Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: conjur
You really should lay off the crack.
Answer this simple question:
Why would bin Laden want to protect the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina FROM attack by Saddam?
Answer the question, Ozoned.
OBL's religion is Wahhabism. Saddam's is not.
Meca and Medina are sanctity symbols to the source of OBL's power.
The *entity* that claims the title of guardian and protector of meca and medina are
by, geographical possession, the *owners* of the islam faith..
Most people know the background, conjur.
CHAPTER 5
BROTHERHOOD IS SELECTIVE
Saudi Arabia has two identities, an Arab identity and a Muslim one. Except for Lebanon, Islam is the dominant religion of all Arab countries, and this dual identity claims all of them. Until the recent radicalization of Islam and the electoral and other successes of Muslim fundamentalists which enabled them to influence state affairs, the rest of the Arab countries, unlike Saudi Arabia, wore their Muslim identity lightly and had no problem placing their national identity above their religion. Saudi Arabia has never been able to do that, and for practical reasons has never tried to. As the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the home of Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, where all able Muslims are commanded to go to perform the Hajj, it has forced upon it a greater Muslim role. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia made religion the foundation of the state.
In Islam there is no clear division between religion and politics - God and Caesar overlap - so the country's religious position is also a political one. Thus Saudi Arabia's commitment to the propagation of Muslim ways means involvement in Muslim politics. In addition, the various kings of the House of Saud have never tried to limit Islam's external claims on them; they welcomed them with relish in order to offset their inherent weaknesses among the Arabs. So, while other Arab countries faced no problems in reconciling their two identities, the House of Saud sought to create a division between the two and always manipulated its bonds with the Muslim world to balance the historic, linguistic and geographical Arab claim.
The dual identity is a reality and a convenience which manifests itself in many ways, including the constant reference to 'Islamic brotherhood' in the texts of all the treaties Saudi Arabia has with Muslim and Arab countries and in King Fahd's adoption of the title of Guardian of Islam's Holy Shrines, which was originally coined for Sultan Selim of Turkey. This exceptional ethno-religious position and power have been enhanced by Saudi Arabia's control of 25 per cent of the world's known oil reserves (by this is meant oil recoverable at a reasonable price). The oil wealth and the relative weakness of the Arabs and Muslims could have led to the country's assumption of a position of true leadership in both worlds. But, much to the chagrin of Saudi Arabia's friends in the West, it has not. The generally accepted Saudi position of Arab and Muslim leadership is superficial. Saudi Arabia feigns it, and it is not accepted by most Arabs and Muslims, and by others only for brief periods of time and because of specific financial needs.
There are obvious traditional reasons for Saudi Arabia's inability to lead and they include its small population, the Bedoum back-wardness of the country and the House of Saud's adherence to Wahhabism. But there are other reasons which are of the House of Saud's own making: its divisive role, a total failure to develop constructive long-range policies, the royal family's corruption and continued commitment to absolute rule, and the weakness and lack of skill of most of its kings. Whether the House of Saud could have done anything about the built-in traditional reasons is arguable, but the family-made reasons began with the conquest of most of the Arabian Peninsula and the proclamation of the Saudi state. Oil, which came later and should have facilitated the assumption of sensible Arab and Muslim positions, did the opposite. It created a distance between the Saudis and the rest. More recently oil has been used to turn the Arabs and Muslims against each other.
But even without much interest in Arabism or the Muslim world, Ibn Saud still could not denounce either. He was unwillingly Arab and Muslim while trying his utmost to keep both from upsetting his personal gains and ways. During the 1920s, soon after the completion of Ibn Saud's conquests, Saudi Arabia, a new state, immediately developed border disputes with all its neighbours (Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, the Yemen and the Trucial States - the latter are now the United Arab Emirates). Ibn Saud accepted British-sponsored solutions for these problems and went further and signed meaningless friendship treaties with some of his neighbours. He did little beyond that and most of the Arab countries were weak colonies fighting for their own independence, hardly in a position to force on him a greater Arab commitment or to sponsor his people against him. But the Muslim context differed substantially. His occupation in 1925 of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina precluded ignoring Islam. In this case infidel Britain stood aloof; Islam and Islamic unity did not threaten it and control of the holy cities might prove useful. The Muslims thought Mecca and Medina belonged to all of them and demanded a say in the way they were governed. They issued specific calls for the institution of a democratic all-Muslim government for Mecca and Medina with Ibn Saud as 'guardian'.
