Weak realpolitik: The vicissitudes of Saudi bashing - Quarterly

ABOUT SIXTY years ago, R.G. Collingwood wrote, "Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way." (1) Inasmuch as his thinking was suspended somewhere between hope for a science of history and an awareness of its practical limits, philosophers of history have been arguing ever since about what he really meant. But one thing he must have meant is that what interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present. As Collingwood said, "As far as we can see history as a whole ... we see it as a continuous development in which every phase consists of the solution of human problems set by the preceding phase." (2)

Human affairs generally move so ponderously, or in such complicated ways, that contemporaries have trouble seeing "history as a whole", or detecting the phases to which Collingwood pointed. But as a glacier or a tectonic plate may slip to dramatic effect, so sometimes major events rattle us into historical awareness. When they do, it is uncanny how we find ourselves reassessing the significance of dates as symbols of the touching points of historical phases. On September 1, 1939, 1918-19 suddenly shrunk in significance for Britons and Frenchmen and 1870-71 suddenly grew. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, 1917 suddenly became a less important date, and 1914 a more important one. September 11, 2001, was such an event, so it is worth asking how our historical perceptions may change as a result of it.

To be sure, some movement in our historical awareness may be detected already. In the past six months many Americans have grown intensely interested in the Middle East and Islam in general--and in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Islam, and the U.S.-Saudi relationship in particular. So far, however, relatively recent matters have monopolized our attention, and an abundance of detailed newspaper feature series has contributed to that focus. The seriousness of our historical thinking is also affected by emotion. We Americans are more than just curious, and more than merely bothered, about these Saudi subjects. Some are better described as very, very angry.

For starters, it soon dawned on us that while the targets of initial U.S.-led military operations would be the Al-Qaeda organization nestled in the bosom of the Taliban regime, the real source of the problem lay in our two most tactically significant allies: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. As to the former, we knew that Pakistan's military and intelligence services had created and supported the Taliban, thus providing sanctuary and foot soldiers for mass-casualty terrorism. As to the latter, not only were 15 of the 19 terrorists Saudi nationals, but the open secret that the Saudi regime deflects popular frustration and opposition away from itself and onto the United States and Israel became more widely confessed in public. As Sandy Berger put it once out of office, "the veil has been lifted and the American people see a double game that they're not terribly pleased with." Though silent on whether he had been displeased with it while in office, he continued: "They see a regime that is repressive with respect to the extremists that threaten them, but more than tolerant- indeed, the more we find out, beneficent--to the general movement of extreme Islamists in the region." (3)

It soon occurred to others that even this deflection game--what George Shultz has termed "a grotesque protection racket"-- was not the deepest root of the matter. (4) The clerically-run Saudi educational system inculcates an intense religious and cultural chauvinism into its youth--and youth under the age of 16 are today about half the Kingdom's population. (5) Saudi ulema have tutored generation after generation in what amounts to jihadist incitement against non-Muslims. The late Hamud al-Shuaibi, a Saudi cleric who followed Wahhabi Islam to its logical conclusion, put it exactly right: "The Saudi people follow the sheiks that relay the truth and the ones who follow Quran and Sunna, not the ones who follow the political side. Jihad is the highest form of worship. This is a very high station. So all look for this station. If the government allowed people, all the Arab Muslims would go to war." (6) This explains why, in a recent poll conducted by Saudi intelligence and shared with the U.S. government, more tha n 95 percent of Saudis between the ages of 25 and 41 expressed sympathy with Osama bin Laden. (7)

Saudi Arabia's political culture, then, is caught in a double-bind owed to the Kingdom's very origins: the alliance between the power of the Al Saud and the theology of Abdel ibn al-Wahhab. Saudi society naturally generates resentment against its own political leadership, for that leadership's power is far too scant to implement the jihadist teachings of its own schools. Moreover, the Kingdom relies on outside physical protection and a welter of sheltering financial and institutional arrangements with the United States while at the same time exporting its excess religious zeal in the form of opposition to that protector. This double bind has been managed with only modest breakage for most of the last half century, but as U.S. protection has become more visible since the Gulf War, and as the excess of zeal has grown from both demographic trends and the establishment's essentially reactionary approach to economic liberalization, an always tricky balance has grown more problematic. (8)

