Iraq: the hidden cost of the war

Andrew Stephen

Published 12 March 2007



America won't simply be paying with its dead. The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.

They roar in every day, usually direct from the Landstuhl US air-force base in the Rhineland: giant C-17 cargo planes capable of lifting and flying the 65-tonne M1 Abrams tank to battlefields anywhere in the world. But Landstuhl is the first staging post for transporting most of the American wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan back to the United States, and these planes act as CCATs ("critical care air transport") with their AETs - "aeromedical evacuation teams" of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, whose task is to make sure that gravely wounded US troops arrive alive and fit enough for intensive treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, just six miles up the road from me in Washington.

These days it is de rigueur for all politicians, ranging from President Bush and Ibrahim al-Jaafari (Iraq's "prime minister") to junior congressmen, to visit the 113-acre Walter Reed complex to pay tribute to the valour of horribly wounded soldiers. Last Christmas, the centre was so overwhelmed by the 500,000 cards and presents it received for wounded soldiers that it announced it could accept no more.

Yet the story of the US wounded reveals yet another deception by the Bush administration, masking monumental miscalculations that will haunt generations to come. Thanks to the work of a Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist named Linda Bilmes, and some other hard-working academics, we have discovered that the administration has been putting out two entirely separate and conflicting sets of numbers of those wounded in the wars.

This might sound like chicanery by George W Bush and his cronies - or characteristic incompetence - but Bilmes and Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist from Columbia University, have established not only that the number wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is far higher than the Pentagon has been saying, but that looking after them alone could cost present and future US taxpayers a sum they estimate to be $536bn, but which could get considerably bigger still. Just one soldier out of the 1.4 million troops so far deployed who has returned with a debilitating brain injury, for example, may need round-the-clock care for five, six, or even seven decades. In present-day money, according to one study, care for that soldier alone will cost a minimum of $4.3m.

However, let us first backtrack to 2002-2003 to try to establish why the administration's sums were so wildly off-target. Documents just obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show how completely lost the Bush administration was in Neverland when it came to Iraq: Centcom, the main top-secret military planning unit at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, predicted in its war plan that only 5,000 US troops would be required in Iraq by the end of 2006.

Rummy's deputy Paul Wolfowitz was such a whizz at the economics of it all that he confidently told us that Iraq would "really finance its own reconstruction". Rumsfeld himself reported that the administration had come up with "a number that's something under $50bn" as the cost of the war. Larry Lindsey, then assistant to the president on economic policy at the White House, warned that it might actually soar to as much as $200bn - with the result that Bush did as he habitually does with those who do not produce convenient facts and figures to back up his fantasies: he sacked him.

From official statistics supplied by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, we now know that the Iraq war is costing roughly $200m a day, or $6bn every month; the total bill so far is $400bn. But, in their studies, Bilmes and Stiglitz consider three scenarios that were not even conceivable to Bush, Rummy, Wolfowitz et al back in 2003. In the first, incurring the lowest future costs, troops will start to be withdrawn this year and be out by 2010. The second assumes that there will be a gradual withdrawal that will be complete by 2015. The third envisages the participation of two million servicemen and women, with the war going on past 2016.

Estimating long-term costs using even the second, moderate scenario, Bilmes tells me: "I think we are now approaching a figure of $2.5 trillion." This, she says, "includes three kinds of costs. It includes the cash costs of running the combat operations, the long-term costs of replenishing military equipment and taking care of the veterans, and [increased costs] at the Pentagon. And then it includes the economic cost, which is the differential between reservists' pay in their civilian jobs and what they're paid in the military - and the macroecono mic costs, such as the percentage of the oil-price increase."

Let me pause to explain those deceptive figures. Look at the latest official toll of US fatalities and wounded in the media, and you will see something like 3,160 dead and 23,785 wounded (that "includes 13,250 personnel who returned to duty within 72 hours", the Washington Post told us helpfully on 4 March). From this, you might assume that only 11,000 or so troops, in effect, have been wounded in Iraq. But Bilmes discovered that the Bush administration was keeping two separate sets of statistics of those wounded: one (like the above) issued by the Pentagon and therefore used by the media, and the other by the Department of Veterans Affairs - a government department autonomous from the Pentagon. At the beginning of this year, the Pentagon was putting out a figure of roughly 23,000 wounded, but the VA was quietly saying that more than 50,000 had, in fact, been wounded.