Aware of the non-acceptance of his Wahhabism, Ibn Saud initially attempted to assuage Muslim unease by announcing that his occupation of Mecca and Medina was temporary, to be replaced by a more acceptable religious body to be defined later, but still with him in control. This was not enough to appease the doubters. Protests against Wahhabi acts of terror were vehement and, because the non-Wahhabi people of the Hijaz were in sympathy with the outsiders, dangerous enough to force Ibn Saud in 1926 to call a Muslim conference 'to have fellow Muslims know us as we are, and not as we have been described by our enemies'.
The Islamic conference was attended by kings, presidents and representatives from over 40 countries, but in the absence of a universally accepted Islamic church hierarchy to decide religious issues, it proved to be a non-event. The issues were heatedly debated and calls for religious tolerance and the banning of granting 'any commercial concessions to foreigners' were added to opposition to any change in the nature of the holy cities and Ibn Saud's assumption of the non-Islamic title of king. But, after many threats and counter-threats, the conference produced no results -just the creation of a committee to deal with these things headed by Prince Faisal. Though they were unhappy, there was not a single Muslim country in a position to alter the situation.
Ibn Saud dismissed the Islamic conference after he expanded his promises regarding the sanctity of the holy cities and emphasized that the pilgrimage, which he promoted because it was his only indigenous source of income, was safer under him than ever before. His deportation of the Indian delegation revealed a great deal about how secure he felt. Though Ibn Saud did not renege on all his promises, including the important one of granting foreign concessions, until much later, the pan-Islamic importance of Mecca and Medina was reduced, but they remained under Saudi control.
The border disputes and doctrinal questions made for an inauspicious Arab and Muslim start. Except for promoting the Hajj to safeguard the income it generated, Ibn Saud concentrated on consolidating his internal position. The Muslims of the world stopped looking to the Governor of Mecca and Medina for religious guidance and they and the Arabs had no interest in Ibn Saud's internal policies. Until 1932, except for minor Iraqi attempts at cooperation with Ibn Saud, which Britain's committed stand against Arab cooperation blocked, the only people who paid serious attention to Saudi Arabia were star-struck Orientalists and British agents. But control of most of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam's holiest shrines precluded long-term uninvolvement in Arab and Muslim affairs. Soon three major problems surfaced. A religious dispute with Egyptian pilgrims, a serious territorial dispute with the Yemen and the budding conflict in Palestine represented major issues which forced Ibn Saud to reveal his true position on the Arabs and the Muslims.
The Saudi refusal in 1929 to allow the Egyptians to conduct their colourful ceremony of Mahmal resulted in the death of over 30 Egyptian pilgrims and led to a rupture in diplomatic relations. It sent a signal to all Muslims, particularly to the Shias of Iran, whose ways were more colourful and more offensive to Wahhabi strictures and sensibilities than those of the Egyptians. For the first time in centuries, Muslims performing the Hajj did so under censorship. It widened the schism between the ruler of Mecca and Medina and the rest of Islam.
The territorial dispute with the Yemen in the 1930s was the culmination of a long-simmering enmity between the only two independent countries in the Arabian Peninsula. The Yemen had become independent in 1918 and its borders were determined by the Turkish-sponsored Violet Line Agreement of 1914. But the nature of the Yemen was a challenge to the Saudis: it was a populous country with more than half the population of the whole Arabian Peninsula, had a solid urban history and was more advanced than its new neighbour. It also represented a thorn in the side of British colonialism, a possible springboard for action against their control of Saudi Arabia and all the makeshift tributary sheikhdoms and emirates of the Gulf. In particular, the Yemen represented a threat to the British colonization of Aden, a territory which considered itself part of a greater Yemen which had been dismembered by colonialism.
As usual when Saudi Arabia and Britain had similar interests, Ibn Saud expressed British policies and began making trouble for the Yemen and its rulers. The problems had begun four years before he gained control of the Muslim holy cities, in 1921, when 3000 Yemeni pilgrims who were passing through Saudi-controlled territory on their way to Mecca were slaughtered in cold blood. The extent of this butchery and the feeble Saudi excuse of mistaking the pilgrims for an invading army augured poorly for the future but the Yemen was trying its best to avoid a confrontation with Saudi Arabia and its British backers and it accepted compensation.
