The data strongly supports what has long been an intuitive
argument--when legitimate avenues for expressing grievances and influencing
policy are unavailable, people are more likely to resort to radicalism and
political violence. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Saudi Arabia
has been a main source of international terrorism--not only were 15 of the 19
September 11 hijackers Saudi, but, according to various reports,
more suicide bombers and foreign fighters in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia than
from any other country. The kingdom, a font of Wahhabi ideology and dominated
by retrograde clerics, produces so many radicals that the regime has long
followed a policy of funding militants to fight abroad rather than face their
wrath at home. This practice dates to the early 1980s, when the royal family
began issuing visas and providing other support to citizens willing to fight in
Afghanistan, a strategy that diverted extremists away from the Arabian
Peninsula.
The established link between tyranny and terror means that
Saudi Arabia’s internal political situation should be cause for much greater
alarm. The country is among the world’s most undemocratic, according to every
respected independent assessment. Freedom House ranks
the Saudi regime as one of the seventeen most repressive governments in the
world. There is no “opposition” to speak of--political parties of any kind are
banned. Human rights activists, and anyone else who publicly criticizes the
regime, are routinely jailed, barred from foreign travel, and blacklisted in
the press. Meanwhile, the notorious mutaww’in, or morality police, have broad
discretion to harass anyone not meeting arbitrary standards of propriety. In
one particularly tragic incident, the mutaww’in prevented rescuers from saving
fifteen girls trapped in a burning school, because the students weren’t wearing
their headscarves. The introduction to a recent Amnesty International report states bluntly that “fear
and secrecy permeate every aspect of the state in Saudi Arabia.” It is a
consistent, unambiguous picture drawn by nearly all international observers. Furthermore,
most empirical studies show that it is political repression--not poverty or
unemployment--that is most responsible for generating terrorism. In fact, many
of those who have turned to extremism, including most of the 9/11 hijackers, have
been relatively well-educated, and middle or upper-middle class