Casualty conspiracy

To draw attention to her academic findings, Bilmes wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times of 5 January 2007 in which she quoted the figure of "more than 50,000 wounded Iraq war soldiers". The reaction from the Pentagon was fury. An assistant secretary there named Dr William Winkenwerder phoned her personally to complain. Bilmes recalls: "He said, 'Where did you get those numbers from?'" She explained to Winkenwerder that the 50,000 figure came from the VA, and faxed him copies of official US government documents that proved her point. Winkenwerder backed down.

Matters did not rest there. Despite its independence from the Pentagon, the VA is run by Robert James Nicholson, a former Republican Party chairman and Bush's loyal political appointee. Following Bilmes's exchange with Winkenwerder - on 10 January, to be precise - the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649. The Bush administration had, once again, turned reality on its head to concur with its claims. "The whole thing is scary," Bilmes says. "I have never been conspiracy-minded, but watching them change the numbers on the website - it's extraordinary."

What Bilmes had discovered was that the tally of US fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan included the outcome of "non-hostile actions", most commonly vehicle accidents. But the Pentagon's statistics of the wounded did not. Even troops incapacitated for life in Iraq or Afghanistan - but not in "hostile situations" - were not being counted, although they will require exactly the same kind of medical care back home as soldiers similarly wounded in battle. Bilmes and Stiglitz had set out, meantime, to explore the ratio of wounded to deaths in previous American wars. They found that in the First World War, on average 1.8 were wounded for every fatality; in the Second World War, 1.6; in Korea, 2.8; in Vietnam, 2.6; and, in the first Gulf war in 1991, 1.2. In this war, 21st-century medical care and better armour have inflated the numbers of the wounded-but-living, leading Bilmes to an astounding conclusion: for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded. The Pentagon insists the figure is nearer nine - but, either way, the economic implications for the future are phenomenal.

So far, more than 200,000 veterans from the current Iraq or Afghanistan wars have been treated at VA centres. Twenty per cent of those brought home are suffering from serious brain or spinal injuries, or the severing of more than one limb, and a further 20 per cent from amputations, blindness or deafness, severe burns, or other dire conditions. "Every person injured on active duty is going to be a long-term cost of the war," says Bilmes. If we compare the financial ramifications of the first Gulf war to the present one, the implications become even more stark. Despite its brevity, even the 1991 Gulf war exacted a heavy toll: 48.4 per cent of veterans sought medical care, and 44 per cent filed disability claims. Eighty-eight per cent of these claims were granted, meaning that 611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

More than a third of those returning from the current wars, too, have already been diagnosed as suffering from similar conditions. But although the VA has 207 walk-in "vet centres" and other clinics and offices throughout the US, it is a bureaucracy under siege. It has a well-deserved reputation for providing excellent healthcare for America's 24 million veterans, but is quite unable to cope with a workload that the Bush administration did not foresee.

The unknown unknowns

There is now a backlog of 400,000 claims from veterans and waiting lists of months, some of which "render . . . care virtually inaccessible", in the words of Frances Murphy, the VA's own deputy under-secretary for health. Claims are expected to hit 874,000 this year, 930,000 in 2008. Casualties returning from Iraq meanwhile outnumber other patients at Walter Reed 17 to one, and many have to be put up at nearby hotels and motels rather than in the hospital beds they desperately need. Suicide attempts are frequent; often the less wounded end up having to care for the more seriously wounded.

Since I researched this piece, the Washington Post has published a series of articles outlining the chaos at Walter Reed and elsewhere. Undercover reporters found soldiers suffering from schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress and other brain injuries, occupying rooms infested with mice and cockroaches. The ensuing furore resulted in the sacking of the general in charge. Even Bush says he is "deeply troubled" by these "unacceptable" conditions at Walter Reed, but his government has carefully avoided the issue of how much it will cost to put right these wrongs. The failure to look after returning, often traumatised troops leads to yet further hidden costs to the US economy: the consequences of unemployment, family violence, crime, alcoholism and drug abuse, for example.

The projected $2.5trn price tag also includes the costs of replacing and replenishing military equipment in use. Nearly 40 per cent of the army's equipment, according to the Washington Post, is currently deployed in Iraq; as long ago as March 2005, Rumsfeld conceded that tanks, fighting vehicles and helicopters were wearing out at six times the normal rate.

