The Sword and the Shield
Morrison, Micah
Micah Morrison THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD Americans in Saudi Arabia are beginning to worry that the Saudis are using them as a kind of mercenary army. Underground imams are warning that the...
...Yes, some people here are very uncomfortable with the presence of unbelievers...
...For the punishments...
...I could not go to the Mecca imam but I found another, in Jeddah, who agreed to my request for an interview...
...A country not used to domestic dissent is hearing it now, soft but distinct...
...There are some soldiers who believe we are here to fight the forces of Islam, and cause problems for our Moslem soldiers...
...Meanwhile, Saddam would have launched his missiles at our forces and at Israel, unless we managed to take all of them out first...
...And Primakov was not the only high-ranking Soviet in the area...
...New voices are being raised against the culture that flows in behind Western commerce, against the troops, against Saudi decision-making...
...Why couldn't the Saudi army defend the country's borders...
...I had heard that a respected imam was preaching against the American presence in Saudi Arabia...
...Of course, this is the new American army and, to judge from the copious Western coverage, one might get the impression it is also a feminist one...
...We deal with this by counseling that Islam is a legitimate faith and we Americans are a pluralistic society...
...The concern for Saddam's face is touching, but disingenuous...
...Some, such as the Syrians, are in the alliance to extend their regional influence and maim their rival, Saddam...
...The rumble of the engines followed them and the sunset glinted silver on the cockpit hoods...
...Accompanying the press on several outings was Vladimir Beliakov, Pravda's top Middle East correspondent...
...attitude toward Soviet involvement in the region...
...The chemicals can be reversed with antidotes...
...Saddam keeps his military machine...
...A single incident, accidental or deliberate, could touch it off...
...Non-Moslems are barred from the holy city and its environs: a special beltway around the city is popularly known as "the Christian bypass...
...Virtually all my colleagues at the JIB, I would soon find, were living on expired visas...
...The land forces would attempt to move fast to the Gulf, sealing Iraq's army inside Kuwait and cutting off its supply lines from Baghdad...
...The ultimate deal: Moscow certainly will be well rewarded by Baghdadif it helps Iraq absorb northern Kuwait without a major war...
...Then King Fand ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Saud eased local restrictions and reluctantly bowed to the need for the Western press to enter the country to help build international support for Desert Shield...
...A bit of "face-saving" also would be on the American agenda, if the war clouds roll away...
...There were only lights and shadows, the white houses and black gaps of streets...
...Its asceticism, now urbanized, may no longer have the support of sun and wind acting in the emptiness of the desert...
...There is not yet an official emblem for Operation Desert Shield, the U.S.-led effort that has put over a quarter of a million soldiers and a vast array of high-tech weaponry into the kingdom, but there are plenty of unofficial ones...
...Soon the mountains leveled down to eerie black fields,old lava flows, skeined with patterns of salt lines...
...A few minutes to the north were Kuwait and the Iraqis...
...They broke north in pairs, and we silently watched them disappear into the desert...
...You must think of that...
...This, in my view, is a fantasy...
...They consolidated their grip on Lebanon by driving out the Christian rebel leader Gen...
...Beliakov is an Arabic-speaker and an expert on regional affairs, unlike most Western correspondents...
...The climate was one not of fear, but of infinite caution...
...Few did, of course...
...Primakov was engaged in a high-profile series of meetings with Arab and Western leaders...
...I had been told I would need a transit permit and a letter from a Saudi "sponsor"—not to mention a valid visa—to fly to the Gulf and stay a few more weeks...
...A draft has not been instituted...
...Depression seemed to be creeping in, exacerbated by an absence of alcohol...
...Humphrey stood beside the missile battery while Beliakov, a battered white Pravda cap pushed down on his head, happily snapped pictures...
...Soldiers in tan camouflage carrying M-16s and gas-mask kits mingled with Saudi officials in floor-length white thobe robes and denim-clad reporters...
...It was rough at first, "But in the Koran it also says that to eat pork is a sin, unless you are going to die and there is only pork...
...Why were the Americans called in so quickly...
...Fighters streaked through the sky, missile batteries stood guard, and the machine gun-toting security men waved me through without batting an eye...
...At times a lonely ridge or isolated black peak would poke up from the dunes, and sand and sky seemed to merge at the horizon...
