09/22/14 – Dan Sanchez – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Okay, next up is Dan Sanchez from the Mises Academy.
He's joining us by Skype, and he's got this great article.
It's running in a few different places here at Medium and at dansanchez.me and here at antiwar.com slash blog.
It's called Playing with Fanatic Fire, How the Saudis and the U.S.
Have Perilously Exploited Radical Islam in Their Pursuit of Power.
Wow, what a bunch of really great work you did on this thing.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
Oh, great.
Great to be here, Scott.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show.
It's a hell of a great story.
War is the health of the state, even if you're on the other side far over there too, huh?
Exactly.
Really, I wanted to provide context for the current controversy over funding Syrian rebels in order to fight ISIS, which is what Washington wants to do, and how Saudi Arabia has long been helping with that, that Saudis have been funding radical Sunni Islamist jihadist rebels in Syria, and that has really fed into the ranks of ISIS because these are just fellow travelers of ISIS and potential recruits.
So it really launched the crisis.
And so I wanted to provide the historical context to show that this has been a long-time policy for both U.S. and Saudis, and not just a policy for the Saudis, but it's sort of just in the existential DNA of the Saudis.
It's what their monarchy is predicated on, and it goes all the way back to the 1700s when Ibn Saud, the founder of the House of Saud, the Saudi dynasty, first met al-Wahhab, who was the founder of Wahhabism, Wahhabi Islam, and they made a deal.
Saud would spread al-Wahhab's doctrine through force, both through conquest and through inculcation, indoctrinating the subjects, and Wahhab, in exchange, would preach the sanctity of Saud's rule and also animate al-Saud's, Ibn Saud's conquest through his doctrine of intolerant fanaticism.
Especially important is the doctrine of Takfir, which defines deviant Muslims as non-Muslims, which makes it easier to war against them.
And so this 1744 pact has held ever since between the al-Saud family and the descendants of al-Wahhab to this day.
It's not just the royal dynasty, but the actual clerics, the highest level clerics of Wahhabism are still descendants of al-Wahhab.
And it really gets at this great quote from Rothbard that I included, where he talks about how the state's age-old alliance with the court intellectuals who weave the apologia for state rule.
And he goes on to say that the religious mode of this is just the earliest example of this more general phenomenon.
And so these two men, they really discovered an extremely volatile blend of what I call the defining chemical formula for state power, which is dogma-propagating violence mixed with violence-sanctifying dogma.
And that led to the bloody rise of the first Saudi state.
And I talk about this great two articles by Alastair Crook, who is a diplomat and a British diplomat and intelligence officer who wrote these two articles for the Huffington Post about Saudi history.
And he writes about this 1801 attack on the holy city of Karbala in Iraq and how they massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children.
And so he really compares that to what ISIS is doing in Iraq now, too, especially with Shiites.
Eventually, the Ottoman Empire crushed the first Saudi state by 1818.
But the Wahhabi gene lay dormant in this one particular town, but not eradicated for a whole century until World War I.
And so I can pick up the story there later, or if you have follow-up questions.
Yeah, no, go right ahead.
We still have a couple of minutes to the first break, and I'm just sitting here listening and learning.
I think it's really important, of course, the end of the Ottoman Empire and the so-called independence of the Arabian states thereafter.
Right, so just sort of like how knocking out Saddam Hussein and knocking out Qaddafi in Libya and trying to knock out Assad in Syria, how that just led to this chaos where these radical groups could flower.
When the Ottoman power was crushed in World War I, that laid the groundwork for the Wahhabi gene to become pestilential again, to become really active again.
And so what happened is that the second great Saudi conquest happened, and it was chiefly manned by this one militia called the Ikhwan, A-I-K-H-W-A-N, which is a militia of former Bedouins that were indoctrinated by Wahhabist clerics.
And they were the most zealous, most fanatic forces, the new Ibn Saud.
There was a new ruler also called Ibn Saud in this new era that he used them to conquer Arabia again.
And this tidal wave was just as ruthless and bloody as the first.
According to some estimates, it involved 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations.
So again, pre-echoes of ISIS's rampage.
But a point that I try to make is that when you're playing with fire, you're going to get burnt.
And the Ikhwan, their fires of fanaticism always would threaten to burn the Saudis themselves.