Significant quantities of equipment are being destroyed, too. The Washington Post reported last December that the army alone has lost more than 280,000 major pieces of equipment in the combat zones; the Army Times reported as long ago as February last year that 20 M1 Abram tanks, 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles, 20 M113 armoured personnel carriers, 250 Hum vees, hundreds of mine-clearing vehicles and the like - plus more than a hundred aircraft, most of them helicopters - have been lost. Those figures have increased considerably since then as fighting has intensified. Add something between $125bn and $300bn for these unanticipated long-term costs, say Bilmes and Stiglitz.

Yet another gargantuan White House miscalculation was over the price of oil. Before his departure, Larry Lindsey told the Wall Street Journal in September 2002 that "the successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy"; the WSJ echoed his thoughts in an editorial the same day, arguing that "the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short, successful war on Iraq". In 2002, the average cost of a barrel of oil was $23.71; today, it is hovering around $50. Dick Cheney's chums in firms such as his own Halliburton - or ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron - have profited enormously, but Bilmes estimates that even if only $5 of the oil-price increase can be attributed to the Iraq war, that alone adds $150bn to the cost of war.

There are also countless imponderables that add to the bill. The deployment of hundreds of thousands of reservists depletes the economy. At present, 44 per cent of US police forces, for example, have members deployed as reservists in Iraq, and their duties have to be performed by others in America; the same goes for firefighters, medical staff, prison wardens.

Then there are the future illnesses that may well unfold. For instance, nobody knew that the notorious Agent Orange defoliant, used by the US in Vietnam from 1961-71, would turn out to have had carcinogenic and other effects on US troops. Today, there is mounting evidence that exposure to depleted uranium - used for firing anti-tank rounds from US M1 tanks and A-10 attack aircraft - can cause cancer, diabetes and birth defects. Many veterans are returning to the US with their health apparently in ruins from adverse reactions to anti-anthrax injections and/or consumption of experimental pills to counter chemical warfare agents. The long-term costs of looking after the likes of them make the cost of the actual war dead pale by comparison: spouses of deceased soldiers receive a "death gratuity" of $100,000. Troops are also given the opportunity to take out subsidised life insurance policies for up to $500,000 for dependants. In the dispassionate way economists assess such things, Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate the additional cost to the economy of the death of a young soldier - typically 25 years old - to be $6.5m.

Bilmes has become a marked woman to the Bush administration. She was invited to participate in a VA seminar on the cost of war, to be held on the last day of this month - but then was suddenly uninvited. She is no raving lefty, though, and her economic credentials are unimpeachable: she was responsible for an annual budget of $9bn in the Clinton-era commerce department. Like none other than George W Bush, she, too, holds an MBA from Harvard.

It is sobering to think how the money going down the drain in Iraq could otherwise have been spent. "For this amount of money, we could have provided health insurance for the uninsured of this country," Bilmes tells me. "We could have made social security solvent for the next three generations, and implemented all the 9/11 Commission's recommendations [to tighten domestic security]."

That kind of list goes on: the annual cost of treating all heart disease and diabetes in the United States would amount to a quarter of what the Iraq war is costing. Pre-school for every child in America would take just $35bn a year. In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with an even more intriguing possibility: "We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds."

What a historic triumph that would have been for Bush. Instead, his legacy to generations of Americans will be a needless debt of at least $2.5trn, what his own defence secretary describes as a four-way civil war in Iraq, dangerous instability in the Middle East, and increasingly entrenched hatred of the United States throughout the world. Alas, we are likely to hear the daily roar of those C-17s as they approach Andrews Air Force Base for years to come.

The unknown price that Britain is paying

No one is counting the long-term costs of caring for injured British troops, reports Sam Alexandroni

The cost to Britain of the Iraq war, according to the Ministry of Defence, will hit £5bn at the end of this financial year. This is the figure given for direct spending on fuel, ammunition, repairs and transport; the real bill is certainly much bigger. The greatest of the uncounted costs is the financial and human toll the war is taking on the mental and physical health of British personnel serving in Iraq.