...Does President Bush possess the political will or the consensus to sustain weeks or even months of fighting to remove the Iraqi threat to the region...
...So far, problems have been minimal—heat-stroke, "adjustment-reaction" cases due to stress and isolation, and broken bones...
...This was the "Arabian Shield," an ancient mass of igneous rock over a million years old...
...Beyond the town was an empty expanse, "the dazzle of league after league of featureless sand, running up to an edge of low hills, faintly suggested in the far away mist of heat...
...Scattered amid the new are reminders of pre-modern Jeddah...
...Primakov flutters around as Gorbachev's apostle of peace, burnishing the Kremlin leader's image in the West...
...Yet I wondered if Wahabism, suddenly rich beyond belief and inextricably engaged with Western commerce, was coming to be seen by some in Saudi Arabia as itself cluttered with inessential things...
...Meanwhile, the Soviets are cutting deals like crazy...
...Embassies and new hostageswould be seized...
...The twenty-tent facility, with over sixty beds, two operating rooms, full hospital resources, and blood reservesfor thousands of casualties, is a quick-response unit, able to expand or contract to meet the need...
...If Gorbachev didn't see some sort of opportunity for a political compromise," Beliakov said, "Primakov wouldn't have been dispatched to the Western capitals for such high-level meetings...
...At one end of the carpeted hall, a group of Saudis, soldiers, and reporters were clustered intently around a wide-screen Sony television...
...Houses seemed eternally empty...
...It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in central Arabia...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1! 23 bid and sends what is from Moscow's view an ominous signal to the Moslem population inside its borders...
...War is still quite possible, but it seems more likely that a deal will be struck and Israel will be left to grapple with international-conference pressure and a nuclear Iraq in the not-distant future...
...One shirt on sale in an aircraft hangar features a scowling, pint-sized Saddam Hussein in a pirate hat, clutching smoking pistols and a "Nuke Israel" flag...
...Konstantin Katochev, the Soviet chief of the Foreign Trade Relations Ministry, had just completed the first visit of a Soviet minister to the Saudi capital...
...A few years earlier, Capt...
...We work long days and nights and people get tired, grumpy, but we're proud of our mission...
...In the early days of the invasion, the local press could not even report it in unambiguous terms: it was referred to as "a disturbing episode" in Kuwait...
...If Baghdad did not surrender, we would then be faced with the need to move north for the capital, sustaining more casualties, while trying to grind down or starve out Iraqi forces in Kuwait...
...My requests to drive across the country had been turned down...
...Her complaint was frequently echoed...
...Officially, all is well in U.S.-Saudi military relations...
...Apropos his former post, I mentioned that some observers were talking about a NATO-style defense compact for the region...
...Mecca lay just to the south, Medina to the north...
...A dune-blown highway cut beneath us...
...Gorbachev is outmaneuvering George Bush in the Gulf—the true meaning of the Primakov mission—by cynically being all things to all suitors...
...The House of Saud, wrapped in its trapping of Islamic purity, is unhappy with the increased flow of Decadent Culture and Dangerous Ideas coming in along with Operation Desert Shield...
...Some Arab forces in Desert Shield might refuse to fight, leaving the Americans out on a diplomatic limb...
...I write him letters and send him stories," Capt...
...the Soviets are interested in Saudi help in petroleum production and development projects...
...The imam confirmed that some religious leaders were upset about the deployment...
...Always the votaries found their neighbors' beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers...
...From a religious point of view," Imam Ma told me, "the Saudi leadership is not perfect...
...I could see why...
...You stay away...
...There's a big pen-pal campaign underway, and people send us all sorts of things...
...Therefore, it is wrong that such Westerners be invited to defend us...
...Benefits thus already are flowing from Moscow's new "positive role," while the Kremlin continues to maintain close contacts with its old radical allies: the Syrians, the Libyans, the PLO, and Iraq itself...
...Or perhaps Wahabism itself, along with the monarchy, will find itself dashed to pieces against a purer foe...
...In one small sign of the endless efforts to bolster that legitimacy, King Fand a few years ago changed his official title to "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" of Mecca and Medina...
...Baker said he saw 'a positive role' for the Soviet Union in the area, this was very important...
...After a while the dunes receded and lone roads and scattered settlements began to appear...
...So here you have a situation which seems to be against the Koran—the soldiers...
...What would they do—chop off my writing hand...
...He indicated a group of concrete hangars in the distance, beyond a fence...