So the Saudis were trying to cultivate favor with the British and trying to stay on their good side, but the Ikhwan didn't want to yield.
They wanted to go ahead and conquer British protectorates.
And so when the Saudis tried to hold them back, they bridled and they revolted and threatened to overthrow the Sauds.
They were finally crushed in 1929.
But then what I show in the essay is that this is a recurring threat that occurred over and over again throughout Saudi history and might even be occurring today with ISIS.
Yeah, well, that certainly raises the question of just what's going on bubbling beneath the surface there in Saudi Arabia right now.
I think you say that when they were crushed, that meant that, well, I guess they were beaten, but then also they were incorporated into the state security forces as well.
I deal with the devil kind of a thing there, huh?
Is that right?
Right, right.
Right.
The ones that stayed loyal were integrated into the Saudi National Guard.
Which is, of course, the only purpose for their military since America fights all their other wars for them.
It's just for keeping their own people down, keeping them in line there.
Oh, so their integration into the National Guard actually would prove to be a threat Later in the 20th century, it was descendants of these same Ikhwan who led a 1970 revolt against the Saudi monarchy when they seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
All right, well, we'll have to stop right there and go out to this break.
When we get back, more with Dan Sanchez.
Also, this great thing you can find at antiwar.com slash blog, playing with fanatic fire.
And I got some follow-up questions, and you should read this thing, man.
It's really good.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show, talking with Dan Sanchez about the compromise between the rulers, the ruling family, really, of Saudi Arabia, and the clerics who keep the people enthralled, basically.
Like the old days, only in modern times, cutting people's heads off with swords for being convicted of sorcery and this kind of thing.
Those are recent headlines.
And now, so let's see, where we left off, it was the 70s.
You say there was another revolt by these guys who were always just the Islamists who were just being barely kept in check at all times.
And then, as you say in the article, they were kind of bought off with oil wealth.
I guess they had adjusted the cost of their oil for 1970s value dollars, finally, and were able to spend some of that wealth, you know, tamping things down the gentler way with carrots rather than sticks, I guess.
But then came the 1980s war in Afghanistan, and a great way to get rid of all these guys, at least for a little while, and then who cares what happens after that, right?
Yeah, there was kind of a couple different new phases after oil was discovered.
And oil was able to fuel, on one hand, what I call soft power jihad, that, you know, with the realities of the American hegemon, they couldn't just conquer new lands anymore, so the Saud dynasty couldn't hold up their end of the bargain to the Wahhabi clerics in that regard by spreading the faith in that way.
So instead, they used soft power money, funded by oil wealth.
Even before the 70s, they had done this to a great degree.
In 1962, they started the World Muslim League, which tried to combat secular and socialist Islam ideologies throughout the world, and that, of course, dovetailed nicely with Cold War aims of the United States.
And then after the 1970s, when the oil wealth increased, they were also able to use that to fund what I call covert hard power jihad, including, as you say, the Afghanistan jihad, which included, of course, Osama bin Laden, and Zarqawi got there late, but he was the one who founded ISIS, basically.
But then things got tense again with the Gulf War, because the United States used Saudi land to stage airstrikes on Iraq, on Saddam, and that was really upsetting.
So in The New Yorker, this article that you turned me on to, I'm so glad that your synapses were able to discover it, because it was such a great article that really informed this essay, just about the 28 pages that were redacted from a report on 9-11.
And in that New Yorker article, he talks about how there was a memorandum of advice, which was an implicit threat of a clerical coup from the Wahhabis.
So they were really threatening to just completely overthrow the Saudis, because they had done this sacrilege of hosting American bases on Saudi Arabian soil.
And so the way to appease them after that was to set up this Ministry of Islamic Affairs.
And a lot of 9-11 families think that this ministry was actually involved in September 11th, and even if it wasn't, it was involved in radicalizing people in the 90s.
Yeah, that's funny.
You heard me struggling trying to remember that footnote.
What a disaster for live radio that was.
But yeah, I'm glad I remembered it too.
Yeah, and Lawrence Wright is a good source for that as well.
And yeah, Greg Pallas talked a lot about how in the 1990s, and in the time leading up to the September 11th attacks, that the Saudis were paying a lot of money to al-Qaeda, basically as protection money, and through these kind of groups.
I don't know if it's exactly this group, but mostly just as protection money.