In 1932, the year that Ibn Saud gave the territory he ruled his name, both countries competed over the control of Assir, now the south-western part of Saudi Arabia, always a neglected territory governed by the most brutal of the House of Saud emirs. The Assiris were Zeidi Shias, the co-religionists of the Yemenis and historically their wards, but the Saudis, even when the disputed territory represented no strategic imperative for them and despite their insistence that the Shias were heretics, wanted to weaken the Yemen and claimed the territory as theirs. The initial military confrontation over this attractive mountainous part of the Arabian Peninsula was settled without any alterations in the territory's status and the two sides signed a friendship treaty.
But neither Ibn Saud nor the British were satisfied with a treaty which left the Yemen relatively strong. Ibn Saud ignored the treaty and sponsored anti-Yemeni cross-border raids until it led to open warfare between the two countries. With British financial support and military equipment, his forces gained the upper hand and the Yemen was forced to sign the 1934 Taif Peace Agreement, which 'leased' Assir to Ibn Saud for a period of 20 years, to be renegotiated on its expiry. The Yemenis knew that they would never get the territory back and it was a humiliation they have never forgotten or forgiven.
The war with the Yemen exposed two articles of Saudi for-eign policy which are still in existence. First, Saudi Arabia was intolerant of the presence of any other powerful force in the Arabian Peninsula. Secondly, particularly in view of unsuccessful Arab attempts to stop the war from breaking out, Saudi Arabia continued to prove itself willing to place its relationship with an outside power above its supposedly brotherly relationship with an Arab country.
The third problem, one which eventually became more impor-tant than the Yemen, was that of Palestine. To restate, the British wish to have a free hand in deciding the future of Palestine was among the reasons they sponsored Ibn Saud, who accommodated them by implicitly accepting the idea of a Jewish state. Internal and regional pressures to speak on behalf of Arab rights in Palestine and Muslim rights in Jerusalem on occasion forced him to make pronouncements which appeared to contradict his original stance, yet he continued to take his lead from Britain.
From the late I 920s and for a decade or so, Ibn Saud's inter-Arab policies on the subject of Palestine consisted of playing the two Arab sides vying for its leadership against each other, while sim-ultaneously trying to bargain away Arab rights in return for British support to expand his domain. He opposed the claim to Palestine of the Hashemite King Abdallah of Jordan and pretended to support his enemy, the militant Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, by giving him limited financial help. Abdallah was a Hashemite rival to be kept from getting strong, but Ibn Saud's support for the Mufti was never wholehearted. He consistently advised the Mufti to negotiate with the various British commissions which were sent to study the Palestine problem. More seriously, in 1936, Ibn Saud tricked the Mufti into ending a 183-day Palestinian national strike which was successful in putting pressure on the British Mandate Government. Ibn Saud promised the Mufti to intercede with the British on his behalf and was explicit in his belief in 'our British friends' intentions'. There is no record of this intercession in the British Foreign Office documents of the time. In fact, Ibn Saud sought to weaken the Mufti as well by establishing contact with leading Palestinian families opposed to him, the Nashashibis and Shawas.
Ibn Saud went beyond using Philby as an emissary to the British Foreign Office and Churchill to negotiate his willingness to accept openly the Jewish claim to Palestine in return for Britain withholding support from his Hashemite rivals, who were now kings in Jordan and Iraq. On 17 September 1939 Philby met with Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of Israel, to negotiate Ibn Saud's overt acceptance of a Jewish state in return for £20 million. Ibn Saud was broke and, as usual, set money above brotherhood and principle.
Ibn Saud's support of the Mufti against King Abdallah of Jordan while sponsoring the Mufti's enemies was one of the earliest exam-ples of a divide-and-rule policy on the Arabs. His acceptance of British policy was a signal that his old subservience to them would continue. His attempt to extract money from Weizmann was very much in character; the reason he was always successful in buying Bedoum loyalty was because he was one of them. But ignoring the Arabs and Muslims was easier in the 1920s and 1930s than it was in the 1940s - among other things the time when the Palestinian problem as an Arab and Muslim issue occupied centre stage.
