a correspondent in Riyadh
The story of how the beduin’s camel under the pretext of getting his head inside the tent to escape from the cold night in the desert took over the whole tent is well-known. The beduin was soon outside the tent with the camel safely lodged inside. The US has virtually done the game in the Arabian Peninsula.
Following the June 25 explosion in Dhahran, the US has announced that not only will the security fence be extended but that US forces will be spread across other bases in the kingdom. The distribution of troops was confirmed by US defence secretary William Perry on July.
The US - and indeed the West in general - does not want to understand that from Rabat to Riyadh, the oppressed masses hate them like the plague. The US in particular is seen as supporter of oppressive oligarchies that are corrupt, incompetent and thoroughly out of touch with reality.
The level of mismanagement in Saudi Arabia can be gauged from the fact that in 1981, the gross domestic product was US$ 18,800. Today it is less than a third of that. Having spent hundreds of billions of dollars on armaments in the last two decades, the House of Saud still needs Uncle Sam for protection.
For decades the House of Saud presented itself as the guardian of the Haramain - the two holy places of Islam. Even though most people knew this to be a facade, they went along with it, at least in the kingdom as long as there was no direct evidence of the sanctity being violated openly. All this changed with the Gulf War of 1990-91.
The Zionists and the Americans have been trying to find a ‘foreign’ hand in these explosions. Zionist paranoia about Iran was so clearly offbase that even the anti-Iranian Americans refused to buy it. The Saudis too refrained from accusing Iran, having had to eat their words when they accused the Iranis of masterminding last November’s explosion in Riyadh and then executing four Saudis on May 31, 1996. The Saudi regime alleged that the four had ‘confessed’ to the bombing. The manner in which people are tortured in Saudi prisons, it is not difficult to make even the Saudi interior minister Nayef bin Abdul Aziz to confess to these ‘crimes’.
By embracing the House of Saud, the Americans too have placed themselves in the firing line. They claim to be protecting their ‘interests’. Clearly, the Americans think that their interests take precedence over others’ lives.
On a visit to Dhahran on June 29, Perry said, ‘we will not cut and run.’ He does not seem to get it. The people of the Arabian Peninsula have an intense dislike for the Americans because they view them as propping up a corrupt and morally bankrupt regime . No matter how far and how many security fences they put around their bases, people will always find a way to strike at them.
If Uncle Sam simply is incapable of doing the honourable thing, then it must face the consequences of its actions. Some Americans are at least realistic enough to realise this. ‘We all know anything is possible. We are not going to be able to 100 percent guarantee the security of this base,’ major Bob Dewald, incoming chief of security police at the Dhahran complex, told reporters five days after the June 25 blast.
Muslimedia - April 1996-August 1996
The Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, was rocked by four massive explosions late on May 12, as Crescent was going to press. They were apparentl...