...Western and Iraqi troops begin a withdrawal...
...Ninety percent of chemical casualties will survive with proper treatment...
...chops off the hands of thieves and the heads of adulterers...
...Welcome, welcome...
...Humphrey, coolly glancing around at his truck-mounted missiles, radio command post, and sand-bagged bunkers spread across an enormous parking lot...
...Industrious G.I.s immediately began producing T-shirts emblazoned with shields and eagles, F-15s and lightning bolts...
...Moureau said...
...At the airport, I was surrounded by a band of humorless security men...
...War is avoided...
...Hey, Pravda...
...We'd like to know if there will be a rotation policy...
...Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites [Arabic-speakers], merchants and concupiscent men of the world...
...When your Mr...
...The Saudi monarchy is fearful of Saddam, fearful of its own people, fearful of Western mores—pretty much in that order...
...Most of Arab Saudi Arabia—away from the international compounds, embassies, military bases, and hotels—was a place of peculiar stillness, narrow and wary...
...Where it will end I cannot tell...
...Yet it is an alliance with massive internal contradictions, unlikely to survive an outbreak of hostilities...
...Black-veiled women flit noiselessly through the streets...
...A Tornado roared down the strip and lifted skyward, banking west, its afterburners aglow...
...and is awash in a sea of oil wealth...
...Humphrey said, "but the support from the States is great...
...Out of the alliance between Saud and Wahab, modern Saudi Arabia was slowly born, as the descendants of the House of Saud, preaching the strict doctrine of Wahabi Sunni Islam, eventually conquered and united the ornery tribes of the Arabian Peninsula...
...Hamda obtained one of his taped sermons, in which Hawaii says that "the animosity between Islam and the West is a matter of fact and will continue...
...By the time I left, my colleagues were quite dispirited...
...Despite Saudi attempts to paint a picture of normality, religious and business travel was way down, hotel workers informed me...
...However, another big problem is: our government was supposed to be strong enough to defend itself...
...Lawrence wrote of Wahabism in Seven Pillars: Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical...
...Saddam sets himself up as champion of the Palestinians, indicating that an international conference on the Arab-Israel dispute is in the offing—part of the package negotiated by Primakov and "indirectly" agreed to by Washington...
...I myself was shocked to learn our army was only 65,000 men...
...What about all those billions of dollars' worth of military equipment purchased over the years...
...frowns on unveiled women and forbids all women from driving andholding most jobs...
...Let's call him Imam Asa...
...Saddam doesn't really want all of Kuwait...
...Not so free, however, as to want his real name used...
...Behind the front waited the largest Western armies assembled in an imminent-hostilities situation in decades...
...Above it, a neon Kraft Cheese sign blinks in Arabic and English, and around the steamy skyline are other signs of the new Jeddah: Pepsi, Konica, Sony, Sharp, Sanyo...
...Long before the city was a place of petro-dollars and high-stakes deals, it had thrived on the pilgrim trade...
...What a strange thing: to lose the sky...
...Fax machines, word processors, phones, and telexes hummed on tables...
...The sense in civilian life that we're being used as a tool by the Saudis applies to the military too"—a sentiment frequently expressed by expatriate workers...
...Air strikes alone will not impel the Iraqis to capitulate...
...The Saudi government is not pleased...
...A coup certainly would have perked up the spirits of the foreign press corps encamped in some of Saudi Arabia's best hotels...
...They have also seen their enemy Saddam Hussein put in a dangerous corner, yet have served notice on Washington, via Primakov, that they will not support the complete destruction of the Iraqi war machine, since it constitutes an important element in the front against Israel...
...Over there," my driver said to me one day as we sped past a stark minaret beside a palm-fringed plaza, "that is Chop-chop Square...
...The Nobel Peace Prize-winner keeps his military advisers in Iraq and elsewhere in the region, cultivating his influence with the various thugs running things...
...forces seem ready for everything...
...Justification can be—and has been—found...
...For without the Desert Shield, the Saudis' sword would be broken and buried in the sand...
...Humphrey said, "this is a very immature theater of operations...
...The Soviets, with their many "advisers" in Iraq, surely saw the August invasion coming and did nothing to stop it...
...In what surely must be an extraordinary situation, Capt...
...T he religions clustered behind Des- 1 ert Shield are by no means the only oddity in the new alliance...