In 1945 Saudi Arabia unavoidably joined the Arab League, an organization committed to fostering political and economic cooperation between the Arab countries. Joining the League satisfied his people and the rest of the Arabs but he had every intention of keeping it and its cooperation plans at arm's length. By 1947 and 1948, most Arabs looked to this new organization to save Palestine. Ostensibly the League decided on the level and nature of the Arabs' Palestinian involvement. Saudi Arabia, a member of an Arab organization for the first time, had no option but to participate in defending the Arab position in the United Nations and other international forums and to vote for sending Arab armies to help the people of Palestine.
During Ibn Saud's life, Saudi involvement in the most important Arab problem of the century never went further than providing verbal support. In the mid-I 930s he had ignored the calls of King Ghazi of Iraq to form a common Arab front to defend Palestine. Then, in 1948, he sat on the sidelines and refused to contribute forces to liberate Palestine (even Philby admits this) and placed hurdles, such as the denial of transport, in the way of Saudi citizens who volunteered to join Arab forces fighting there. He continued to pay the Arab position lip-service to the extent of publicly instructing his son and Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal, to attack US support of Israel while conducting secret negotiations with the Americans for the building of the huge US airbase in Dhahran. His previous commitment to British policies had been replaced by a new American one and America was solidly pro-Israeli.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli War ended in the defeat of the Arabs and Ibn Saud's ensuing behaviour revealed no remorse - only a genuine fear that the popular feeling surrounding the Palestinian problem might infect his kingdom and undermine his position. Ibn Saud withheld financial support from the Egyptian and Jordanian forces still occupying parts of Palestine, but spent money supporting several military regimes in Syria to keep it from uniting with Iraq to create a military counterweight to Israel. According to Glubb Pasha, Ibn Saud was always apprehensive of such a union and how it might engender feelings for Arab unity among his people. The Saudi volunteers who managed to join the Arab forces in Palestine returned home to be harassed and imprisoned by the security forces. Saudi Arabia refused to admit qualified Palestinians who sought employment there because of fear of political agitation. Laws forbidding Saudis to marry Arabs without prior governmental permission, which was seldom given, were introduced for the first time. The Saudi press was ordered to tone down its pro-Palestinian rhetoric and reduce its reporting of the misery which had befallen the Palestinians. Ibn Saud refused to contemplate the possible use of oil to pressure America into a more even-handed Palestinian policy and, according to the Palestinian leader Jamal Toukan, a member of a delegation who visited him to ask for assistance, he was preoccupied with burning what food remained after the feast he gave them, lest it fall in the hands of poor people who might get accustomed to eating meat.
The acts aimed at distancing Saudi Arabia from the aftermath of the Arab defeat, even the smallest of them, amounted to an adherence to a Saudi Arabia-first policy. The Saudi people felt differently, however, and even then Saudi writers and poets wrote about the problem constantly and tearfully. Such a policy in reality meant the House of Saud came first. And a House of Saud-first policy meant financial and political reliance on America, the oil concessionaire who held the purse strings.
Briefly the policy worked. Saudi Arabia's level of political development, Ibn Saud's repression and the rising oil income allowed it to escape the consequent upheavals which beset other Arab regimes. To many observers, this completed the picture. The Saudi attempts to undermine the Yemen, Ibn Saud's aloofness from Muslim independence movements and Arab calls for cooperation, and his intolerance of non-Wahhabi Muslims, were capped by his attitude towards Palestine. This left his country's Arab and Muslim positions both tarnished and weak, and opened the door for America.
In 1953, it was left to the inept Saud to face the consequences of his father's policies. The inevitable internal pressures which Ibn Saud had failed to neutralize were ignited and compounded by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader who assumed power in 1952 and later espoused Arab nationalism and became its leading twentieth-century exponent.
Nasser, a former Egyptian Army colonel who saw heroic combat in Palestine, rose to power as a result of the 1948 Arab defeat. His Army group seized power in Egypt from the corrupt King Farouk and was committed to eliminating the causes of the defeat in Palestine and to punishing the ruling social establishment respon-sible for it. Nasser's initial target, the Egyptian royal family and the land-owning Pashas, was expanded in 1954 when Nasser claimed leadership of Egypt's three circles of power: the Arab, Muslim and African worlds. The African role was uniquely Egyptian, but Nasser's claim in the Arab and Muslim arenas, though Nasser was loath to admit it, was an extension of the Hashemite claim of leadership of all the Arabs against which the House of Saud rose to power. And Nasser did not stop there; using as a base Al Azhar, Islam's oldest university and the leading recognized source of Muslim learning, he also presented a Muslim challenge. Because the House of Saud had not permitted anything to flourish in Mecca and Medina except Wahhabi teachings, Al Azhar was an attractive pan-Islamic alternative and its ulemas enhanced their position by adopting the issue of Jerusalem.
