Proxy Battle for a Nation’s Soul

The latest tragic car-bomb explosion in Saudi Arabia--the second since November--impacts the kingdom, the region and the United States in profound ways. First, it highlights the major struggle underway against the House of Saud by two sharply differing political camps, the liberals and the Islamists. Both camps have as their goal political change--liberalization and democratization of the political order, a more representative government answerable to the public, more freedom of information, a lessening of corruption, a lightening of the heavy hand of the extensive Saud clan in all facets of life (including the royal family’s cut on too much of the business conducted within the kingdom) and a more independent foreign policy. Where these two camps disagree is in the solution: The liberalizers look to Western models of political organization, while the Islamists seek the creation of a just society that draws on Islamic tradition.

The Islamists are the greater danger to the regime, not only because of the willingness of some of their most extreme elements to resort to violence, but also because the Islamists attack the regime on the basis of an Islamic critique, one that views the current political order as lacking legitimacy in both the political and moral realms. This kind of critique finds resonance within broader Saudi social circles, and the Islamists outnumber the liberalizers since they grow out of native traditions of political rule and justice.

The bombing clearly targeted both the regime and its partner, the U.S. It was significant that this terrible incident occurred in Dhahran, a city strongly linked in the Saudi mind to the presence of foreigners inside the traditionally closed and xenophobic kingdom. Dhahran was created in the middle of the sands by foreign capital and technicians who developed the nearby oil fields that sustain the country’s economy. Dhahran thus is a symbol of all of the outside pressures and foreign ways that transformed the kingdom in a few decades. The changes brought great wealth to the state, but they also replaced the traditional structure of life--egalitarian, communal--with centralized, isolated, staggeringly wealthy power structures, a process captured in Abdelrahman Munif’s classic “Cities of Salt.”

Not all Saudis have been pleased with the new character of the kingdom. And many blame the U.S., both as the dominant foreign power and as the bulwark of support that ensures the royal family’s continued tenure. Thus, while most Saudis will share the universal horror at the violence and bloodshed of the explosion in Dhahran, most will also understand why the extremists have made the U.S., its presence and its regional policies a part of the coinage of the internal struggle.

If the Middle East should grow more polarized in the months ahead, particularly as a result of the accession of the Likud party to power in Israel, then Saudi Arabia, even in its desert fastness, cannot remain invulnerable.

Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, has added importance as the site of this act of political violence because it is where most of the country’s Shiite Muslims live. The Shiites are particularly unhappy with their lot as a despised minority in Saudi society. They are closely linked by blood, family and clan ties with the Shiite majority on the island of Bahrain 50 miles away--a group that is even more alienated by its second-class status and is engaged in an active revolt against the Bahraini ruling family, which is staunchly supported by the Saudi royals. Bahrain also is the site of a major U.S. naval installation.

Whether or not the Shiites are linked to the Dhahran bombing, the region will continue to be an exceptionally sensitive and volatile one, and the U.S. will increasingly figure in the conflict. The U.S. military presence can indeed protect these Gulf states against Iraqi or Iranian military attack, but it can do almost nothing to protect the local regimes from their own people. The most the U.S. can do is urge that long-overdue political and social reforms be implemented in the hope of reducing the ground for domestic opposition.

Yes, a terrorism problem exists, but it will not do to ignore the broader political picture. The bombers must be tracked down, but can we write off the problem with the dangerously limited diagnosis and prescription of just “fighting terrorism”? Foreign enemies of Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, such as Iraq or Iran, will indeed be tempted to fish in these troubled waters, but the universal and self-serving temptation will be to point the finger at foreign agitation for the source of domestic troubles. A much deeper look is required about where the future of the Persian Gulf is heading, what the U.S. presence represents--both positive and negative--to the people who live there, what the risks are to oil (if any) and what U.S. military power really can do when confronted with basically internal discontents.