Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [239]
bribes and kickbacks, the fact remained that the Saudi army numbered only fifty-eight thousand troops, facing a highly mechanised foe with a standing army of one million. In order to prevent the stationing of defensive US forces in the kingdom, bin Laden offered to raise a force of ‘one hundred thousand’ from the Arab Afghan mujaheddin and the kingdom’s own large numbers of male idle. This offer was rejected as ridiculous. Bin Laden’s mood was not improved when the senior clergy issued fatwas to permit the stationing of Christian, Jewish and female US forces in remote parts of the kingdom. Disgusted by his homeland’s craven dependence on infidels and females, bin Laden pulled strings to have his passport returned and flew back to Peshawar. Meanwhile, Saddam began to cloak himself not only in Arab nationalism—thereby securing the support of a PLO that was always the unlucky gambler—but in Islamic rectitude, inveighing against the corrupt rulers of Riyadh and proclaiming ‘Allahu Akhbar’ upon reaching the Kuwaiti shoreline. Although the multinational coalition expelled Saddam from Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm, unleashing a tempest of high-tech violence that sickened even those responsible for it, in the process Saudi Arabia forfeited its unimpeachable Islamic credentials in the eyes of parts of the Muslim world. The kingdom reaped what it had sown everywhere else. It faced unprecedented domestic discontent, both from Saudis seeking to liberalise the regime through such symbolic acts as allowing women drivers, and, by way of a backlash, from radical Islamists who thought the kingdom needed to restore Islamic fundamentals. When some of these extremists were expelled, Saudi Arabia’s British ally and arms supplier inevitably provided them with a safe haven in London, where they could propagandise amusing tabloid slanders against the Saudi ruling elite entitled ‘Prince of the Month’. These were people who would give an aide £1,000 to buy a drink, and then be offended when the aide offered something so mysterious as £990 change. Even bin Laden was allowed to establish offices of a Reform and Advice Committee in the British capital. For ‘Londonistan’ would soon provide a home from home for more dangerous kinds of Islamist subversive, in one of the most complacent, decadent and irresponsible acts of policy and policing of any Western democracy, all undertaken under the delusion that there was an unwritten ‘pact of security’ in which the hosts would be safe from attack.32
One emerging rival to a discredited Saudi Arabia was the military-Islamist regime of Hassan al-Turabi in the Sudan. The Western-educated al-Turabi advocated the Islamic emancipation of women as well as reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, while waging war on the African animists and Christians of the south. His regime hosted an Arab and Islamic junket to rival the Saudi-dominated Organisation of the Islamic Conference, to some extent seeking to take over the mantle of the dead Khomeini as a beacon of radical Islam. Who contacted whom remains in doubt, but in 1991 bin Laden arrived in Khartoum. He cemented his ties with al-Turabi by taking the latter’s niece as his third wife. In a country ruined by war and political turbulence, bin Laden’s wealth counted. He deposited US$50 million in the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank, which virtually gave him control.33 He gave the Sudanese an US$80 million loan to purchase wheat to prevent mass starvation. He helped build an airport and a road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, and invested in a variety of enterprises, including an Islamic bank, a bakery, cattle stations, stud farms, and various import and export businesses. Like many unsuccessful entrepreneurs bin Laden diversified beyond his ken, as when he began importing bicycles from Azerbaijan into a country where nobody rode them. A series of farms doubled as Al Qaeda training camps, for with the aid of Sudanese passports a small multinational army of jihadi-salafists descended upon Sudan. It was one of those curious, lull-like interludes before the storm. Bin Laden spent much time