Nasser's Arab and Muslim appeals struck a chord with the Saudi people. Their Saudism was new and, despite four decades of attempts by the House of Saud to promote it, an unsatisfactory replacement for their Arab and Muslim identities. Saudi people needed and wanted to express their Arab and Muslim selves. Nasser's threat was not to invade Saudi Arabia, but his ability to subvert its people by appealing to their frozen identities and to their dissatisfaction with the House of Saud. It was a simple case of the external idea depending on internal support and Saudi political groups such as the Arabian Peninsula Peoples' Union supported Nasser and established offices in Cairo. Nasser's attempt to undermine the House of Saud utilized new technology, and the confrontation took the form of a battle between the old and the new. A new Egyptian radio station, the Voice of the Arabs, specialized in telling the Arab people of the misdeeds of their leaders. There was no shortage of material on Saudi Arabia, and the numbers of the King's wives and palaces and the gambling and womanizing of his brothers were recited in the manner of a scandal magazine of the airwaves. Of course, the promise of what Arab unity and Islamic solidarity would bring were exaggerated. The denunciations and exaggerations were combined in the slogan: 'Arab oil for the Arab people.'
King Saud faced a greater threat than had ever confronted his father. The previous Saudi position of safety had depended on the lack of responsiveness by the country's people to outside stimuli and the weakness of its enemies, and Nasser represented a reversal of both elements. The Arab threat was from within and Saudi Arabia's diminished Islamic credentials left it little room to manoeuvre. To avoid being left adrift politically, religiously and culturally, the Saudi Government decided to reclaim its two iden-tities. William Quandt of the Brookings Institution in Washington, in his remarkable Saudi Arabia in the 1 980s, suggests, 'It isn't sentiment which draws Saudi Arabia into Arab politics' to make a point about Saudi Arabia's response to the Arab threats to its safety. Quandt's observation holds true for the Saudi involvement in Muslim affairs. The Nasser challenge brought an end to its Arab and Muslim isolation. The Saudis had either to confront Nasser or to appease him.
King Saud was surrounded by foreign advisers in the manner of his father but the Americans had not replaced Philby with an influential court personality to keep him in line and his weakness and the mixed advice of his Syrian and Palestinian courtiers led to confused policies. In 1955 Saud quarrelled with Nasser over the latter's espousal of socialism, but in 1956 he went as far as to enter a tripartite alliance with Egypt and Syria which, however, he soon allowed to wither away. The resulting deterioration in the Saudi position enhanced the popularity of Nasser within Saudi Arabia and made other Arab leaders opposed to Nasser reluctant to befriend its government.
Suddenly there was Suez. When Nasser failed to secure total American support for his policies, his ambitions to control the Middle East and to eliminate what remained of British and French political influence and economic interests culminated in his 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal and the consequent British, French and Israeli invasion of his country. This time, unlike in 1948, the weakness of Saud and Nasser's popularity and the resulting threat of internal upheaval forced the Saudis to respond to the multinational attack on Egypt. Saud offered Egyptian military aircraft safe haven in his country and, unlike his father in 1948, ordered the cessation of oil shipments to Britain and France. ARAMCO, the American oil-producing con-sortium, encouraged by official American disapproval of the Suez invasion, obeyed the Saudi decision meekly and estab-lished a precedent which came back to haunt the company in the early 1970s, when the USA itself became the target of an oil embargo.
The selective oil embargo and courageous safe-haven offer were followed by generous financial aid to Egypt. Privately furious over Nasser's policies of confrontation, Saud acted to avoid being toppled. But, contrary to Saudi and other expectations that Suez was the end of Nasser, the Suez defeat strengthened rather than diminished Nasser's popularity and his threat to his Arab neighbours. Eventually the shakiness of the Saudi regime registered with the Eisenhower administration and forced it to act to protect its oil interests.
