Goodbye Saudi Arabia, hello Qatar, Islam and the West, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and the West

Goodbye Saudi Arabia, hello Qatar

An Al-AAhram analysis

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, taking what some analysts are calling a "victory lap" of Gulf countries who supported the US invasion of Iraq, announced in a joint press conference with Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan Bin Abdul-Aziz in Riyadh that the United States will end its military operations in Saudi Arabia and remove virtually all of its forces from the kingdom following the Iraq war. US military personnel in Saudi Arabia, which doubled to 10,000 during the attack on Iraq, have already started evacuating a desert airbase used by US planes since the end of the Gulf War.

The decision was made in concert with Washington, the Saudi defence minister said, denying press reports that Saudi Arabia had asked the United States to withdraw. However, the real reasons for the move appear to have much to do with the tense relations that governed Saudi-US relations in the 1990s and which led to a series of terrorist attacks against US military interests in the kingdom. The presence of Western troops in the country has irked many Saudis already angry with the United States over its support of Israel. Ousting US troops from Saudi Arabia became a battle cry of Osama Bin Laden and his Al- Qa'eda militants.

Saudi Power - Shaping another U.S. Foreign Policy Misadventure, Islam and the West, NewAgeIsla.com

Islam and the West

Saudi Power - Shaping another U.S. Foreign Policy Misadventure

The Saudi kingdom can be considered one of the youngest of the oldest kingdoms in the world. Its establishment and operation recalls the reign of the Spanish Catholic monarchy of the 15th century. Similar to the Ferdinand and Isabella pact with the Catholic church to gain recognition for their kingdom in return for sole approval of the Catholic church in Spanish lands, Arabian chieftain Mohammed ibn Saud, in 1744, allied himself with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, leader of the Wahhab sect. The Wahhabis backed the Saud families in their methodical conquest of the entire Arabian peninsula, and, in turn, were allowed to control Saudi social society as the dominant and only fully recognized religion. Believing in the basics of Islam, they enforced a strict interpretation of the Koran.

King Ibn Saud, a descendant of Wahhabi leaders, seized Riyadh in 1901 and eventually conquered almost all the peninsula. By 1933, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia finally coalesced close to its present form. Ibn Saud established an absolute monarchy and ruled it by an all encompassing Sharia; the body of Islamic religious law which regulates public and private life.

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