Crude World (26 page)

The Saudis and their allies in OPEC realized that their customers could be made to pay far more for the oil their economies were addicted to. In 1973, the colonial era of oil, in which American and European companies controlled pricing and distribution, came to an end. When the Yom Kippur War broke out in October and America provided weapons to Israel, Arab members of OPEC boycotted shipments to
America. Prices soared instantly. The reversal was celebrated by Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister at the time. “The moment has come,” he exulted. “We are masters of our own commodity.”

This was only partly true. The royal family might be the master of the country’s oil, but not of the alienation it fomented.

In today’s agricultural and industrial economies, the government does not tend to own every ear of corn that comes from a farm or every slab of steel that rolls off a factory line. Yes, some land and factories might be state-owned, but even in those cases there are usually large numbers of workers and managers involved in the creation of this wealth who care about what happens to the products they have made, and whose salaries come out of the revenues gained by selling them. Other inputs must be paid for—fertilizer, seeds, furnaces, delivery trucks and so on. That is why diverse economies with labor-intensive sectors (whether agricultural or industrial) are healthier over the long term than ones that depend on a single resource or industry: they generate jobs, they are not tossed up or down by inevitable price swings for a particular commodity or product, and the national treasury is not a bulging piggy bank from which princes can take as they wish.

Oil offers another paradigm. In most countries, oil is not owned by the person who lives atop it. (The United States is one of the handful of countries where property rights extend below the earth.) And unlike the farming of wheat or manufacturing of cars, relatively little labor is required to get oil out of the ground, particularly in the Middle East, where the reservoirs tend to be large and close to the surface. This means that an enormous amount of money that flows into the state’s hands has no owner or benefactor other than the state. A king or prince who pilfers tax funds is taking cash from his people’s pockets, and they will notice. Oil revenues are not squeezed from individuals, as taxes are, and the financial complexity of oil contracts and oil sales allows ample opportunities for theft. The scholars Terry Lynn Karl and Ian Gary noted in a coauthored study that “petrodollars actually sever the very link between people and their government that is the essence of popular control.” This is an origin of the House of Saud’s moral downfall.

Before the oil rush, the monarchy was known for piety and thrift under Ibn Saud, who lived in a modest palace made of mud bricks. He was not in it for the money or the easy living. He died in 1953 and was succeeded by a son whose immodest ways included throwing money from the window of his royal sedan and watching as his destitute subjects grabbed the riyals fluttering in the air. He was nudged aside by siblings concerned that the monarchy would be destroyed by his rule. But the genie was well out of the bottle. The heirs of Ibn Saud, who had at least forty-five sons and some two hundred daughters, allotted themselves sizable allowances from the nation’s oil revenues. The phrase “Saudi prince” became a synonym for fantastic riches. Long before Hollywood A-listers could afford private jets, Saudi royals rented out entire floors of luxury hotels in Switzerland and arrived in silver-plated Boeings; King Fahd, who ruled from 1982 to 2005, reportedly had a fountain in his 747. Saudi royalty all but created the spectacle of “the entourage.”

There were two ways of drilling into the public till to fund lavish lifestyles. First, there were direct allowances to royals; the amounts have never been divulged but are regarded as substantial, because palaces cannot be built cheaply. Princes who wanted even more cash used their royal status to win contracts and commissions on government deals. For example, a prince who was a longtime defense minister was famous for the cuts he demanded from foreign companies that wished to sell weapons to the kingdom. Decades ago, an elegant portrait of these inelegant affairs was crafted by William Morris, Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In cables that were unsealed just a few years ago, Morris described Saudi commerce as “a jungle inhabited by beasts of prey in which one must move with caution and uncertainty.” He wrote in another dispatch, “What they do with the wealth is often comedy and sometimes farce … the theatre of the absurd is never far away. … The sheer effrontery is breathtaking of a prince who will keep on talking about rights and wrongs when you know (and he probably knows that you know) that his cut may be 20 percent of the contract price.”

