Steve Quayle News Alerts

Nov. 11, 2003

Finding the central front in the war on terror is not as easy as youíd think. So many places lay claim to it. So many countries look like it. And like all battlefields, anyone in the line of fire feels they are at the heart of it.

IF YOU ASK anyone inside the Bush administration, there is one —or maybe two—central fronts in the war on terror: Iraq, and possibly Afghanistan. But if the war on terror means anything, it means Al Qaeda. And the attacks of the last few days leave no doubt about where Al Qaeda is focused. Those are the attacks in Riyadh, not Baghdad.

The Iraq assaults are coming from Iraqis, not Al Qaeda. Even as the administration talks about “foreign fighters” flooding into the country, U.S. forces on the ground concede that they cannot establish any direct relationship between Osama bin Laden’s network and the jihadis they are rounding up.

That kind of link is easy to find in Al Qaeda’s true battleground: the holy land of Saudi Arabia. Sunday’s bombing on a residential compound in Riyadh left 17 dead and more than 120 wounded. Both the compound attacked on Sunday, and the similar compounds attacked in May, have been described as “western”. In the sense that they have swimming pools and tennis courts, they are. But the compounds are also dominated by Arabs, many of whom are employed by foreign companies.

So who are the terrorists trying to kill? In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, we all thought the answer was obvious: Americans and what they stand for. To this day, President George W. Bush claims that the terrorists attacked the United States because they hate American freedoms. That may be an understandable reaction amid the shock of such a huge attack. But it’s a huge misunderstanding of Al Qaeda’s real goals and methods.

Bin Laden’s terrorists don’t want to turn America into an Islamic state. They want to take control of Saudi Arabia and the holy cities of Islam. If that means attacking the superpower that supports the Saudi government, so be it. And apart from the events of 9/11 itself, the group’s tactics look surprisingly familiar. With every attack, Al Qaeda looks more and more like a traditional terrorist group, not the fiendishly sophisticated enemy of the future. The group is simply shooting and bombing its way to topple the rulers it hates so passionately: the Saudi royal family.

“Saudi Arabia is the main front in the war on Al Qaeda,” says one senior Saudi official. “There is no way in his dreams that bin Laden thought he could destroy America. But he thinks Saudi Arabia is doable. It’s absolutely brilliant. If you destroy the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States, you will weaken the Saudi state and it becomes ripe for the picking.”

In that context, Sunday’s attack—in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan—is much like May’s attacks that left 25 dead. Both are signs that the Saudi authorities are finally taking the fight to Al Qaeda. The attacks earlier this year followed a botched raid on an Al Qaeda cell, at a time when many Saudi officials insisted there was no real Al Qaeda presence in the kingdom. This week’s attacks follow an intensive summer crackdown punctuated by shootouts, killings and mass arrests. Both the Saudi government and Al Qaeda now seem to realize this is a battle for their own survival.

That’s not to say this will be a short war. The Saudis say they have killed the “top five” Al Qaeda leaders in the kingdom over the summer. “We have killed more Al Qaeda people in the last six months than anyone else in the world. It’s not that we are proud of it, but it is very significant,” says a senior Saudi official. “Now we are dealing with the second-echelon types.”

What those second-tier terrorists show is the scale of the Saudi problem. Sure, the terrorists may be less sophisticated and their leaders may be more rattled. But the Saudi authorities are uncovering a network that has been in place for at least three or four years, and draws on relationships that are rooted in the old jihads of Soviet-era Afghanistan, post-Yugoslavia Bosnia and modern-day Chechnya.

They are also uncovering a far bigger breeding ground for the next generation of terrorist recruits in a society that has long stagnated. “The security part is just a Band Aid,” the Saudi official concedes. “In order to deal with the underlying problems, to wipe out the environment in which they flourish, you have to deal with the broader issues. We’re looking at 10 to 15 years.”

That means a hugely ambitious agenda to overhaul Saudi society—including education reforms, the introduction of democracy, civil rights for women, an open economy, the rise of a middle class, and even a taste of religious freedom. At best, the Saudis have only taken their first steps along this path. Schools have begun to tear out some of the most inflammatory pages in their textbooks, such as the 8th-grade geography book that declares “a malicious Crusader-Jewish alliance [is] striving to eliminate Islam from all the continents.” Officials are also exploring how to introduce the first taste of democracy in municipal elections, but have not embraced the notion of political parties or even a target date for elections themselves.

Bush was right to urge all countries in the region to embrace democracy last week, invoking the spirit of Ronald Reagan and the Cold War along the way. Yet the parallels with the Soviet Union are not immediately helpful in the war on terror. Now the enemy is not an evil empire, but the barbarians at the gate of an antiquated kingdom. That is why the governments of the region are so reluctant to embrace democracy, even when they know it is inevitable. “You don’t want to push countries in the region towards one man, one vote,” says one Arab official. “You really don’t want to see the result. You need to let countries move at their own pace.”

In that sense, the Saudis are only just beginning their long war on Al Qaeda. By the end of it, neither the Saudi government nor Al Qaeda are likely to survive as we know them.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/992273.asp?0cl=c1