Rather than use diplomats to develop a Saudi-American plan to contain Nasser, America played on Saud's simple Bedoum instincts and in January 1957 invited him to the USA, where he was met on the tarmac by none other than Eisenhower himself. The negotiations which ensued and were followed up in Saudi Arabia produced a declaration of the Eisenhower Doctrine. This policy articulated the so-far secret American guarantees to Saudi Arabia (see The Brutal Friendship) and extended them to cover the safety of other countries friendly to the USA against the expansionist designs of Nasser or communism or both. At long last Saud's mind was made up for him.
As we will see in the following chapter, the Eisenhower Doctrine also formalized the replacement of the Anglo-French hegemony over pro-West Middle Eastern countries with an American one. But, like Britain before it, America had no long-term policy for Saudi Arabia and beyond the threat of military intervention it did nothing to define Saudi Arabia's role in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
In 1957 King Hussein of Jordan, encouraged and aided by the CIA, overthrew his own popularly elected pro-Nasser cabinet. (Contrary to popular history, which alleges that the cabinet tried to overthrow Hussein, the plot was concocted in Beirut and the CIA had a team of agents directing the operation from the King's palace.) This palace coup represented a confrontation between the pro- and anti-Nasser forces throughout the Middle East. America prevailed on King Saud to cast aside the historical Saudi-Hashemite enmity and to support King Hussein. This time Saudi Arabia used money against Nasser and it went further and stationed Saudi troops in Jordan to help stabilize it. It was the first use of Saudi troops in an Arab dispute beyond its borders.
Nasser's threat to the whole Middle East was deeply entrenched, however, and was anchored in the desire of the Arab people for unity. In 1958 Syria, a shaky republic lacking in permanent leadership and prone to coups d'etat, gave expression to this desire and decided to join Nasser and become the junior partner in the union with Egypt which created the United Arab Republic. To counter this threat to their security, Jordan and Iraq decided to merge and form a union of their own. What Saudi Arabia had always dreaded most, the emergence of strong Arab neighbours who could act as a magnet for its people and bring an end to the use of Saud's rule, became a reality. The American guarantee of its national integrity was deemed insufficient protection and Saudi Arabia felt obliged to try to stop both unions from being realized.
Saudi Arabia's attempt to intercept the march towards Arab unity took the form of a sophomoric plot in March 1958 to assassinate Nasser by shooting down his plane as it was about to land in Damascus. This was to be followed by other assassinations of pro-Nasser Syrian leaders, including the Syrian President, Shukri Kuwatly. The scheme was conceived by Yusuf Yassin, a Syrian adviser to Saud, and approved personally by the King. Nasser was nothing if not a publicist, and he got considerable mileage out of exposing the plot and giving journalists copies of the £2-million cheque the Saudis paid his Syrian chief of intelligence to do the job. Instead of eliminating Nasser, the plot played right into his hands and he convinced the Arab people, including many unhappy Saudis, that Saud was a Western lackey and that the West was the plot's real instigator. (Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad and a former Palestinian adviser to King Saud insist that it was a CIA plot but provide no evidence to back their allegation. Others have hinted at CIA-ARAMCO involvement, again without adequate proof.)
Saud's fate was sealed. His brother Faisal, too shrewd to personally lead a move to force Saud to step down, allowed other members of the family to do it. There was no way for Saud to outlive creating an atmosphere which alienated the Saudi people to the extent of endangering the rule of the family. In 1958 he initially agreed to cede power to Faisal to run the country while remaining a figurehead.
One of the first problems to confront Faisal after his initial assumption of power was what to do about the ostensibly pro-Nasser coup d'etat which overthrew the Hashemite Iraqi monarchy and put an end to unity plans between Iraq and Jordan on 14 July 1958. Eliminating the Iraqi monarchy, always a more substantial establishment than its poor Jordanian cousin, had been a goal of the House of Saud, but replacing it with a revolutionary regime posed a bigger threat. It took Faisal several days to recognize the new regime, since he was reluctant to accept the demise of his more predictable conservative enemies.
As it was, the new Iraqi regime became opposed to Nasser. Later, in 1961, Syria seceded from the union with Egypt and this time Faisal's anti-Arab-unity policies led him to immediately recognize the new regime and provide it with financial help. The regional balance of power was back to square one and Saudi Arabia moved to reclaim its old position, keeping the Arab world divided.
continued in next post