The government has not attempted to calculate the long-term cost of caring for the injured, and official statistics offer little guidance. Four thousand eight hundred personnel have been evacuated from Iraq on medical grounds but only 144 were classified as "seriously" or "very seriously" injured. What about the rest? Nobody in the MoD or NHS was able to say how many personnel who served in Iraq are being treated in Britain, or how many will require long-term medical care. The treatment costs of servicemen at NHS hospitals such as Selly Oak in Birmingham - home to the Royal Centre of Defence Medicine - are passed on to the MoD, which in turn bills the Treasury Reserve, but once a patient leaves the armed forces, ongoing treatment is paid for by the NHS.

Mental health offers similar uncertainties. So far, 2,123 troops who served in Iraq have been diagnosed with mental health problems, 328 with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); but cases take 12 years on average to surface and there is no sure cure. "We won't know for many years after the Iraq war is over how many former servicemen are suffering from psychological problems," says Toby Elliot, chief executive of the charity Combat Stress. "The MoD doesn't provide all the funds we need by a long way. We have to make up 40 per cent of our funding ourselves, and that's a problem."

Nor has anyone tried to quantify the indirect economic effects. The surge in the price of Brent crude oil from $31 a barrel at the start of 2003 to $60 today has been driven largely by increased demand, but Middle East instability affects the market and "Iraq has been factored in for years", according to the oil analyst Jean-Luc Amos. The extent to which the Iraq war has exacerbated the domestic threat of terror and made Britain less safe remains similarly ungauged. Then there are other costs barely considered. In 2002 a study commissioned by Ken Livingstone, the city's mayor, estimated that war in Iraq would cost the London economy £1bn in lost tourism alone, though there has been no post-invasion follow-up.

That no one in the British government has even attempted these calculations is worrying, but perhaps any cost-benefit analysis of the war misses the point. "In the end, if the Iraq war had brought the Iraqis a better life and us greater security, then - whatever the costs - it would seem 'worth it'," says Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London. "Because it has been such a screw-up, then, even at a lower level of calculated costs, it seems like a waste."

Iraq War: Key Dates
Research by Sarah O'Connor

20 March 2003 US and Britain invade
1 May 2003 Bush announces "mission accomplished"
13 December 2003 Saddam Hussein is captured
28 April 2004 Images of US troops abusing prisoners emerge from Abu Ghraib
November 2004 US assault on Fallujah insurgents
30 January 2005 Eight million Iraqis vote in elections
July 2006 Deadliest month in Iraq: 3,438 civilians are killed
30 December 2006 Saddam Hussein is executed
10 January 2007 Bush announces 21,500 troop surge to Iraq
21 February 2007 Blair announces the withdrawal of 1,600 British troops

Iraq 2007 by numbers
Research by Rebecca Bundhun

l57,805 minimum number of Iraqi civilians reported killed since the 2003 invasion, according to the Iraq Body Count website
33% of Americans in a March 2007 poll approved of George Bush's Iraq policy
80 US soldiers killed in Iraq last month
7,100 number of UK troops currently in Iraq
135,000 number of US troops currently in Iraq
134 number of British soldiers killed in Iraq
21,500 additional troops Bush plans to deploy in the "troop surge"
28 percentage of Americans in the March poll who said the US will probably or definitely win the war

I wonder if this guy remembers what the economy did following 9/11?

Maybe he ought to do a little research so he can write a story about the costs of not fighting this war.

This is a simple way to explain that this is cost of learning there were no WMD in Iraq, no Al Qaeda or any Iraqi threat on our homeland from the Iraqi people or Saddam.
The cost of not fighting this war is also simple; some 3200 American dead wouldn’t be so, same goes for the 25,000 wounded, our treasury would be close to a trillion dollars better off. We might have found and destroyed the devils agents who actually did attack the USA on 9-11. The price at the pump would be a whole lot better, the list goes on and on, some of you must not have been paying any attention following 9-11. Shouldn’t we be fighting in Saudi Arabia, didn’t 19 of the devils agents who attacked us on 9-11 come from Saudi Arabia? Where does Al Qaeda get most of their money, it wouldn’t be Saudi Arabia would it?

Well, we'd be fighting Saudi Arabia if we wanted to do what Ossama wanted us to do.

When President George Herbert Walker Bush put together his Muslim coalition at the onset of Desert Shield in August, 1990 the Saudi royal family had a vested interest in allowing the American military to take up temporary residency on Arab soil—Saddam Hussein. Saddam, who miscalculated, believed that the United States would not come to the defense of Kuwait if he moved swift enough, in blitzkreg-style, and overran the nation before either the Saudi government or the United States could respond.