Just go blow up somebody else and leave us alone was basically the message.
But then, of course, it was helping them get away with a lot of their plans and what they were trying to get away with.
Right, right.
And then after that, that led to a whole different phase, because 9-11 led to the Iraq War, which the Saudis opposed.
And it created what the Saudis, and especially the Sunni Wahhabis, thought was a very threatening Shia crescent, extending from Iran through the new Shia-dominated Baghdad regime in Iraq, and into Syria, and into Hezbollah's turf in Lebanon.
And so they started, the Saudis, including private Saudi wealth, started really turning on the money spigot to support radical Sunni rebels in Lebanon and in Syria.
And eventually they were able to help Israel and other factions turn Washington policy around to go against the Shias in what Seymour Hersh called the Redirection.
And this is where Washington first started really supporting radical Sunni Islamists in Syria, and then Obama continued that policy, and that is what really made ISIS bounce back, because the Sunni awakening in Iraq, that had really trounced ISIS.
ISIS was really at a nadir before the 2011 Arab Spring War in Syria.
But then, with all this influx of money and CIA training and supplies from Saudi Arabia and the United States and Qatar and Turkey, ISIS was able to bounce back from that, and they were able to conquer parts of Syria, and from there stage the conquest of western Iraq, which leads us to the crisis that we're at now, and leads us to the new Iraq war that we're faced with.
And leads us to the question of what's going on in Saudi Arabia right now.
Again, are the masses of Wahhabi-led, just regular Joe Saudi Arabians right now looking at ISIS as inspired, and wanting to see something much more like that as the regime in Saudi Arabia?
Because after all, these princes and their solid gold airplanes, although, I don't know, that may have been a guy from UAE with the solid gold airplane, but they virtually, metaphorically speaking, they've all got their solid gold airplanes and coke and hookers and fast cars and all of their stuff, and I know that doesn't go over very well with the regular Joe Saudi Arabians.
And then they got all this going on right at their northern border, and with all of the propaganda coming out of the so-called caliph up there, that this is the Bible coming true and all this kind of stuff.
This is all magic.
It's the way it's supposed to be.
It's ordained by God.
Come and join us.
And like you're saying, the peninsula is where all this starts.
So how long until we got black flags flying over Riyadh?
Right.
You have to imagine that the true Wahhabi believers would just love to see al-Baghdadi replace the Saudis as the new caliph, and especially al-Baghdadi is himself an Islamic scholar.
So he's sort of a man of their cloth anyway, of the Wahhabi clerics, and he, as Alastair Crook points out, he uses Wahhabi language in his public pronouncements.
And so it really is sort of an explosive situation potentially.
Yeah.
And you know, this whole discussion just drives home the point that, in my mind anyway, my prejudice, but my show, that Islam, Sunni, Shia, here, there, and in a lot of places, maybe not everywhere, but in a lot of places, has been desperately in need of a reformation for a long time.
And America leading in the Western foreign policy in this century and before has been absolutely the exact opposite way to achieve that, for narrow interests instead of, you know, the future of mankind or anything like that being important.
We've got, because of the chaos and violence of American intervention, we have the Zarqawiites rising to the top, the lowest two-bit rapist, suicide bomber scumbags in charge because of Bush and Obama and the American foreign policy consensus now.
Right.
I mean, I like to call ISIS extremophiles, like the biological microorganisms that thrive in extreme temperatures, and they thrive in conditions of war and chaos, and that's what the United States has been exporting all along.
And not only that, but also just their direct foreign policy, that they've been helping the Saudis support the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s, and they've been helping with the redirection policy in Syria, and they've been helping Islamist rebels in Libya, and just more generally, they've been propping up this Saudi regime that beheads far more people than ISIS does over apostasy and sorcery and these kinds of things, and it's propping up this billionaire state propagator of radical Islam that is, like I said, just predicated, that it owes the regime's very existence to propagating radical Islam because it depends on the sanction of these radical Wahhabi clerics.
All right, well, we're over time, so I want to make sure that people go one more time and tell them, playing with fanatic fire, how the Saudis and the U.S. have perilously exploited radical Islam in their pursuit of power.
It's at antiwar.com slash blog, and it's also at dansanchez.me, and come on, cursor, and medium.com.
Thanks very much for your time, Dan.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to talk to you.
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