THE SOVIET SAUDI UNION

The critical insight about the Soviet Union that led to its downfall was — as I explained in countless “Reagan Doctrine” briefings during the 1980s — that the Soviet Union didn’t simply possess an imperialist empire of colonies beyond its borders: it was itself a colonial empire within its borders.

The Soviet Union was composed of nations and peoples — Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Azeris, Uzbeks and others — that were free and independent before Soviet Russians colonized them, and would be so again if they had the chance.

Thus the ultimate goal of the Reagan Doctrine was not only freedom for Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe and the Third World. It was the break-up of the Soviet Union, the extinction of the Soviet state.

Because of this insight, the Reagan Doctrine was the most spectacularly successful geopolitical strategy of modern times, and is why its author — Ronald Reagan — is credited with winning the Cold War.

The Cold War is typically characterized as a struggle between the “First World” of the capitalist West plus Japan and the “Second World” of Communist countries, with those “Third World” countries in between and fought over.

Yet however much Red China and other non-Soviet states like North Korea were a part of the Second World, the locus of the Communist threat to America and the West was the Soviet Union. This is why the Cold War ended not with the defeat of Communism in general, but with the defeat of the Soviet Union specifically.

To win the War on Moslem Terrorism we must apply the strategy of the Reagan Doctrine to Saudi Arabia.

Victory in this war will not come with the defeat of any and all radical Moslems all over the world. It will come with the break-up of the Saudi state.

The Soviet Union was a Russian Imperial Empire with Marxism-Leninism as its ideological justification. Saudi Arabia is an imperial empire of the Saudi family with Wahhabism as its ideological justification.

The Saud family comes from the central plateau of Arabia, a region called Najd. The dynasty’s founder, Mohammed ibn Saud, ruled the Diriyah oasis near present-day Riyadh.

In 1744 he formed a mithaq or covenant with the leader of a puritanical sect professing strict adherence to the Hanbali interpretation of Islam (after Ahmed Hanbal d. 855 AD), Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab.

Saud would provide armed protection for Wahhab who, in turn would provide religious legitimacy for Saud’s conquering other Najd oases and nomadic Bedouin tribes.

Saudi-Wahhabi imperialism spread across Arabia like Russian Communism spread over Eurasia. In April 1802, a Saudi-Wahhabi army sacked Kerbala in present-day Iraq, butchering 4,000 Shiites and destroying the tomb of Mohammed’s grandson Hussein.

In 1803, much of the Moslem holy cities of Mecca and Medina were destroyed, and by 1805 Baghdad itself was threatened. The Ottoman Turks and their Egyptian allies finally pushed them back into the Najd deserts.

On January 15, 1902, Mohammed ibn Saud’s great-grandson Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al-Saud — known to history as Ibn Saud — leading a group of Wahhabis seized control of the town of Riyadh from the rival Rashidi family, and declared he was Emir of Najd.

By 1913, Ibn Saud had enough Wahhabi soldiers to conquer the Hasa region of eastern Arabia, and by 1921 to conquer the Häil region in northern Arabia.

In December 1925, Ibn Saud invaded the Kingdom of Hejaz along Arabia’s west coast, including Mecca and Medinia, with Ibn Saud now declaring he was King of Hejaz-Najd.

The following year, he invaded the Kingdom of Yemen. British and Italian forces were able to keep him from conquering the entire country, but not to kick him out of Yemen’s northern provinces.

In 1932, Ibn Saud announced his personal country was to be known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In 1934, the Treaty of Taïf was signed formally ceding the Yemeni states of Asir, Najran, and Jizan to be incorporated into the Saudi state.

All of these conquered provinces are not Wahhabi. The majority of their populations reject the Hanbali version of Islam. There are four madhahib or schools of law in orthodox Sunni Islam.

Most of the folks in Hejaz ascribe to one of the other three, Shafi, Hanafi, and Malaki. The Hanbali Wahhabis denounce the Shafis as Sufi mystics and the Malakis as deviants. All the Hanafis have been driven underground.

Almost the entire population of Najran, members of the Yam tribe, are Ismaili Shias, followers of the Aga Khan. In Asir and Jizan, folks ascribe to the Zaidi Islam practiced in Yemen. The Wahhabis have closed Zaidi mosques and forbid the Ismailis from making their distinct call to prayer.