...But there is a second war of sorts going on, with battle lines that are invisible, for it is a war fought across time, across history and cultures...
...These chemical agents," he said, "are more of a psychological weapon...
...Humphrey had been in Europe, pointing his "Scud-buster" missiles at the Warsaw Pact and Beliakov's employers...
...What a strange thing: to lose the sky...
...Goats are tethered in the shaded alleys between ruined buildings...
...I could see why...
...ne sign of change is a modicum of press freedom...
...Ai this point, the Saudis and others are likely to pay off Moscow too, in gratitude for a return to the status quo ante...
...That didn't happen, and events have spun out of control...
...We're not allowed to go there—they're very uptight about it...
...Yet it didn't feel like a city—or a country, for that matter—on a war footing...
...Perhaps the elasticity of the Koran will allow the House of Saud to adapt and manage change...
...It may seem like mild stuff to American ears, but to the Saudis it is a criticism both of the Western presence and—perhaps more importantly—of a decision of the Saudi monarchy...
...I decided to gamble that there might be a bit of Middle Eastern flexibility (or chaos) at the airport, and that by mentioning my dear friend Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and my other close personal acquaintances in the royal family, and by promising to resolve the unfortunate and inexplicable confusions in the matter of the visa immediately upon reaching Dhahran, where a representative of the royal family was at this very moment expecting me, I would succeed in boarding the plane...
...So far the Syrians are the big winners in this deadly game...
...Weeks after my visa expired, I headed for the airport...
...I am free to criticize the Saudi government, to say ninety-nine percent of what I want in the mosque...
...A visa extension and travel permits were not forthcoming...
...The Syrians, the Iranians, and Kurdish separatists might use the opportunity to attempt to seize parts of Iraq...
...It is not the Saudi way: the monarchy historically has preferred to place its money on all bets to forestall a heavy loss...
...At the beginning of the crisis, the Saudi view was that the Americans would come in, quickly overwhelm the Iraqis, and clean the whole matter up by the end of August...
...We're the front line against Iraqi missiles and fighters...
...Humphrey may be proved wrong about "common goals" if large-scale combat erupts, but some people are looking at the possibility of a long-term stay...
...A squadron of U.S...
...Like many reporters who have covered the Middle East, I was intrigued by the possibility of seeing Saudi Arabia, a country typically portrayed as a xenophobic Islamic theocracy that bars Jews and atheists from its territory...
...exclaimed Captain Leland P. Humphrey, commander of a Patriot anti-aircraft missile battery...
...F-15s swept low overhead, running silent, fast, ahead of their own sound...
...behind half-opened windows, curtains flapped in darkened rooms...
...Finally, with a day left on my visa, I resolved to go to the airport and get on a plane for Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf...
...Ken Steinweg, Hospital Commander of the 5th MASH unit...
...The Saudis are very sensitive about this," my Army escort added...
...According to Saudi businessmen, American military contractors are negotiating long-term leases in the area...
...Lawrence's former home on the Jeddah lagoon, beside a fancy hotel, is a yellowed wreck...
...rr he Saudi army may not be ready 1 for anything, but at this point the U.S...
...We have little contact with regular Saudi soldiers, although the officers we meet are nice...
...He wants the Rumaila oil strip and the islands of Bubiyan and Warbah" in the Kuwaiti north...
...Riots in support of Sad-dam would break out in the West Bank and Gaza, Cairo, Amman, and North Africa...
...In strictly Islamic terms, it is a very grave error to have non-Moslem soldiers on Moslem land...
...The colonel spoke in one of the MASH tents, its walls glowing orange from the noon sun outside the canvas and a smell of disinfectant in the air...
...The scenario would likely resemble Israel's 1982 Lebanon debacle more than the Six-Day War...
...News from the front...
...A report from the Gulf...
...a much ballyhooed volunteer recruitment drive for the Saudi army has attracted, as far as televised footage of the trainees indicates, only several hundred paunchy enthusiasts in their early thirties who seem unable even to march in formation...
...Steinweg, "are apprehensive about chemical weapons...
...Below, the gravel plains had given way to great billowing hills of tan and red sand...
...Fear of chemical weapons is one of the ways the enemy tries to instill fear in a people it is trying to defeat...
...In the past, the Western press, with rare exceptions, had not been allowed into the kingdom...