Just as recognition of these realities was penetrating minds in and around the Beltway, Saudi behavior fed the growing sense of American disquiet. First, Saudi leaders refused to publicly acknowledge that the United States might use Saudi bases against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and for a while it was not clear if the U.S. military would even have unfettered unpublicized use of them. At the same time, the Saudi government raised barriers to U.S. law enforcement agencies' efforts to learn about the Saudi terrorists of September 11. Americans were incredulous at being told by Saudi officials, long after it had become even remotely plausible, that few if any of the terrorists were Saudis but had stolen Saudi passports and identities. V/hen subsequently asked to help U.S. officials in the critical task of "following the money", Saudi officials at first denied, pace Mr. Berger, that any public or private Saudi money had financed any terrorist organization. This raised the question of whether the Saudis were lying, which would have been bad, or whether they were clueless as to what was going on under their noses, which would have been worse. The New Republic bluntly summed up the emerging conclusion: "In fact our Arab 'coalition partners'-particularly Saudi Arabia-are actively sabotaging our efforts to identify the wider terrorist international, made up in large part, of course, of their citizens." (9)

Before long, too, recognition of the inadvertent but unmistakable Saudi complicity in September 11 begged the reinterpretation of older data into something of a pattern. The Saudis had impeded the U.S. investigation into the Riyadh and Khobar Towers bombings that killed 23 American soldiers in November 1995 and June 1996. Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that has refused to participate in an FAA-run airplane manifest agreement that lets U.S. officials know who is arriving into the United States from abroad. The Saudis have at times been unhelpful to sensitive U.S. Arab-Israeli diplomacy; actively dissuading Yasir Arafat during and after the summer 2000 Camp David summit, for example, from accepting compromises over Jerusalem that are a sine qua non for a settlement.

More pointedly with regard to Al-Qaeda and company, the Saudis refused to take Osama bin Laden into custody in 1996 when the Sudanese government offered, with American encouragement and support, to deliver him there. As egregious, in April 1995 the FBI learned that Imad Mughniyah was on a flight from Khartoum to Beirut that was scheduled to stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. FBI agents rushed to Jeddah to apprehend Mughniyah, who was responsible for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which a U.S. Navy diver was murdered in cold blood, and for the October 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine complex in Lebanon. But the Saudis refused to let the plane land. (Mughniyah went on to become an important liaison between Hizballah and Al-Qaeda, and is even now helping to host escaped Al-Qaeda terrorists in Lebanon.)

AS ALL OF this history was being revived, reviewed and discussed, together with post-September 11 developments themselves, the Saudis shouted foul. They claimed, most pointedly, that a conspiracy was being mounted against them by the American media, averring sotto voce that this was because so many Jews occupy high positions in that media. Very much related, the Saudis sought to excuse their own reticence to help the United States by alleging, in the person of Crown Prince Abdallah himself on January 28, that Saudi reluctance flowed from justifiable anger throughout the Arab world over America's "absolute" support for Israel.

Now, Saudi attitudes toward Palestine and Israel, and toward Jews in the American media, may seem like side points considering all the other things that have impinged on U.S. and Saudi interests since September 11. But they are not. The Saudi leadership's approach to Palestine helps define its predicament, stuck as it is between the demands of its own society and its need for friendship and protection from the United States. Moreover, this predicament has been, and will remain, a central and uncomfortable fact in the American war on terrorism.

U.S.-Saudi disagreement over Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy had passed through a dramatic stage in the weeks just before September 11, and Saudi complaints after September 11 make little sense without an awareness of that drama. To understand either, however, some background is necessary.

While Saudi Arabia has for decades been ritually referred to by Americans and Europeans as "moderate", there has never been anything the least bit moderate about its basic view of Israel. Saudi religious figures and most Saudi citizens see Israel and Zionism in ways indistinguishable from Al-Qaeda or the Iranian mullahs at their worst (which they frequently are). They accept unquestioningly a passion-play version of the conflict that is entirely one-sided and, given the closed nature of Saudi society, few Saudis have ever even heard any other account. Israel stands irredeemably guilty of "original sin", Palestinians are ever and always mere innocent victims, and no wild Arab press exaggeration--or pure invention--of dark Israeli deeds is too bizarre to be believed. Partly on account of their educational indoctrination, too, many Saudis are avid consumers of anti-semitism, both vintage imported versions from Europe and fresh creations from the pens of contemporary Arabs. It may make at least back-page news in the United States when an official of the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs refers to American Jews as "brothers of apes and pigs" and calls on America to "get rid of its Jews", but it is occasion for nods and yawning inside the Kingdom. (10)