Over 10% of the native population in Saudi Arabia — 2 million out of 19 million — are not Sunnis at all. They are Shias, and they are concentrated in Hasa — right across the Persian Gulf from Shia Iran and right next to all those Shias in southern Iraq.

They are discriminated against in every way by the ruling Saudi-Wahhabi elite, who commonly refer to them as rafida, an Islamic insult equivalent to “nigger.” Just as the Sunnis oppressed the Shias in Saddam’s Iraq, so have they done in Saudi.

Here’s the kicker. Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, currently at 264 billion barrels. The majority of those reserves are in the east — where all those Saudi-hating Shias are.

So let’s cut to the chase. Just as the Soviets devoted themselves to a messianic campaign to subvert and convert people around the world to Soviet Communism, so do the Saudis with Saudi Wahhabism.

Just as breaking apart the Soviet Union was the death knell of Soviet Communism and the end of the Cold War, breaking apart the Saudi state will be the death knell of Wahhabism and the end of the War on Terrorism.

Bear in mind that Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi Wahhabi. He hates the Saudi Royals for their hypocrisy, for not being Wahhabi enough. The key to victory against Islamist terror is to demolish the political power of Wahhabism — and the source of that power is the Saudi state.

One major factor that precipitated the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the dual collapse of the Soviet economy and Soviet society. Soviet women had more abortions than babies, Soviet men drank on average one or two gallons of vodka a week.

20 years ago, Saudi per-capita income was $23,000 – now it’s $7,000. Unemployment is above 30%. The majority of Saudis are functionally illiterate, and have received no education other than Wahhabi religious indoctrination and reciting the Koran.

The Saudi culture has an abhorrence of manual labor, thus the country is physically run by imported labor. Women are regarded as literally sub-human. The Saudi government is the most fascist theocracy on the face of the earth. It is also facing bankruptcy, with government debt well over 100% of GDP.

This is a place ready to come apart at the seams. Especially when three-fourths of the Saudi population is under 30, while the key Saudi rulers are in their 80s or late 70s.

The way to go about this is to divide up Saudi Arabia like Caesar divided Gaul: into three parts:

• The Shias get the east from Qatar to the Iraq-Jordan border.

• Yemen gets Asir, Najran, and Jizan back.

• The Hejaz gets to be independent again, with the Hashem family invited to resume their rule established in the 1200s and overthrown by Ibn Saud (provided they relinquish in trade their current rule in Jordan, which would then become the state of Palestine: see The Ultimate Solution, TTP, October 16,2003).

We’ll let the Saudis keep what’s left — the deserts of Najd, central Arabia, and the sand seas of the Empty Quarter. (They’ll be landlocked, yes, but not destitute: The Najd oil fields of the Hawtah Trend contain 30 billion barrels, while the Shaybah field in the Empty Quarter have another 7. They can use that to pay off their debts)

This has to be done sequentially, and setting up the necessary preconditions first. The most important of these is to stabilize Iraq with a secure government and secure oil production.

This means getting the Shia Arabs of Iraq to grasp the big picture — the promise of Shia Arabs for the first time in history controlling their own destinies from Qatar to Baghdad — and forego their demand to electorally control all of Iraq (they’re 65% of Iraqis).

Next is to get a Hashemite agreement to exchange Jordan for Hejaz (and arrange for Arafat’s demise, but that’s another story), and clue the Yemenis in. You can imagine how cooperative they’ll be!

With this set, we explain to the Saudi Royals and the Wahhabi clerics their day in the sun is over.

All the Saudi-Hanbali governors of the non-Saudi provinces are recalled, power is peacefully transferred to the people in those provinces, all Wahhabi missionaries throughout the world are brought back home, all financial support for Wahhabi medressas (indoctrination schools) and mosques (80% of all mosques in the US are Wahhabi) is stopped, the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the religious police who whip any woman showing a square inch of skin in public) is disbanded, and they stay put in the Najd and don’t budge out of it.

The alternative is touching off a too-easily ignitable spark among the Shias along with others, and all of the hated Royal Princes receive the retribution of the sword. Far better to go quietly into the Arabian night.

The greatest achievement of the Reagan Doctrine was to get the Soviet Union to collapse peacefully. America won the Cold War not in a gush of blood, but in its enemy quietly expiring. The War on Moslem Terrorism can be won in the same way.

But this can be achieved only if the locus of that war — Saudi Wahhabism — is identified and a specific strategy developed to do precisely to the Saudis what we did to the Soviets. Saudi Arabia is the Soviet Saudi Union.