...A week later, Tarek Hamda of the Detroit News pulled off a coup by traveling to Mecca and interviewing Safar al-Hawaii, the protesting imam...
...As I spoke with the man from Pravda, tens of thousands of troops faced the enemy along the Saudi-Kuwait border...
...We're here to save lives...
...We really feel America supports us—and that's very important to us...
...David Colson, pointing at the diamond shine of the Tornado engines...
...Many of the soldiers, said Col...
...The fighting forces are in place and so are the support units...
...An American businessman with contacts in the Saudi military told me that much of the armament purchased over the years remains stored in secret underground bunkers...
...I'd say the only problem," remarked Capt...
...Lacking a good war to report on, the sensitive white males of the press corps have vastly exaggerated the military's female face...
...Underground imams are warning that the presence of Western forces could undermine Wahabi Islam...
...The Soviets and the French were Iraq's main arms-suppliers and are leading the effort to save Saddam and avert a war...
...Few of the Saudi Air Force's approximately 180 combat planes have been seen in the skies...
...slowly bending, if not changing, the rules of the game...
...Some, such as the Egyptians, are wary of both Syrian and Iraqi radicalism and want simply to chase the Iraqis out of Kuwait...
...I hurried over...
...After the Patriot tour, I took my engaging and no doubt KGB-approved colleague to lunch...
...Wahabi Islam still rules Saudi Arabia, and from it the House of Saud continues to derive its legitimacy...
...T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his account of the Arab revolt against Ottoman power in World War I, described Jeddah as a "white town below a blazing sky," where the noon sun, "like moonlight,put to sleep the colors...
...Here was the true heart of Islam and Arabia, a land indifferent to man's puny strugglings, territory that stripped life down to the absolute essentials before stripping it down to death...
...All the factions would have a different reaction to an extended land war...
...That an imam would talk frankly with a Western reporter is another small sign of shifting attitudes in the country...
...The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital is an air-conditioned complex of tents and folding metal shelters designed to move with a fighting division...
...The weather was cooling off: a good time for a desert war...
...the pilot turned to parallel its track...
...Over there is the Saudi Air Force...
...he is a leading Islamic theologian...
...High spirits will give way to gallows humor if a shooting war starts, but as of this writing the war remains one of troop buildups and rhetorical bluster, a war of words and symbols...
...Among other things, the Saudis are interested in selling wheat and buying into Soviet military production lines...
...But the relatively few women in Saudi Arabia, like the men, voice little complaint...
...No compromise against aggression" goes the way of "No new taxes...
...We left a tape in case something happens to us...
...Was the Saudi sword useless without the Western shield...
...It's meatball surgery...
...Of course, there are problems...
...And," said Beliakov, "he needs to save face...
...It's great to get letters, even from people you don't know...
...We're trained to handle mass casualties, that's our mission," said Col...
...Fr he heat of Jeddah was killing, and 1 I would venture out only around dawn or dusk...
...All fifteen of the American units I visited in Saudi Arabia were confident and optimistic...
...Saddam would gain much by dragging the Israelis into war and splitting Desert Shield unity...
...Everybody here, our troops, are feeling pretty good...
...Then you eat pork, because it is a greater sin to starve yourself to death...
...He insisted that Saudi THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 21 Arabia was a free country, and a misunderstood one...
...an "arms embargo," a sop to concerns about Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, replaces the total embargo...
...He sees the Gulf crisis as intensifying the new Soviet role in the region, "a process that began with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and greater religious freedom for Moslems in the Soviet Union...
...Still, the few hundred reporters were making the Saudis nervous, and lists of journalists with expired visas were being posted in the press center, asking them to check in with the Saudi Ministry of Information...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 but it's gotten cooler—made it easier on everyone...
...The plane banked out over the shallow turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and touched down in Dhahran...
...Bush preserves his affiance, calculating that Americans will not support a conflict over a few hundred square miles of northern Kuwait and arguing that he is now in a better position to influence the Arab-Israeli "peace process" because of Desert Shield cooperation...
...The Katochev mission resulted in an agreement for direct trade between the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia...
...The unit does a mass-casualty exercise every week...
...And the Saudi leadership is terrified that taking its expensive weaponry out of the warehouses could leave it on the wrong end of a popular revolt...
...economic relations are the key...
...American officers in the field admire the Israelis and favor an Israeli-style quick strike against the Iraqis...