Saddam, who spent ten years fighting a no-win war with Iran and gained millions of dollars in covert money from the U.S. government, and was aided with covert intelligence from the CIA that would help him become the strongest military force on the Arabian peninsula, was determined to go far beyond Kuwait in 1990. Saddam intended to extend not only his northern border to gain access to the Persian Gulf. Saddam wanted direct access to the Arabian Sea through the Red Sea—access which Saudi Arabia possesses. To gain it, all he needed to do when he secured his grip on Kuwait was to attack Saudi Arabia. The added plus for Saddam was the fact that Saudi Arabia is the most oil-rich nation on the Arabian peninsula and it is, because of its potential tonnage of black gold, the loudest voice in OPEC. If Saddam controlled Saudi Arabia and its oil wealth, it would be simply a matter of time before he would be in a position to overrun the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, and Oman.


Saddam made two very serious mistakes in 1991. First, he failed to make Israel the villain in the eyes of the Arab world before he invaded Kuwait (which would have made it difficult for the Sauds to help the Bush-Quayle Administration build a coalition throughout the Islamic world). Second, Saudi intelligence agents learned that Saddam Hussein also intended to invade Saudi Arabia if the United States failed to act.


Because of the threat from Saddam to their own national security, the Saudi royal family invited the Bush-Quayle Administration to bring the full military might of the United States to Arabian peninsula. In addition to military installations in Saudi Arabia, the New World Order coalition that was structured by Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, Defense Secretary (and now Vice President) Dick Cheney, and General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (now Secretary of State), bases were created in Qatar (where CNN is now the majority shareholder in the al-Jazeera al-Qaeda television station which airs all of Osama bin Laden’s hate messages to Islamic militants all over the world), and in Bahrain. The militant Islamic states of the Mideast: United Arab Emirates, Oman and Yemen refused to allow either British or American forces on their land. Jordan would allow “flyovers,” but they were too close to Syria to allow American troops to roost in Damascus.

Hussein, realizing he had overplayed his hand once the 21st century air war commenced with B-2 Stealth bombers that eluded Iraqi radar and GPS and laser-guided bombs did everything except knock on the doors of Hussein’s military bunkers before entering, decided he would have to bring Israel into the war, forcing America to defend the Jews and change the nature of the Gulf War from a war between Muslim nations to one in which infidels, Jews and Muslims were fighting the descendent of Saladin, the man who restoring the glory of Babylon.


But, try as he did, the coalition held. When the ground war against Iraq started, it lasted less than a week. Hussein’s vaunted Royal Guard surrendered to anyone who stumbled upon them. CNN, ABC, CBS and ABC news crews were shocked when Hussein’s best troops tried to surrender to them hoping the news crews would supply them with a morsel of food or a cup of water. The Iraqi troops which survived the most horrendous bombings in the history of warfare had no stomach for the “Mother of Battles.” There was no Islamic resistance between the advancing American forces and Baghdad; and there was nothing between Saddam Hussein and arrest—or death.


Nothing, that is, except the Saudi royal family.


Pressured by Saudi’s senior cleric Sheikh Hamoud bin Oqla al-Shuaibi (a Shi’ite cleric), King Fahd was told to give up the quest to capture Hussein or face a fatwa. Public opinion in the Muslim world had quietly shifted during the Gulf War for two reasons. First, the United States took Saddam Hussein’s bait and helped Israel when Iraq began shooting Scud missiles at the Jews. In order to keep Israel from retaliating against Iraq, the United States supplied Israel with anti-missile missiles. It was a lose-lose situation for the U.S. military. Had Bush not supplied Israel with antimissile missiles, the Jews would have launched their own air strikes against Baghdad, making it appear that the Jews were part of the Arab-British-American coalition. But, in supplying Israel with a sophisticated defense system, America—the infidel—was aiding the Jews against the Muslims. According to the Koran, as an ally of Israel, the United States could no longer billet its troops, or maintain military bases, on Saudi soil since they were an ally of the Muslim’s chief enemy.


To avoid a fatwa in 1991 against the Saudi family initiated by the Wahhabis clerics (which has been the source of Saudi legitimacy for the past 250 years), King Fahd was pressured to force the United States to end the Gulf War before American, British and Saudi troops marched into Baghdad. Further, the Bush-Quayle Administration was forced to allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power.


