When I was living in Saudi Arabia some 15 years ago as a young British diplomat, Jeddah always held a special place in my heart. During my time in the Kingdom, Saddam Hussein launched his brutal occupation of Kuwait, and for a few days the world held its breath before it became clear that his armies were not going to sweep onward to the oilfields of the Eastern Province. For me, both before and during the war, Jeddah was a haven, a place of cooling breezes and civilized conversations. Whenever the plane banked over the city to land, or whenever my car turned onto the final approach road, my spirits would lift perceptibly.
Now times have changed, for me personally — having decided to leave government service for the world of business — and for the wider world. Saddam is mercifully no longer with us, and I remain convinced that despite the current difficulties, a better Iraq will emerge as a consequence. What is of greater historical concern, however, is the rise of a new threat. Call it Al-Qaeda, call it whatever you want, but as the recent attacks in the Kingdom have shown, it exists.
Visiting Jeddah recently from London, I was pleased to see that some things have also remained the same. Friends, for example. But those civilized conversations of yesterday have taken on a new urgency. One Saudi friend leans forward as he folds and refolds his ghutra. “We need reform,” he tells me. “Total political and economic and social and yes, also religious reform. Nothing else will do.” Another Saudi in her abaya looks at me in a curiously new way. “It must be strange,” she says, “to be a Westerner here now, and to know that every car that pulls up next to you at the traffic lights might contain someone who wants to kill you.”
Exaggerations? Maybe. There are those who say that the particular savagery of the recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia reflects the desperation of those responsible: Too weak now to attack key military or economic installations, they have no choice but to resort to terrorizing civilians. This analysis may be correct. And there are also those who say that Al-Qaeda itself is only desperation: Following the failure of the insurgencies in Egypt and Algeria, following the failure to impose Islamist rule in Bosnia, the terrorizing of civilians globally represents a last gasp of the misuse of religion for political ends, rather than a way-station on the road to a restored Caliphate, to a new Andalus for a new Christian millennium.
Again, maybe. But while the terrorists continue their hate-filled war against the “Crusaders” and “cow-worshippers” they denounce so luridly in their Internet communiques, others claim that political solutions are available. In the wake of the failed Arab League summit in Tunis, President George W. Bush recently held a gathering off the Georgia coast at which another kind of communique was issued, calling on the Arab world to embrace democracy, modernity, “civil society” and women’s rights.
Others, Europeans as well as Arabs, pointed out that perhaps it wasn’t as simple as that. What about the continued systematic terrorizing of the Palestinian people by an Israeli government recently given a green light by President Bush to do pretty much whatever it pleases in the Palestinian territories?
But then again, is that relevant? How many of the Arab governments that demonstrated their woeful impotence in Tunis have cynically used the Palestinian cause in the past to mask their own inadequacies? And what about Al-Qaeda? Are we to believe that they think that the Crusaders and cow-worshippers will simply disappear, merely because a proper Palestinian currency circulates in the souqs of Ramallah and Nablus? Or because a proper Palestinian permanent representative to the United Nations can add his voice to the chorus of condemnation next time a hotel is blown up in Marrakesh? Or a train in Madrid? Or, for that matter, another expatriate compound in Saudi Arabia?
It is time to wake up. Of course the Palestinians should have their own state. Quite apart from its relevance to any other issue, natural justice alone demands nothing less. But the idea that this is a magic wand to be waved over the problems of the Middle East and the Islamic world is illusory. The wound that always remains covered can never properly heal, and the wounds of the region have remained covered now for too long. Palestine alone cannot be the medicine. Arab societies generally have to reach out to themselves, not simply as a pact between rulers and ruled, still less because of the agenda of President Bush, but because the social, economic and cultural emancipation of the Arab world demands it.
(Dominic Simpson is managing director and Kroll Middle East practice head. He is based in London. The views expressed are his alone, and not those of Kroll.)