The View from Riyadh
GLASS, ANDREW J.
AFTER THE STORM The View from Riyadh BY ANDREW J. GLASS Riyadh Despite the inevitable changes here resulting from the Persian Gulf war, Saudi Arabia remains a repressed society where...
...Fahd & Co., a limited family partnership, controls one of the world's great fortunes...
...On one such tape, a supposed Islamic religious teacher described in graphic terms the American Jewish female troops that he said were deployed in Saudi Arabia as part of the coalition forces...
...Until this changes, there will be no peace in the Middle East...
...Before it fell, the religious hierarchy at the college had sharply criticized the government for allowing 535,000 American troops and another 1,400 Western journalists into their puritanical country...
...It carries the inscription: "There is no god but God and his prophet is Mohammed...
...Even today, as the troops prepare to return from the Saudi desert, they hold no religious services as such...
...Having most of these records incinerated may have been seen as a blessing in disguise bytheSaudis...
...The second Scud that did damage— even though it was intercepted by a Patriot missile fired from a local air base —happened to strike a fundamentalist Islamic college on the outskirts of town...
...Because the Scud hit in the dead of night it killed just one person, the watchman, an Egyptian...
...So long as the Saudis continue to cast a longing religious eye on Jerusalem, the"J" dwellers of the region can at best look forward to small accommodations...
...Its census also officially gives the number of native Saudi Arabians at better than 13 million, although knowledgeable people, both within and outside the power structure, say the actual number is closer to 6 million...
...Save for the aforementioned foreign drones, Saudi Arabia, for all of its vast oil riches, had succeeded in keeping itself virtually a closed society...
...Give them and their descendants the choicest parts of Germany, he advised...
...At a briefing some weeks prior to the Iraqi collapse, I asked Sir Patrick Hine, the top British air general, whether the same Western-Arab coalition that successfully waged the war could secure a lasting peace...
...He replied, quite sensibly, "That remains to be seen...
...In 1945, just before another war came to a close, Fahd's father, Abdel Azizibn Saud, the prolific founder of the modern Saudi state who gave this country his name, met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt...
...AFTER THE STORM The View from Riyadh BY ANDREW J. GLASS Riyadh Despite the inevitable changes here resulting from the Persian Gulf war, Saudi Arabia remains a repressed society where truth is often hard to come by...
...But that does not mean they live together, as I soon discovered...
...The family has said it will no longer give large subsidies to the PLO, pay protection money to terrorist gangs or shore up assorted dictators, all in the name of a supposed Arab "reawakening" and the promised recovery of East Jerusalem...
...FDR told the King of Arabia that the Jews, having suffered severely in the War, deserved a home of their own...
...But you do not need a list of the people injured in a Scud attack to discern that the country functions largely on the backs of mercenaries...
...And that dims the prospects for a real postwar peace in the Middle East, at least in the foreseeable future...
...The struck building belongs to the ubiquitous Ministry of Interior, whose security arm stands out among the various military components in Riyadh because its members ride around town in Jeep-like vehicles painted fireengine red that have 50-caliber machine guns mounted over their rear seats...
...A few days later, a junior member of the Saudi royal house (the number of princes is in the low thousands) told me that was probably the single most lucky missile the Iraqis fired, from the family's point of view...
...Foreigners live side-by-side with the Saudis...
...Yes, Riyadh is quite a cosmopolitan place...
...Nevertheless, the Gulf war has unalterably changed the geopolitical scene and, in so doing, has changed Saudi Arabia...
...We eventually found our way through the maze of clover-leafed eightand 10-lane highways that soar over and burrow below the capital with the help of a map I had providentially brought along from Washington...
...Others who were approached delivered similar rebuffs...
...Yet as fate would have it, they illuminated several aspects of the Saudi psyche...
...Sir Patrick was standing in front of the green-and-white Saudi flag...
...The destroyed wing housed the records of the approximately 6 million foreigners working in the kingdom...
...The speaker claimed some of those soldiers had deposited their "menstrual rags" at the base of the Kaaba, the holiest shrine in Islam, located in Mecca, its holiest city...