The Wahhabis are a puritanical minority in Saudi Arabia with a direct ancestral link to Muhammad. They are very powerful not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the Arab world.. Like the Saudi royal family, which also claims direct ancestral ties to Muhammad, the Wahhabis are Sunnis. But, unlike the Saudi royal family which has adopted many western customs and a more conciliatory attitude towards Israel in order to maintain its political ties with the United States, the Wahhabis are becoming much more militant with respect to Israel and are now defending the Shi’ite militants—whom they traditionally hate. Even though cleric Sheikh Hamoud bin Oqla al-Shuaibi is 80-years old, and blind, he is the most powerful holy man in Saudi Arabia. Oqla, who lives in the town of Burayda, a Wahhabi stronghold north of Riyadh, has made the Saudi royal family walk a virtual tightrope between the Saud’s need to support its most powerful military backer—the United States—and the increasingly puritanical Shi’ite views of the Koran.


Oqla, who was born in 1921—the year the Al Sauds came into power—rose to become the most powerful cleric in Saudi Arabia. What gives Oqla his power is not the Wahhabis as a clan, since they are one of the smallest minority groups on the Arabian peninsula. Oqla, who has trained many of Saudi Arabia’s clerics over the past five decades, is probably the most respected cleric in the Islamic world due to the political clout in the Arab world of three men: Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.


In 1995 Oqla was jailed for two months for accusing the royal family of corruption. Had Oqla simply been a Saudi dissident, he would have simply vanished. While Saudi Arabia is a somewhat democratic monarchy, it is a monarchy first and a democracy second. All important government officials are members of the Al Saud family. Oqla was simply to powerful to keep in jail.


Just days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Oqla issued the first of several fatwas in which the Saudi royal family was warned that “...[w]hoever supports the infidel against Muslims is considered an infidel...It is a duty to wage Jihad on anyone who supports the attack on Afghanistan.” Oqla warned the Saudi royal family, in particular King Fahd, that if the Saudi government helped the United States attack the Taliban in any manner, it would be the responsibility of loyal Muslims everywhere to assassinate the king and any member of the royal family. Not to do so, Oqla insisted, would violate the Koran. The fatwa amounted issued by Oqla amounted to the most significant challenge to the authority of the Al Sauds in 80 years. Religious edicts are official sanctions to overthrow the House of Saud. It effectively authorizes the assassination of the king, and instructs the Saudi people to treat the royal family as Islamic apostates who are subject to the Koranic punishment of death. Anyone who ignore the fatwa can then be declared apostates themselves and, as such, can be subject to a death warrant themselves.


Since the Oqla fatwa was issued, a whole series of fatwas have been issued by prominent Wahhabi clerics instructing their followers to wage jihad on any American living within the kingdom—and condemning the rulers who protect the infidels on their soil. Thus far the dissent the fatwas authorized against the Saudi royal family has not materialized, but a molotov cocktail was thrown at a German couple in Riyadh and a Canadian aircraft technician, Luke Adrey, was shot to death in Kuwait and his Filipino companion was wounded. In addition, two men, one American, were killed by a suicide bomber in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia on October 6. Thirteen thousand Americans live in the eastern province city. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced he was going to Riyadh, the royal family discouraged the visit when fatwas turned up specifically naming King Fahd as the target of assassination.


“The Saudi royal family is in a state of anxiety and fear,” said militant Islamic Saad al-Fagih of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. “They know that several thousand people have been trained in Afghanistan in the last few years—and there is information that these people have orders to hit the Saudi royal family.”


When the fatwa against the Al Sauds appeared on an official Islamic website Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz met with Shiekh Qqla and attempted to persuade him to retract the fatwa on the king. The Sheikh declined. The Al Sauds, once again, are in trouble. Try as they might to remain moderate—at least in the American public’s eye—King Fahd had a problem. He has to walk a barbed wire fence. If he loses the support of the American military, he risks attack not only from Saddam Hussein but the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden which has thousands of trained operatives living in Saudi Arabia, waiting for orders to overthrow the Saud government. Many of those terrorists are supported by the al-Rashid Trust which publishes the most popular newspaper in the Muslim world.


Whenever Fahd climbs in bed with the Americans he risks assassination. That’s why when Fahd climbs in bed with the American government he always keeps one foot on the floor.