The theater of the brazen was nearer. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a
longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, said in a television interview that it wasn’t a problem if the elite “misused or got corrupted with $50 billion,” because a far greater amount of money was not stolen. The prince, whose vacation compound in Aspen was valued at $135 million when it was put up for sale, famously added, “What I’m trying to tell you is, So what? We did not invent corruption.” A former fighter pilot, Prince Bandar was himself accused of receiving one billion pounds from BAE Systems, the British arms manufacturer that sold $80 billion of weapons to the Saudi government. An initial probe by the British government’s Serious Fraud Office was shut down by then-prime minister Tony Blair because it imperiled British-Saudi ties, though the U.S. Department of Justice has begun looking into the case.

Royal corruption was not the only precursor to instability. The extraction of oil required the construction of an infrastructure that included drilling rigs, pipelines, roads, power plants, offices and airports. American firms flooded into an isolated nation that, until the 1930s, had almost no paved roads. The oil boom functioned as a sudden introduction to Western ways. Elvis Presley and Johnnie Walker were brought to the kingdom, as was education for women. The transition was uneasy because Saudi Arabia was one of the most conservative societies in the Arab world, with a brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism, that was famously strict and puritanical. Even the advent of TV was an occasion for a violent protest from conservatives opposed to reproductions of the human image. While it was a comfort to have air-conditioning in Riyadh and running water in Jeddah, some Saudis worried that Islam’s holy land, where Mecca and Medina are located, was selling its soul.

The revolt of the alienated began in 1979, when several hundred gunmen, led by a messianic fundamentalist named Juhayman al-Oteibi, seized Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Islam’s holiest shrine. Perhaps the seizure would have taken place without the oil wealth on which the royal family had compromised itself, but the qualities that made the House of Saud so odious to Islamists—its Westernized ways, its love of material comforts, its less-than-devout inclinations, its willingness to
allow infidels and their impure customs into the holy land—were linked to petroleum. Oteibi, speaking over a loudspeaker system normally used to broadcast prayers, called for the ousting of the royal family and the imposition of theocratic rule.

The national guard failed to retake the mosque in a series of assaults. The ruling family, realizing that its own forces were inept or disloyal, called upon the military services of foreign countries, including Pakistan and, controversially, France. Infidels are not allowed in Mecca, so the use of French commandos has been officially denied. The foreigners, according to some news accounts, were required to make quick conversions to Islam before entering Mecca. In the final battle, which killed hundreds, a gas was used to disable the fundamentalists. More than fifty-five of them, including Oteibi, were captured and, a month later, beheaded in the largest mass execution in Saudi history.

The royal family felt too weak to oppose a rising tide that its misbehavior had helped incite. Instead, the House of Saud decided to placate the fundamentalists. New authority was granted to religious leaders, with the Ministry of Education placed under their control and enhanced powers given to the
muttawa
, an Islamic police force whose official name was the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. To augment its conservative credentials, the government gave several hundred million dollars a year to the mujahideen who fought the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Most crucially, in terms of the global spread of fundamentalism, billions of dollars were poured into projects to propagate Islamic values. An American think tank estimated that more than $70 billion was spent between 1975 and 2002 on projects that included the construction and operation of mosques and study centers. Thanks to this funding, in Karachi, Jakarta, Hamburg and elsewhere, young Muslims were taught that the Koran should be the law of the land, that living as the Prophet lived was a way forward, and that nothing was more glorious than dying in the service of Allah. With a population equal to only 1 percent of Muslims worldwide, Saudi Arabia funded more than 90 percent of the faith’s costs, and these expenditures constituted the most expensive information campaign ever mounted.

• • •

Paradoxically, the dissatisfaction the monarchy sought to cure by supporting fundamentalist causes had the effect of deepening the problem. Exhibit A is the seventeenth child of a onetime bricklayer.

