level task force of the Council on Foreign Relations makes similar conclusions, finding the Saudi government has failed to hold any well-connected individuals accountable for terror-financing activities.
Given the sheer number of Saudis involved in terrorist attacks in other countries this is a very telling revelation.
Saudi citizens are, however, sufficiently disgusted by attacks within Saudi Arabia that many cheered the killing of the local Al Qaeda leader Abdelaziz al-Miqrin.
JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA The kidnapping and beheading of American Paul Johnson Jr. marks a turning point in Saudi public opinion against his Al Qaeda slayers.
Celebrations broke out at the news Friday night that Abdelaziz al-Miqrin, the man responsible for Johnson's death, had been killed. It was the first time in the kingdom's 13-month fight against terrorism that ordinary citizens expressed spontaneous joy at security forces' success.
But do not expect a major change in the educational system, religious teachings, or popular views in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is a major source of money for terrorism and probably the biggest source of Jihadists and terrorists in the world. The Saudis also openly and aggressively fund the spread of Wahhabi Islam around the world. Saudi Arabia is a national security threat to the United States at the same time that it is a vital supplier of oil for the world economy. Spencer Ackerman. filling in for Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, has a series of posts interviewing and excerpting quotes from an anonymous serving US intelligence agent who has a new book forthcoming entitled Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. Ackerman asks the intelligence agent what should we be asking the Saudi rulers to do and the intelligence agent says we can not expect too much.
TPM: What should we be asking them to do?
ANONYMOUS: I think we're focused on what we want them to do. We want to control al-Qaeda within the kingdom. We want them to continue to produce oil. We want them to do any number of police-type, and intelligence-type cooperation, and I'm sure they'll be willing to do that. But what we [really] want them to do, as I wrote in the book, I don't think is going to happen: people argue that we should force them or pressure them to change their curriculum and their education system, and that is very unlikely to happen. The al-Sauds, when they came to power, made a deal with the Islamic establishment: the al-Sauds would take care of the economy and foreign policy, and the religious establishment would take care of education. I'm not sure they're terribly eager to adopt a curriculum of Islamic education as its proposed by the United States.
It's a system that's not prone to reform at a pace that would satisfy us. A pace that would satisfy us would completely destabilize the country. We're going to watch them do as much as they can, and they'll do as much as they can that's consistent with the survival of the state.
I would encourage you all to read the interview in full.
This anonymous intelligence agent is also the author of a book released last year entitled Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America.
Writing for The Guardian Julian Borger reports that this anonymous intelligence agent thinks Al Qaeda is becoming more competent and able.
"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group.
"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much more careful across the board in the way they operate."
As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.
This guy thinks the Bush Administration's strategy is completely wrong, that the invasion of Iraq has been very detrimental to our interests, and that Al Qaeda is probably so satisfied with the Bush Administration that it will launch a terrorist attack in the US near the election to rally the American people around Bush to get him reelected! I find his argument plausible.
Ackerman thinks Borger is exaggerating the extent to which this intelligence agent is aiming to bash Bush specifically.
Julian Borger has a story in The Guardian that paints the anonymous intelligence professional who penned the forthcoming Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror as animated in no small measure by "contempt for the Bush White House and its policies." That's a bit wide of the mark. Does the book exhibit contempt for the administration's policies? Certainly. It also takes a dim view of the White House's conception of what motivates al-Qaeda and how to fight it. But in the book and in an interview, Anonymous doesn't traffic in Bush-bashing. He has much harsher words to say about the leadership of the intelligence community, whom he faults for bending too far to the predispositions of the policymakers they serve.
Ackerman also takes issue with the anonymous agent's argument that democracy promotion is bound to be counterproductive. However, my own take on democracy promotion is that there are a number of obstacles in the way of democracy promotion in the Middle East that the neoconservatives fail to even acknowledge (see bullet list in the middle of that post). The neoconservative and liberal advocates of democracy promotion appear to be arguing for it in part because they do not like what it says about human nature if there are peoples who simply do not want to become Western style liberal democrats. But this denial of human nature and differences in human beliefs does not change human nature. People do not all universally embrace the same set of values in the same rank order. There are huge differences in the extent of belief in various values. Those differences are quite resistant to change for a number of reasons (again, see my post about the obstacles in the way of democracy in the Middle East).
While I do not see democratization as a panacea I still think it is worth looking at the question of how to spread ideas into the Middle East that might have the efffect of making them less hostile to us. Jon B. Alterman argues for a change in how the United States promotes democracy and liberalism in the Middle East.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we need to recognize that, as a group, such liberals are increasingly aging, increasingly isolated, and diminishing in number. These liberals are losing a battle for the hearts and minds of their countries, and populations are increasingly driven toward younger and more disaffected personalities.
