Inside the Kingdom (26 page)

Fahd said nothing—in public. Behind closed doors the Saudi king was on the phone constantly to his allies, particularly President Mubarak of Egypt, who, like Fahd, had accepted Saddam’s personal assurance that he would not invade Kuwait. Like Fahd, the Egyptian felt bitterly betrayed. But the king kept his counsel. As the days went by, it seemed possible to some observers that Saudi Arabia might be planning to accept the Iraqi occupation in some messy compromise that would be covered up with assurances of Arab brotherly love. The Desert Leopard, they insinuated, was in a funk.

“Not at all,” recalls a member of his kitchen cabinet. “He did not want to show his hand too early. It was a tactic he took from poker. Fahd never took any decision without running it right through the consensus—all his brothers, the main ministers, the military, the tribes, and the religious sheikhs.”

The sheikhs most of all. Faced with an armed threat on his border, Fahd obviously spoke to his military, but his most important calls were to the religious establishment, and to Abdul Aziz Bin Baz in particular. Would the ulema support him, asked the king, if he had to turn to America for military assistance?

The answer was a prompt and unanimous no. The Wahhabi tradition—upheld in the past by the “Son of the Tiger” and by Bin Baz himself when he was qadi of Al-Kharj—was to seek separation from nonbelievers: “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.” This well-known hadith was one of several authorities that fundamentalists liked to cite as prohibiting the presence of infidels in the Kingdom. There remained many a true believer in the towns of Unayzah and Buraydah who would walk the other way if he saw a foreigner in the street. Such cautious and fearful folk constituted the deep roots of the Kingdom’s believing community, and it was for them that the sheikhs now had to speak.

Fahd kept on trying, recruiting his brothers Salman and Nayef, who had more pious reputations. All the senior princes maintained close ties with the ulema, and with Bin Baz in particular, some of them visiting him in his home and seeking spiritual guidance. The keener princes rather enjoyed sitting in Bin Baz’s majlis to watch the blind sheikh conduct his teachings, when his students would read out sections of the Koran or Islamic writings, then earnestly scribble down the wisdom that the great man delivered at the end of every paragraph.

The scholar’s home was a little cluster of modern two-story buildings where he lived with his wives and children in the Shumaysi neighborhood of Riyadh. This was royal territory. Talal bin Abdul Aziz and other princes had palaces nearby. In fact, the compound had been a gift to Bin Baz from the royal family. This did not make it a bribe. All senior Saudi clerics lived in homes that were gifts from rich benefactors and foundations. Still, it was a reminder of the underlying reality of the royal-Wahhabi alliance. The Al-Saud needed the Wahhabi clerics for their legitimacy, but the clerics, for their part, depended equally upon the Al-Saud. In no other Muslim Arab country did senior religious figures enjoy such prestige and closeness to the government centers of power. There would be no more cars and plush houses for the sheikhs if Saddam Hussein marched into Riyadh.

It took a few days of arguing, but once the discussion had started, Fahd reckoned that the initial No would not stand.

“’Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds,” came the announcement, eventually, on August 13, 1990. “The board of senior ulema has been aware of the great massing of troops on the Kingdom’s border and of the aggression of Iraq on a neighboring country. . . . This has prompted the rulers of the Kingdom . . . to ask Arab and non-Arab countries to deter the expected danger.” It was the duty of the good Muslim ruler, continued the statement, “to take every means to deter aggression and the incursion of evil. . . . So the board thus supports all measures taken by the ruler.”

It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but it would do. In the meantime, the Saudi king had been talking to Washington. On Saturday, August 4, General Norman Schwarzkopf received a phone call from his boss, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“King Fahd is asking for someone to brief him on the threat to his kingdom,” said Powell. “When you get there, you’ll have to play it by ear.”

“Is the U.S. government saying we’re prepared to commit forces?” asked Schwarzkopf.

“Yes,” replied Powell. “If King Fahd gives his permission.”

The bulky figure of the Saudi king was waiting for the Americans in the far left-hand corner of the majlis in his Jeddah palace beside the Red Sea. Down one side of the plush green and gold room were lined the princes—Abdullah; Saud Al-Faisal, the foreign minister; Bandar bin Sultan, just in himself from Washington; Abdul Rahman, Sultan’s Sudayri brother and vice defense minister—all in robes, headdresses, dark mustaches and beards. Down the other wall, dressed in shirts, ties, and Western business suits and every one of them clean-shaven, were seated the American officials—Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Pentagon strategist Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates (later defense secretary to both George W. Bush and to Barack Obama), and Ambassador Chas Freeman, along with their bemedaled and uniformed military delegation.

Schwarzkopf strode forward with his array of charts and aerial photographs, and, since there was no seat available, he went down on one knee in front of the king to begin his presentation.