...Peter Rabbit, that sort of thing...
...In Beliakov's view, there is a new US...
...As the plane took off, the only thing that marred the picture of a prosperous and secure Saudi Arabia was a black cloud from a refinery fire rolling in the northern horizon...
...Cocks crow at dawn, awakened by the muezzin's call to fajr, morning prayer...
...Their army is not in a high state of preparedness," the businessman said, requesting anonymity out of fear of losing his lucrative work contracts...
...But in the Koran it also says that to eat pork is a sin, unless you are going to die and there is only pork...
...Giant C-5 cargo planes, painted in green camouflage, were offloading troops and supplies...
...Gorbachev's increasingly desperate bid to keep his country from bankruptcy and chaos remains a top concern...
...Within half an hour, I was climbing the hotel steps to the press center, the American-Saudi Joint Information Bureau (JIB...
...Penny Moureau, "is we'd like to know how long we'll be here...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991...
...We had reached the Eastern Province...
...I was not one of them, but, after weeks of entreaties at the Saudi Embassy, I managed to slip in by the back door, obtaining a visa for a brief visit to the old Red Sea port of Jeddah...
...The screen exploded with violence—the Bruce Willis action-thriller, Die Hard...
...It reads: "From the Same Asylum That Brought You Khaddafy Duck . . . Middle East Looney Tunes Presents: Yosemite Sad-dam...
...It seems to be shaping up like this: Saddam announces his willingness for a partial withdrawal from Kuwait in the interests of "the Arab nation...
...The Saudi "street" sees the hasty call to the Americans for support as a disgraceful sign of panic by the House of Saud...
...Casualties would be horrendous, and we would have a desperate Iraqi army caught south of our new line and a chaotic Iraq to the north of it...
...President Bush is justifiably proud of the international alliance he has assembled against Iraq...
...It's very isolated and lonely out here," Capt...
...The reaction in the Arab world to the sight of Western forces moving on an Arab capital, with possible Israeli air action involved, would be explosive and complicated...
...From there I hoped to travel overland to the front...
...An unanticipated problem concerns the small percentage of Islamic American soldiers, some of whom have been harassed by other American soldiers, said Chaplain Freitas of the MASH unit...
...Some, like the Kuwaitis, and the Saudis in the opening stages of the operation, want to blast Saddam and his war machine into the lowest circle of Hell...
...A day later, I was at a military air-base in the desert...
...The Saudis are now almost wholly an urban people, operating in an environment of wealth and modernity that Lawrence did not foresee and that may have mitigated Wahabism's rigor and postponed Lawrence's prediction of "early death...
...W e climbed over the jagged gray escarpment of the Hijaz highlands...
...He also wants to preserve his military power and political influence in the region...
...And while the future is unclear, it is certain at least that Operation Desert Shield has brought a number of players out of the shadows of silence at home and out of formerly low-key international alliances, players who are Micah Morrison is The American Spectator's roving correspondent...
...But all the chemical agents we know the Iraqi army to possess can be effectively treated...
...About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of rightness...
...Imam Asa adjusted the white ghutra on his head and smiled...
...War disrupts this There had been a number of military aircraft crashes recently, and it was said that the featureless landscape confused the pilots...
...Saudi Arabia T he flag of the Kingdom of Saudi 1 Arabia is a long sword on a field of green beneath the inscription: There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is His prophet...
...Mecca, the birthplace of the prophet Muhammed and Islam, was seventy kilometers away—as close as this non-Moslem would ever get...
...The desert kingdom is nervous and restless, unhappy not only with the Western presence but with its own rulers...
...Chaplain Freitas discounted reports in the Saudi press that twenty to thirty U.S...
...Supporters were circulating cassette tapes of his sermons, as the Ayatollah Khomeini's supporters had done in the early days of the revolt against the Shah...
...Rumaila and the islands go to lengthy international arbitration...
...The Saudis allowed several hundred reporters into the Eastern Province, on the Persian Gulf side of the country, to cover the international deployment...
...Egyptian workers lounge in its broken doorways and root about in the yard...
...We still have a great deal of tactical development to do in the region, and that's aside from all the political problems...
...They totally freaked out the first time they saw a woman driving a forklift...
...If it flies, it dies," said Capt...
...In one corner of the lot were hundreds of brand-new Toyota Land Cruisers and Mitsubishi autos`the Japanese contribution to the war effort," someone commented...