Americas problems do not stop there, however. The United States faces a paradox. Liberal reformers in much of the Arab world are already seen as clients of foreign powers and as collaborators in a Western effort to weaken and dominate the Arab world. Focusing attention and resources on these reformers runs the risk of isolating them still further, driving a deeper wedge between them and the societies we (and they) seek to affect. In such an event, U.S. efforts are not only ineffectual; they are counterproductive.
U.S. efforts to promote political openness and change in the Arab world would be far more effective if they stopped trying to coax the disparate sparks of comfortable liberal thought into a flame and instead concentrated on two targets: regional governments and mass publics. The U.S. also needs to be willing to work multilaterally to promote reform in a way it has been unwilling to do up to now. If the stakes were lower, the U.S. could afford the luxury of taking an easier and less effective approach to political change in the Arab world. In todays environment, it isnt nearly sufficient.
Whether the approach Alterman argues for could work in practice a number of his suggestions strike me as more likely to be effective than what is currently being tried. Invasion of Iraq has not been a liberalising influence in Iraq or in the rest of the Middle East. However, even if there is some better set of ideas for spreading democracy in the Middle East that have a chance of working this is at best a long term project. The spreading of democracy is not a short or medium term solution to the threat of terrorism. The anonymous intelligence agent is therefore correct to argue that the Bush Administration's strategy is deeply flawed.
Ackerman reports that the anonymous intelligence agent doesn't think we can win a battle of ideas in the Muslim countries.
But Anonymous doesn't really consider it possible for the U.S. to answer bin Laden in a battle of ideas throughout the Islamic world: U.S. support for what many Muslims may see as unjust policies has drained us of our credibility, he argues. He combines that critique with a rejection of anything resembling democracy promotion. Woodrow Wilson, to Anonymous, is a "bloody-handed fantasist." Insisting on democratic reform in the Muslim world then becomes naïve futility--even though one of Bin Laden's rallying cries is, as Anonymous puts it, U.S. support for "tyrannical Muslim governments."
Suppose we can't. What's our back-up plan? We need one and we need to start implementing it today. Defense in depth is one element. We ought to make it much harder for unfriendlies to get into the United States. We also need to push hard to develop technologies to obsolesce oil as a way to defund the Wahhabis.
Of course other efforts would require resources. But, as the editors of The New Republic admit, resources are finite.
Resources are finite. To defeat and occupy Iraq, the United States has transferred special operations units from the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Because our military is stretched so thin in Iraq, we cannot threaten military action in Iran or North Korea, which has reduced our diplomatic leverage. The tradeoffs even extend to the nonmilitary sphere. The Bush administration's refusal to adequately fund security for U.S. chemical and nuclear plants, for inspections at our ports, and for the police officers and firemen who would be the first to respond to a terrorist attack is well-documented. Absent its enormous expenditures in Iraq, the administration could have far better addressed these threats--threats more urgent than a tyrant in Baghdad with nuclear dreams, but no nuclear plans.
We could have paid for decades of a very large set of energy research efforts for what it cost us to invade Iraq. We could have gotten far better control of our borders, trained large numbers of multilingual intelligence agents, and put a lot more effort into slowing nuclear proliferation. The continued pursuit of current policy will bring with it still more opportunity costs.
It is gratifying to see the anonymous intelligent agent lists energy policy as one of the elements of a better grand strategy for dealing with the terrorist threat. The United States and the West as a whole ought to play to its strengths. One of those strengths is that we have a lot of scientists and engineers and can afford to engage in massive research and development projects. While energy research is not a short term solution neither is invasion and promotion of democracy. But a better energy policy is an essential element of a better grand strategy in response to the threat of terrorism.
The US should have an energy policy shaped much more strongly by national security considerations. A national security policy for energy should include an additional $10 billion or more per year spent on energy research as part of a recognition that the world's increasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil creates national risks for the United States.
Some of the neoconservatives are more intent on invading Syria. Why? Advocacy of said invasion by David Frum and Richard Perle seems more motivated by their support of Israel than concern for American security. Yet they have no interest in invading Saudi Arabia. It is hard to take seriously their belief that US military force can be used to transform the Middle East into a more liberal and democratic region when they are placing Syria ahead of Saudi Arabia on their list of priorities. They have nothing to offer that has any chance of reforming the Middle Eastern society most in need of reform (Saudi Arabia - as if this even needs stating). How can military attacks and democracy be solutions against such a widely distributed enemy which is most concentrated in the one Middle Eastern country which the Bush Administration is reluctant to even criticise? The neoconservatives pride themselves on a supposedly tougher and more realpolitik view harnessed to the spread of great ideals. Yet their grand strategy is so logically incoherent that I'd be too embarrassed to try to defend it. So I'm going to continue to attack it instead. We deserve to be defended. The neoconservatives are not defending us.
By Randall Parker at 2004 June 21 01:23 PM Grand Strategy