In light of this, it seems odd upon a moment's reflection that the Saudi political establishment has always supported Yasir Arafat, the leader and symbol of secular Palestinian nationalism, rather than Islamist alternatives, like Hamas, whose religious-based views are closer to those of Saudi clergy and society. That it has done so illustrates how the Saudi internal dilemma projects itself onto Saudi diplomacy. To be saddled with the political leadership of a weak state means to be simultaneously pragmatic in private and ideologically spotiess in public. While the royal family would probably accept any settlement over Palestine that would satisfy Arafat and the nationalists, the Kingdom has been very reluctant to take an active public part in any diplomacy that might in the end legitimate Israel's existence, within any borders whatsoever, for fear of the internal reaction it might provoke. (Crown Prince Abdallah's "speech in the desk" comment to Thomas Friedman about possible Saudi normalization with Israel m ight signal a lightening of that reluctance, but as of this writing, in late February, it is too soon to say.) For the Saudi leadership, in any event, Arafat is as moderate a figure as it dares to support.

This is why, despite longstanding and obvious differences between U.S. and Israeli views of a settlement, despite Arafat's having visited the Clinton White House more often than any other foreign dignitary, and despite the fact that the U.S. government has provided more financial support to the Palestinian Authority than has the Saudi government, Saudi leaders still say publicly that U.S. policy has been "absolutely, 100 percent" biased toward Israel during the second so-called intifada. Such a view sounds self-evident to most Saudis because it is accompanied by a parallel belief that any support for Israel is unjustified because Israel's very existence is illegitimate. Over the past 17 months of Palestinian-instigated violence, most Saudis see the Israeli state as terrorist and the Palestinians as blameless targets and martyrs.

Whether Crown Prince Abdallah and his court privately hold the same attitude is not clear. But it is clear that, both before September 11 and since, the Saudi government has acted as it has because it is far more afraid of its own domestic shadow than of Washington's glare. It knows that its own internal peril paradoxically gives it enormous strength in its dealings with the United States because as difficult as the Saudi status quo is, serious people in Washington realize that all the available alternatives are worse.

It is from this mix of motives and assessments that the Saudis brought considerable pressure on the Bush Administration last spring and summer to change its standoffish public diplomacy with regard to Palestinian-Israeli troubles. An August 24 press conference in which the President laid the major share of blame for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse on Arafat touched off a particularly intense Saudi effort. By early September, that effort resulted in two promises: one very defer-rental one from the United States to put its views of a settlement into the public realm, and one from Chairman Arafat to do what needed doing to resume negotiations toward a ceasefire if not a setdement. (11)

September 11 intervened before either of those promises could be kept. But the promised speech from the United States was nevertheless made, by Secretary of State Colin Powell on November 19, with significant foreshadowing from the President on October 2 and November 10. With these pronouncements, a Republican administration went on record supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Arafat, however, did not keep his promises to Abdallah. Instead, he connived to bring Iranian arms and influence into the Levant, right up to the shores of the Red Sea. In secret league with Hizballah through Iran, Arafat seemed to be planning a kind of re-run of the 1973 Middle East War, with Iran playing the Soviet role, Hizballah in place of Syria on the northern front and the PLO tanzim in place of Egypt on the southern front. The aim was basically the same: to cause such danger and fear as to trigger outside intervention on the Arabs' behalf.

As evidenced by the President's January 29 State of the Union address, the administration has drawn the proper conclusions from all of this: that President Bush, at his August 24 press conference, was right the first time; that Arafat and the PLO are on the wrong side of the war against terrorism; and that trusting Saudi (and Egyptian) advice on how to handle other Arab leaders brings embarrassment and failure. One wonders how the President now reads his hurried, placating response to Crown Prince Abdallah in late August. After all of Arafat's special industry since the summer, one may also wonder how the Crown Prince reads it.