...Had Saddam moved his tanks down from Kuwait in August, he could easily have been in Riyadh and Dhahran in two days...
...The King agreed...
...In fact, as countless refugee scenes since last August attest, much of the Middle East continues to be a polyglot babble of poor people trying to make ends meet in oil-rich lands lacking a strong sense of national identity themselves...
...Special Forces teams destroyed the Iraqi launching sites north of Kuwait during the final phase of the war...
...Fewer than 40 Scuds landed in Saudi Arabia beforeU.S...
...The tapes, I was told, originally came from Baghdad...
...It is a brew ripe for a far bigger human explosion than the incendiary ones that rocked Kuwait's devastated oil wells...
...Bedouins driving compact Japanese-made pickup trucks regularly crossed the Saudi-Iraqi border in both directions during the fighting...
...That roster of injured read like a caucus of Third World delegates to the United Nations...
...The government acknowledges the existence of no more than 4 million such workers...
...There were no deaths or injuries, but the warhead decimated the college's indoor swimming pool and made a mess of the nearby gymnasium, an ultramodern concrete structure...
...In addition to a handful of Saudis, it included Egyptians, Sudanese, Jordanians, Syrians, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, SriLankans, Thais, Koreans, and Filipinos...
...All commercial flights were grounded when I landed in Dhahran on the first day of thewar, so I had to make the long trip here in a taxi...
...Instead, they have "P-morale meetings" and "C-morale meetings" and "J-morale meetings...
...After the strike, the same religious leaders passed the word to King Fahd that they would like nothing more in this life than to see the defiled body of Saddam Hussein swing from a lamppost in Riyadh...
...It is an unstated yet everpresent reality hereabouts that Fahd would prefer to be known as the "Custodian of Three Holy Mosques...
...At thesametime, as remoteas the Crusades may be to Westerners, the failed infidel attempts to reclaim Jerusalem for Christianity are embedded in the lifeblood of the Saudis and other Islamic peoples...
...Only two of the missiles, to my knowledge, caused any substantial damage in this sprawling capital situated in the arid high desert roughly at the center of the Arabian peninsula...
...Mistaking the driver for an outsider, the man responded sternly, "How dare you, a mere foreigner, address a Saudi citizen...
...Since the driver, a Saudi, had never been to Riyadh before, upon entering the outskirts of the city he stopped to ask a man walking down the street for directions...
...One Scud neatly demolished a wing of an office building located about a mile from my hotel and the complex across the street where General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the theater commander, and his tightly knit staff were managing the war with the aid of a bank of computers...
...Ibn Saud's son has seen about the same number of Iraqi Scuds fall on his land and on Israel...
...Moreover, while most U.S...
...Andrew J. Glass, is head of the Cox Newspapers bureau in Washington...
...For reasons that go far beyond the Palestinian issue or Jordanian or Syrian ambitions, the Saudis will not play the game...
...They are located in Mecca and Medina, near the Red Sea, a tough 10-hour drive from Riyadh during the war...
...Riyadh's newspapers subsequently reported that some 50 people had been hurt in the attack, mostly by flying glass from blown out windows...
...Throughout the war, for example, at a shopping mall not far from General Schwarzkopf's campaign headquarters, you could obtain cassettes offering a very different version of the conflict than the rather antiseptic accounts provided by the allied briefers here or at the Pentagon...
...Several random street interviews with Saudis suggested that the propaganda was having an impact...
...Whenever the local press refers to King Fahd, which is quite often, he is invariably described as the "Custodian of Two Holy Mosques...
...But when it comes to what Fahd still always calls Palestine in private conversations, he sees matters essentially the way his father did...
...troops will go home, Saudi Arabia has now cast its lot firmly with the United States...
...George Bush would have had to declare war on the Iraqis sooner, and it would have taken a lot longer to defeat them...
...That would require adding to the inventory —over the objections of the Israelis and perhaps other assorted infidels—the Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem...
...There were, of course, no American GIs, of whatever sex or religion, in Mecca, although plenty of them could be found at a huge air base not far from the holy sites...
Vol. 74 • February 1991 • No. 3