The oil boom enriched a number of nonroyal Saudis, including Mohammed bin Laden, who was a manual laborer for Aramco in the 1940s. Mohammed used his talent with numbers—he could instantly solve calculations—as well as his proclivity for hard work and harder bargains to create a construction firm that by the 1960s was building everything—roads, palaces, mosques. The wealthiest nonroyal in Saudi Arabia, he was rich enough to support twenty-two wives and fifty-four children. If the oil boom had not happened, he could not have dreamed of such an extended family, and Osama would not have been born.

After Mohammed bin Laden died, in a 1968 plane crash, his firm continued to prosper under the leadership of his eldest sons. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi Binladen Group, as it was called, employed about thirty-six thousand people. Osama was not an active manager, though he performed minor functions during quieter moments in his life. Although his wealth was estimated in some reports to be as high as $300 million, later and more reliable estimates cited in Steve Coll’s
The Bin Ladens
suggest that Osama received about $24 million from the family firm between 1970 and 1993 or 1994.

This was sufficient to make him, when he went to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a noted figure of the anti-Communist jihad who leveraged his personal finances by raising donations from wealthy friends and acquaintances. By the time he returned home after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, bin Laden was regarded as an Islamic hero. The 1990-91 Gulf War soon brought a new cause to his life when the royal family welcomed American troops to ward off the attack by Iraqi forces massed in Kuwait. Ironically, the Saudi government became a prime target of the fundamentalists the government had all but created. Like Dokubo Asari in Nigeria, bin Laden was outraged at the corruption of political and moral values that oil had wrought, and he stridently opposed the presence of an infidel army in
Islam’s holy land. Dissatisfied and restless, he moved to Sudan and presided over a grab bag of small businesses started with his funds.

The Sudanese all but fleeced him, so he left for Afghanistan in 1996, nearly broke. Because he had spoken out against the Saudi alliance with America, family money was now out of reach. At times, bin Laden and his followers had nothing to eat in Afghanistan but stale bread. Al-Qaeda, mostly inert since its creation in 1988, was nursed to life with modest donations bin Laden raised on the basis of his previous exploits fighting the Soviets. His new enemy was the United States. Oil was now relevant not as a source of funding for bin Laden’s activities but as the reason the United States kept its troops in Saudi Arabia (to ward off another invasion of Kuwait by the still-troublesome Iraq). Bin Laden’s mission broadened beyond removing infidel soldiers from his homeland: he now wanted to cleanse the entire Muslim world of American and Jewish influences.

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual, wrote a book about the terrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule entitled
Republic of Fear
. The Middle East has many such countries, each different from the other, and Saudi Arabia is one of them. A hallmark of these countries, whether they are rich or poor, is a brutal security apparatus that, rather than elections or dialogue, is the method through which the unloved regimes deal with their opponents. Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, when I talked with him, was trying to avoid becoming the next victim.

Mugaiteeb had one of the loneliest jobs in Saudi Arabia. He was the oft-interrogated and occasionally imprisoned leader of the Saudi branch of Human Rights First, which consisted of a handful of activists sending out information and appeals to a world that paid little heed. As Amnesty International noted, “The Saudi Arabian government spares no effort to keep its appalling human rights record a secret, and other governments have shown themselves more than willing to help maintain the secrecy.”

After arriving in Riyadh, I reached Mugaiteeb on his cell phone in Dhahran. He was parking his car at home and told me he had been summoned for a police interrogation the next day.

“I have been under scrutiny for the past two years,” he said, his voice a mixture of impatience and nervousness. “All they have done is harass me. I do not know what they want to accomplish.”

Mugaiteeb had arranged to meet a small group of diplomats the next day, so the summons appeared to be a form of punishment and a means of stopping the event from happening.

Might he be jailed when he went in for questioning?

“It would add another honorable individual to the long list of activists who are in jail,” Mugaiteeb replied. “We are not sheep. Believe me, I don’t care. They”—he was referring to the regime—“like to break people. They think they are getting on my nerves, but they can go to hell. Look at the price of oil, and still people do not have what they need. They think they can steal the resources of the country and the people will keep quiet.”