Civilizations clashing? (part 2)

(Thanks to John for not letting me get ahead of myself.)

With the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan concluded and people heading home, Saddam Hussein in 1990 invaded Kuwait. Kuwait is as we know one of the Gulf oil states. President Bush 41 drew a line in the sand and in early 1991, the United States armed forces expelled Saddam from Kuwait.

Unfortunately, Bush 41's line in the sand was drawn in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which as we've seen, is the stronghold of fundamentalist Wahhabism. What was even more outrageous for jihadists such as Osama ibn Laden was that 'infidels' were being based in the same country where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were located. Non-Muslims have never been allowed to enter the holy cities without special permission and the fact that tens of thousands of foreign military personnel were based in Saudi Arabia with the blessing of the king of that land was simply unacceptable.

Osama ibn Laden has been the central figure in the story of al-Qaeda. The son of a rich Saudi family, ibn Laden ended up in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets. Using his wealth, he did much to bring in the Wahhabi doctrines of his homeland. This put him in a position to serve as a central point for the various cells that would form after the end of that war. But he shouldn't get all the credit. The Saudi royal family deserves some as well. After the oil crisis of the early 70s, the Saudis were flush with petrodollars. With rampant inflation, those dollars had to be spent before their value went down. So the Saudis, like good Muslims, started spending those dollars on building a network of schools around the world in Muslim countries. Those schools would of course teach good clean Wahhabi doctrines to the students. Thus over time, in places where Muslim communities had lived in peace with their non-Muslim neighbors for generations, tolerance slowly degraded and sectarian strife grew. As the 80s came in and on through the 90s, the rulers of Saudi Arabia were not as pious as King Faisal. With the growing hatred of their western lifestyles and corruption, the Saudi royal family didn't spend their money charitably, but rather spent it in a bid to buy off the fundamentalists. In short, they were paying ibn Laden and the jihadists to take their terrorism elsewhere.

The final straw was the continued and unrelenting US support for the House of Saud, the ruling house of Saudi Arabia. In the land their father created out of the disparate factions of the Arabian Peninsula, the Saudi princes and their descendents slipped ever further into corruption and vice. In a country where Wahhabism has thrived in no small part due to the sponsorship of the royal house, this slide was been viewed as a betrayal. Yet despite the unpopularity of the ruling elites, they managed to hang onto power by spending the oil wealth of their country in an attempt to buy off their citizens. But the average Saudi Arabian was and continues to be disgruntled. Since the Gulf War, various sources have indicated that Osama ibn Laden is more popular in Saudi Arabia than the House of Saud.

Ibn Laden and the nascent al-Qaeda turned their eyes away from their homeland and came to the Great Satan itself: the United States.