Embarrassed, Fahd called for a servant to bring a chair, so the husky four-star general found himself seated with his display materials in his lap, while the Saudi king looked over one shoulder and Crown Prince Abdullah peered over the other.

“I had imagined,” Schwarzkopf recalls, “that they would listen to my briefing politely, then go away to discuss it among themselves.”

In fact, he found himself in the middle of an animated discussion in Arabic, only snippets of which were translated into English by Bandar. The U.S. photographs, taken a few days earlier by surveillance planes and satellites, showed Iraqi armored vehicles and troops massed in the desert along the Saudi border, with a handful of tanks—no more than five—clearly inside Saudi territory. Schwarzkopf was inclined to think that this was unintentional. The Saudi-Kuwaiti border was not delineated on the ground at that point. But Fahd took it very seriously.

“I don’t care if it’s only one tank!” said the king indignantly. “They’ve trespassed on Saudi sovereignty.”

Schwarzkopf said bluntly that America had no inside intelligence of Iraqi intentions, and he now laughs at the often-canvassed Arab conspiracy theory that the United States had doctored the aerial photographs to make the threat seem worse than it was.

“They were regular reconnaissance photographs, sharp and clear, taken on some very bright days, but they did not show a definite picture. If we had doctored them we could have done a much better job. I explained that we could only make an educated deduction from the facts on the ground: these were identifiably some of the Iraqi Army’s very best units; they were clearly pausing to rearm, refuel, and reequip as taught by their Soviet instructors. We had observed them regroup that way during the Iran-Iraq War. They might or might not be preparing to attack. But it could hardly be said that their posture looked defensive. The tanks were facing south.”

Schwarzkopf concluded with a presentation of the substantial forces that the United States could provide to protect the Kingdom, then he yielded the floor to Cheney for a final statement. President Bush was willing to make this military commitment immediately, said the defense secretary: “If you ask us, we will come. When you ask us to go home, we will leave. We will seek no permanent bases.”

This was the point at which Schwarzkopf had expected the Saudis to retire to conduct their deliberations privately. But the princes continued their discussion briskly and briefly in front of their visitors—with the turning point coming in a sharp exchange between Fahd and Abdullah.

“We must be careful not to rush into a decision,” said the crown prince.

“Like the Kuwaitis!” retorted Fahd caustically. “They did not rush into a decision, and now there is no Kuwait.”

“There is still a Kuwait,” persisted Abdullah.

“And its territory,” replied Fahd, “consists of hotel rooms in London, Cairo, and elsewhere.”

Abdullah conceded the argument, and as the other princes in the room agreed, the king turned to Cheney and spoke his first and only word of English—“OK,” he said.

Within days U.S. planes and troops were flooding into Saudi Arabia’s airports and bases in every corner of the country. Schwarzkopf ’s rule of thumb was simple. He wanted five U.S. soldiers on the ground for every Iraqi, and by the end of September thousands of young Americans in combat gear were driving their jeeps around the streets and highways of the east. The trouble was that quite a number of these Americans were women—attractive young female GIs who swung their vehicles around as if they were back in North Carolina. This set alarm bells ringing in the Saudi Ministry of Defense, and, after talks with General Schwarzkopf, the U.S. lady drivers were confined to U.S. camps, the Aramco compound, and out in the desert (where bedouin women also drove).

But the ban did not apply to the several thousand Kuwaiti women who had recently arrived in the Kingdom. They went on driving their cars to the shops—they could be seen every day in Al-Khobar and the sprawling cities of the oil fields, loading their cars with groceries and ferrying their children to and from the beach. There was no law that explicitly banned women from driving in Saudi Arabia. There is none today—the Kingdom’s notorious female driving ban is a matter of social convention, fortified by some ferocious religious pressures. So some Saudi women started looking thoughtfully at their Kuwaiti sisters.

Dr. Aisha Al-Mana came from a religious family on her mother’s side—“all imams and bearded ones,” she recalls. Her father was Mohammed Al-Mana, Abdul Aziz’s literate companion and translator whose charming memoir,
Arabia Unified
, vividly captures the leisurely atmosphere of Riyadh before the oil wealth came.

“My father,” she remembers, “always warned me against joining parties and factions, either left or right. ‘Be yourself,’ he used to say.”

Aisha took his words to heart. As a politically active student in America she had fought a losing battle against the Islamist takeover of the Arab student organizations in the 1970s.

“In those days the U.S. government encouraged the religious hard-liners as a counterweight to the Arab nationalists,” says Aisha. “I remember how the State Department used to give money to the fundamentalist students—the Arabs and also the Iranians. They gave them air tickets for their conferences and helped them organize. I saw it myself. They thought they were fighting Communism, and they ended up with Khomeini. All this Islamism—it’s not religion: it’s only politics, and it was America that helped create these extremists. They just ride on religion, these born agains—in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, and in the southern states of America too: they’re all after their own piece of the cake.”