Inside the Kingdom (25 page)

It was an extraordinary defeat—Russia’s own humiliating Vietnam, as the U.S.-Saudi alliance had hoped. But the victors interpreted its roots and reasons in different ways. Within months the West was celebrating the scarcely believable collapse of the entire Soviet monolith. Europeans danced on the Berlin Wall, and the exact details of how and by whom the Afghan victory had been accomplished were swallowed up in a generalized tale of Cold War triumph—free enterprise, capitalism, deterrence.

But Saudis remembered their prayers at school assemblies. They had shaken their collecting boxes, and had sent off the bearded young heroes to jihad. The photos and film footage of the bandolier-slung fighters in the mountains was compelling. Afghanistan had been
their
triumph—and it certainly owed much to the massive injections of Saudi government funds via Pakistan, along with private, charitable cash.

Khaled Batarfi remembers the celebratory gatherings in Jeddah’s grandest homes, with groaning buffets, trays of fruit juice, and the guest of honor, Osama Bin Laden, doing the rounds to be embraced and kissed. Thirty-two years old in March 1989, the young man was as quiet and soft-spoken as ever, but he was clearly gathering a sense of destiny. After the meal the room fell silent as the victorious mujahid rose to tell tales of caves and of the mountains, of battles won and of brave companions who had not returned, but who were now, of course, all sitting beside God as martyrs in heaven—
“Al-hamdu lillah,”
“God be praised,” murmured the room in unison.

Invited to look into the future, the warrior came up with an unusual prediction that he derived from the war between Iraq and Iran, which had just petered out. Both sides had fought themselves to a standstill. But now, warned Osama, Saddam had a huge army on his hands—hundreds of thousands of young men for whom he had no peacetime jobs. The Iraqi dictator was feeling humiliated, and, with the continuing oil glut, he was desperately short of cash. Far from being grateful to the countries that had helped him out, he was angry and full of blame. Having been brushed off by Iran, he would be casting around for another target.

PART TWO

KINGDOM AT WAR

A.D. 1990 -2001 (A.H. 1411-1422)

—Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

CHAPTER 14

Desert Storm

“I
t was a Wednesday night, going into Thursday morning,” remembers Ahmed Badeeb, who received a call in the small hours from the director of the Saudi intelligence bureau in Kuwait. “He told me he was up on top of the office with his binoculars—the Iraqis had driven over the border, and he was watching them. They were heading into the city with armored cars and tanks.”

Helicopters were landing special forces troops in the city, guided down by men on the ground waving flashlights—a group of Iraqi air-traffic controllers, it was later discovered, that had come to Kuwait pretending to be a football team.

Badeeb put in a call to King Fahd, who was cruising in the Red Sea on his yacht.

“Nonsense, Ahmed” scoffed the king. “You’re making it up. I was on the phone just five minutes ago with the emir of Kuwait.”

But Fahd called the Saudi ambassador just the same, and Badeeb listened on the line as the ambassador climbed the stairs to report from his own roof.

“There’s nothing at all,
tal omrak
[may your life be long]. I can’t see anything. Wait a minute—
wallahi
[by God], I am mistaken! I can hear bullets!”

“Escape at once!” Badeeb heard the king shouting. “Line up the cars! Get yourself out of there now!”

“Sons of the Arabian Gulf!” ran a plaintive and unsourced statement issued on a Kuwait radio frequency that was picked up by the BBC that morning. “Men of the desert shield . . . an Arabian Gulf country is asking for your help. How could an Arab occupy the land of his Arab brother? . . . Kuwait of Arabism, which has never abandoned its pan-Arab duty, today appeals to Arab consciences everywhere. God is above the aggressor . . .”

And with that pious expression of hope, the BBC’s monitors could pick up no more.

A few hours later Prince Mohammed bin Fahd was awoken in Al-Khobar by a call from the captain of the Al-Khafji frontier post on the Saudi-Kuwait border—the emir of Kuwait had just driven in and wanted to speak to him.

In fact, the emir wanted to speak to Mohammed’s father, the king, but no one knew his number in Jeddah. For two hours Fahd and his son tried to persuade Emir Jaber, a timid and depressive man, to stop waiting at the border and drive down the coast to Dhahran. In the end, Fahd told his son to drive up and get him.

Mohammed bin Fahd and his guards jumped into a 4x4 and headed northward up the coast road, past a long stream of Kuwaitis heading south.

“The emir did not want to leave the border,” he recalls. “He kept looking across at his country and phoning to Kuwait City to try and find out what was going on.”

Fahd was phoning his son every half hour.

“ ‘You’ve got to bring him south,’ he told me. ‘It’s not safe! You’ve got to move! Now!’ ”

Eventually Mohammed bin Fahd persuaded Jaber to leave the border. The prince drove the now stateless ruler south and delivered him to Dammam late that afternoon.

If Saddam’s invasion surprised the Saudis, they were still more shocked by the reaction of countries they had considered their friends—especially that of the biggest client on their payroll, Yasser Arafat, who came out for Iraq. By one estimate, the Saudi government had paid $1 billion or more to the Palestine Liberation Organization in the course of the 1980s. Then, as now, Saudi Arabia was by far the largest financial supporter of the Palestinians.

“We watched the Palestinians chanting against us on television,” remembers Princess Latifa bint Musaed. “I couldn’t believe what they were shouting: ‘With chemicals you must kill them, Saddam!’ I was so angry. Ever since I could remember I had been sending riyals to help support the poor oppressed Palestinians every month. So did my friends. Helping the Palestinians was a thing that good Saudis did.”

King Hussein of Jordan also came out in support of the Iraqi invasion, telling CNN that Saddam could be forgiven for assimilating Kuwait—the little emirate, he said dismissively, was “a British colonial fiction.” This was rich coming from a man for whose family the British had invented the Kingdom of Transjordan only two generations previously, but Hussein seemed to have forgotten that particular episode in Hashemite history.

“Even if I were not a king, I would still be the
‘shareef ’
[descendant of the Prophet],” he told a gathering of Jordan’s tribal and parliamentary leaders, referring back to the title his ancestors had borne for the seven pre-Saudi centuries during which they had ruled in Mecca. “Indeed, now you may call me shareef.”

To emphasize his claim to rule on Saudi soil, the king chose this moment to grow a beard that made him look remarkably like the last but one shareef, his great-grandfather Hussein, who had packed up his gold and fled from Jeddah in 1924 as the Saudi armies approached. Sixty-six years later, it seemed, the great-grandson was ready to return.

Yemeni television redrew its television weather map to relocate its borders hundreds of miles northward, painting vast swaths of Saudi territory in Yemeni colors. The electronic land grab crossed the peninsula just south of Riyadh. When the Saudi government revoked the favored-neighbor privileges extended to Yemeni workers in the Kingdom, the Yemenis walked off jauntily.

“We’ll be back,” chortled one group to their Saudi employers, “and when we come back,
we
’ll be occupying
your
houses.”

It was the revolt of the have-nots who had long resented the Saudi blend of windfall wealth and self-righteousness. Now they showed their true feelings. Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria, Mauritania—even the Afghan government recently installed in Kabul with Saudi money—all distanced themselves from Saudi Arabia. A leaked recording from the Cairo summit summoned to discuss the crisis exposed Arab leaders shouting insults at one another across the table.
¹⁴
Saddam had not disclosed the direction he would be heading after he had swallowed Kuwait, but it did not sound as if his freshly declared friends would object too much if he staked his claim to the oil fields of the Kingdom.