New Yorkers saw that on Thursday, October 11 when Fahd’s nephew, Prince Al-Walid bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz showed up in New York for a well-publicized guided tour of the World Trade Center. After New York mayor Rudy Giuliani gave the visiting potentate and his entourage a personal tour of the site, the Prince gave the Mayor a check for $10 million. As he handed Giuliani the check, the prince cited the long term friendship that has existed between his nation and the United States and charged that warlord Osama bin Laden does not belong to Islam or any religion in the world. Al-Walid’s rhetoric followed the current political spin here and elsewhere in the world that Islam is not a religion of terrorism—and that terrorists demanding a Jihad against America are not true Muslims. In point of fact, as Al-Walid spun that rhetoric in New York, his uncle—who sent him to America with a $10 million check and a message blaming Israel for the Twin Towers tragedy—was feeling the brunt of the Koran himself at that moment. Fahd stood condemned not only by clerics in Saudi Arabia, but Muslim clerics all over the world.


While Fahd needed to appear as though he was still in bed with America, he now needed both feet firmly planted on the floor—and the Muslim world needed to see that he had a copy of the Koran in his hands.


As Prince Al-Walid gave lip service to America, and a half-hearted condemnation of Osama bin Laden, his aids were passing out official Saudi statements to the media which actually criticized American policy in Afghanistan. “At times like this one,” the official Saudi position stated, “we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.” The official Saudi position is that the jihad against the United States was triggered by America’s ill-advised support of Israel’s terrorism against the helpless Palestinian people. Since Israel is the enemy of the Muslims, anyone who helps the Jews is also an enemy.


To fan the fires of hate against the United States as it intensifies its air war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Front have increased their attacks against the Jews only to provoke lethal responses by the Israelis which has been publicized by CNN’s al-Jazeera satellite TV network to show that as the Americans attack the Taliban in Afghanistan, their ally, Israel, had launched all-out war against the peaceful Palestinians on the West Bank. At the current time, the United States is losing its global public relations war to continue waging its war on terrorism.


With a fatwa against King Fahd that not only authorizes his assassination but the overthrow of the Al Saud dynasty if the royal family does not back the official Muslim position that the problem in the Mideast is not bin Laden but the Jews, Fahd is doing an impossible highwire act without a net. Afraid to double cross the United States almost as much as he is afraid to cross the Wahhabi clerics who have pronounced a death sentence on the House of Saud, Fahd is offering the United States weak lip service that gets weaker by the day (just as it did during the Gulf War when Fahd was forced to shield Saddam Hussein in order to protect his kingdom). In addition to the fatwa against Fahd, the Muslim clerics have issued fatwas on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.


In an attempt to defuse the militant mood in Saudi Arabia and, hopefully, abrogate the fatwa posted by Shiekh Oqla, State cleric and Saudi Chief Justice Sheikh Leheidan appeared on Saudi television where he attempted to spin the spin. “The most important trait of true Muslims is to oppose any unjust person who is bent on bloodshed and not to give shelter to any mischief maker,” he declared.


Most of the mature Saudi citizens are firmly behind King Fahd. His problem comes from the more militant Saudi youth, most of whom are unemployed. Unemployment in Saudi Arabia is extremely high. And because it is, most of the Saudis who do not have jobs are very conscious of the 30 to 40 thousand Americans in Eastern Saudi Arabia who are not only gainfully employed, but are earning extremely high incomes by Saudi standards. In addition, there is much recent criticism of King Fahd for hosting some 5,000 military personnel—many of them women. This adds insult to injury in a nation which treats women as second-rate citizens. It is a lesson America did not learn in 1991.


“Osama bin Laden,” Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said, “has become a symbol of defiance. Whoever stands in defiance of American arrogance will be seen as a local hero.”


Reform-minded Saudis and Mideast experts in the White House blame the current fatwa against the Al Sauds on the Saudi government itself which allowed the Wahhabis to dictate the scholastic syllabus. The fatwas—which were circulated in mosques and on the Internet—justified the expulsion of the Al Sauds from Islam on the basis of the Tawhid, the Wahhabi manifesto. The Tawhid is compulsory study for 10-year olds in Saudi Arabia. On page 29 of the Tawhid, Muslim students are taught that “...Allah has said...never support infidels.”