When Will Arabia Stop Being "Saudi"?

Kevin Barrett 

The name “Saudi” Arabia was invented by a mid-level British bureaucrat circa 1915. But if you ask Gemini for the details, it will deny the claim. Instead, it will trumpet the official myth that King Abdulaziz named the country after himself, Trump-style, in 1932. (Who doubts that after Trump names all the oceans after himself, and grifts his way to owning most of his country’s wealth, he will rename his bankrupt nation “Trumpy America”?)

If you prod it long enough, Gemini will eventually discover The Creation of Saudi Arabia: Ibn Saud and British Imperial Policy, 1914–1927 by Dr. Askar H. Al-Enazy. Contradicting its earlier statements insisting that it’s just a social-media-driven conspiracy theory, Gemini admits:

While Abdulaziz and his council legally enacted the royal decree renaming the country in 1932, British imperial files prove that mid-level colonial bureaucrats had already invented and formalized “Saudi Arabia” as a geopolitical descriptor in Western diplomacy decades prior.

So it’s true: “Saudi” Arabia was invented and named by British bureaucrats. The Arabs themselves were just bit players in a colonial drama.

The Ibn Saud clan was always just a gang of unusually nasty bedouins from the Najd desert who made their living robbing and killing pilgrims on their way to and from Mecca. In 1744, Muhammad ibn Saud teamed up with vitriolic preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to create a religious pretext for the ongoing banditry. According to Abd al-Wahhab, almost all Muslims besides himself and his followers were heretics who deserved to be robbed and killed.

The British imperialists were delighted. They quickly turned the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance into brigade of anti-Muslim mercenaries—a sword aimed at the throat of the Muslim world in general and the Ottoman Caliphate in particular. For the most part, that has been the Saudi-Wahhabi role ever since. (The Americans took over the arrangement from the British after World War II.)

For a wonderful fictional description of the 20th-century history of “Saudi” Arabia, read Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt novels. And for the short version, see Zafar Bangash’s essay “How Abdul Aziz proclaimed himself king of Najd and the Hijaz and renamed it ‘Saudi Arabia’.”

It’s also worth mentioning the conspiracy theories linking the Ibn Sauds to Sabbatean satanists in general and the crypto-Jewish Donmeh in particular. Are the Ibn Sauds not just desert bandits, but crypto-Jewish satanists? Wayne Madsen writes of the “the close intelligence and military links between the Dönmeh-descendent Sauds and Wahhabis in Arabia” and Israel, as well as other regional Israel-penetrated governments.

For decades, dissidents and experts alike have been predicting the fall of the Saudi dynasty. Through some combination of wily leadership, sheer luck, and help from the United States (and perhaps Israel) it hasn’t happened yet.

But epochal wars in the region are setting the stage for what could be the Ibn Sauds’ last act. The acting Saudi ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), unwisely tied his leadership claim to a losing war on Yemen. It began in January 2015, when his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, acceded to the throne, and immediately appointed MBS as Minister of Defense. Two months after the appointment, MBS attacked Yemen. The ill-starred war gave MBS emergency powers, which he used to make himself de facto ruler (as commander of the military) two years before he was officially elevated to Crown Prince in 2017.

MBS’s genocidal war on Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people due to starvation and other forms of deprivation, has become the Crown Prince’s Vietnam. But that comparison is misleading: The Yemeni quagmire is even worse than Vietnam, in that Yemen is not just failing to buckle under the pressure of brutal Saudi bombings and a starvation blockade, it is hammering critically important Saudi targets—including the oil infrastructure that pays the salaries of the Uzi-and-chainsaw-wielding thugs who keep MBS in power.

This week, Yemen’s Ansurullah forces devastated the headquarters of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. With Saudi oil exports choked off to the east by Iran’s control of Hormuz, and to the west by Yemen’s recently-enhanced power over Bab al-Mandab, and the bills for MBS’s failed grandiose projects coming due, the stage is being set for a potential regime change. The Yemenis have also shut down Saudi airports in tit-for-tat retaliation strikes, while making territorial gains that could see Yemen regaining territory from Saudi Arabia. Former MI6 advisor and diplomat Alastair Crooke speculates:

Might the Saudi Kingdom experience a revolt against MbS? Such a possibility is not without precedent: When King Saud’s reckless governance threatened the monarchy’s survival in 1964, the family, senior princes, and the religious leadership stepped in to strip him of power and enforce his abdication.

In the event of the collapse of MbS-led al-Saud family rule, this would not only topple the Gulf colonial project, but would then initiate a scramble for a fundamental geopolitical re-alignment of the region.

Video Link

For more on the checkered future of the Ibn Saud dynasty, I recommend Ron Unz’s new article, which links analyses by Prof. Mohammad Marandi, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, and Chas Freeman, as well as Alaistair Crooke.