...Operation Desert Shield has among other things brought two of Israel's bitterest enemies, the Saudis and the Syrians, into an open regional alliance with Jerusalem's chief supporter, the United States...
...Besides, what was the worst that could happen...
...The city was quiet, ghostly...
...There had been a number of military aircraft crashes recently, and it was said that the featureless landscape confused the pilots...
...She paused...
...Then you eat pork, because it is a greater sin to starve yourself to death...
...The new press freedom has spurred widespread criticism in Saudi society...
...Beliakov was one of the first Soviet journalists allowed into Saudi Arabia, and holds the post at one time occupied by Yevgeny Primakov, Gorbachev's top Middle East adviser...
...But everyone has a common interest here at the moment, common goals...
...We have had very few problems of a religious nature," he said, "considering the environment we function in...
...Part of the complexity results from the mixed motives of our Arab allies...
...Imam Asa pointed out that the Koran, like the Bible, is a tapestry of laws and tales, some immutable, some elastic...
...As an American, it's disturbing to me...
...Today, great gleaming blocks of office towers, shopping centers, and apartment complexes, blindingly white by day and embroidered in neon by night, cover much of the sands...
...I would never make it past all the checkpoints...
...They had come expecting a war—some had even been looking forward to it—and now they were a disappointed lot, reduced to filing color pieces on such esoterica as the role of the woman in Saudi society and "the clash of cultures...
...A country made comfortable—some would say lazy—by oil wealth is now being called on by internal and external forces to display some backbone, some decisiveness...
...Jeddah is Saudi Arabia's commercial center and gateway for the haj, the pilgrimage to nearby Mecca and Medina that is the duty of every Moslem who can afford it...
...Capt...
...Compared to NATO," Capt...
...A little to the east, in the gravel-and-sand Najd plains we were approaching, the clan of Mu-hammed Ibn Saud allied two hundred years ago with the fundamentalist religious leader Muhammed ibn Abdul Wahab...
...It's not fine surgery," said a medic...
...A crescent moon hung in the dusky sky as a pair of British Tornado fighters maneuvered in the yellow band of sunset and helicopters beat around the base perimeter...
...It was a negation of the old Kissinger policy of keeping us out...
...From Bush's point of view, the politics of Desert Shield—holding together the alliance and building a "new world order' point to a deal...
...bans alcohol and cinemas, pork and pornography...
...Massive air strikes against Iraq likely would be coupled with a northeastward land drive from somewhere around the meeting point of the Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi borders, together with an amphibious assault on key positions in Kuwait City...
...It was an important and little-noticed story—exactly the sort of journalism the Saudis didn't want emerging from the country...
...Now, perestroika drives Moscow's Middle East policy...
...The Saudi monarchy is fearful of Saddam, fearful of its own people, and fearful of Western mores—pretty much in that order...
...But now they are caught in a trap...
...Anything is possible...
...On board, the pilot announced we would hear a travel supplication from the Prophet Muhammed, and there followed a deep Charlton Heston-like voice in mellifluous Arabic...
...We also ask the Islamic soldiers not to proselytize...
...Jewish soldiers, he noted, are provided with extra security for their religious services...
...A nd what of a military solution to the Iraq stand-off...
...soldiers had converted to Islam...
...They left a three-month-old baby at home...
...Capt...
...current hostages would be executed...
...Michel Aoun, a move that included the well-reported murder of captive Christian soldiers, with hardly a peep from Washington...
...It's really pretty at night," said Army Lt...
...The people know that the reason the Saudi military remains tiny and the sophisticated weapons stored away is that the royal family fears a powerful army that may one day throw a ring of tanks around the palace...
...It's almost like hiring a mercenary army...
...They examined my papers, frowned at my story, poked through my bags—the Koran I had helpfully placed atop my luggage seemed not to impress them—and, after a heated discussion among themselves, waved me through...
...But now I knew that Saudi security was riven by paradox and illusion...
...Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes—sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and unencumbered minds of the desert-dwellers...
...Yet there are signs that the Saudis, more than four months after the invasion of Kuwait, are still taking a less than aggressive stance in defense of their own country...
...Hawaii is not an obscure preacher...
...Moureau and her husband are both serving in Saudi Arabia—it also seems extraordinarilydumb...
Vol. 24 • January 1991 • No. 1