HOWEVER they read it, it is evident that a combination of new indignities and old resentments has coalesced into a crescendo of American criticism of Saudi Arabia. Senator Carl Levin was the first, on January 15, to raise the possibility of withdrawing U.S. forces from Saudi soil, but by the time he went public, an attentive audience in Congress, the Pentagon and elsewhere stood ready to applaud his view. Privately, some senior former U.S. officials began saying things only slightly off the record that would have been hard to imagine six months earlier. At the core of these remarks has been advice to speak frankly, at long last, and at the highest level to the Saudis about key matters that divide us. As Brent Scowcroft put it (for the record), "We probably avoid talking about the things that are the real problems between us because it's a very polite relationship. We don't get all that much below the surface." (12) The developing sense is that we should finally give the Saudi leadership to understand that the y need us more than we need them.

But is that really true, and is there any sense to such a calculation in the first place? Despite all that has happened since September 11, there has been a limit to Saudi bashing, and for good reason. While some experts believe that the United States does not need Saudi facilities to make war against the Iraqi Ba'ath regime, for example, most Pentagon officials would rather do with than without those facilities. Saudi oil still matters greatly to the limping world economy, too, inasmuch as we have neither a serious energy policy in this country nor yet a ready substitute for Saudi swing production abroad (though the Russians are trying and hinting). More important, if the United States lets loose of the Saudis to sink or swim as they might, they might actually sink--only to be replaced by a regime that more resembles the Taliban than, say, the Hashemites in Amman. What benefit, then--aside from the idle pleasures of rhetorical release, or the scoring of petty political points--is there in bashing them?

There is none. The point of foreign policymaking is not to feel good but to do well. A useful step in that direction would be to take up Collingwood's advice in earnest to rewrite our history.

When we recall our lessons as to what was significant between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, we have been used to naming such items as the Washington Naval Conference, Locarno, and the KelloggBriand Pact. From the vantage point of September 11, however, new historical coordinates arise. In the wizened, windswept autumn of 1924, the Al Saud wrested ownership of the Hejaz from the Hashemites, who had lorded over the holiest places of Islam since the 10th century. With that conquest--which could have been prevented by a few gunboats and some strong language had British policy not been otherwise bent--the basic territorial configuration of what became known in 1932 as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the Kingdom oil was being found in abundance, and by the 1970s money began rolling into Saudi coffers in amounts that neither traditional conceptions nor vaults could hold.

The combination--oil riches and the religious legitimacy conferred by control of Mecca and Medina (and of the bajj along with it)--has allowed the Saudi partnership of the Al Saud and the Al Wahhab to overturn the equilibrium of Islamic civilization that had existed for nigh on a thousand years. The Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam is neither traditional nor orthodox. It is a slightly attenuated fundamentalism that dates only from the end of the 18th century. Though linked to the Islamic past through Ibn Taymiyah, a 13th century exegete, and to the minoritarian salafiyah stand of interpretation before him, as recently as fifty years ago the large majority of Muslims considered Saudi Wahhabism to be exotic, marginal and austere to the point of neurotic. But an aggressive and very well-funded campaign of intra-Islamic evangelism has established it as the paragon of Sunni piety today. This is, in a word, bad; bad for Arabs, for Muslims, and for everyone else. More than anything, the ascendancy of Wahhabism within the Islamic world, to a point that is now beyond the control of the Saudi state, is the core source of the terrorist attacks of September 11--and of the way that those attacks have been variously received and understood by Muslims everywhere.

Once we understand "1924" properly, we are instantly sobered by the new perspective it provides. We see that Saudi society, caught as it is between its origins and the inexorable press of modernity, is an inherent threat to the United States and to its allies, Arab and non-Arab alike; that by its very nature it cannot help but be such a threat. While we can and should try to persuade the Saudi government to help us "follow the money" and to do other things manifestly in its own self-interest as well as ours, we will get nowhere trying to persuade Saudis to be what they are not. We may not like the way Saudis think about the non-Islamic world, or what they teach in their schools, or how they define concepts like charity and terrorism. But for American Christians or Jews to demand that they educate their children to become "better" or "more tolerant" Muslims is utterly futile. Next to the apparently unlimited hubris of those who think it so easy to change the political culture of the Muslim world with so-called Middle East Marshall Plans, this presumption--that we have the right to insist on the reform of other peoples' religions--has to rank as the most outrageous American foolishness of the post-September 11 period.

Too many Americans, then, have simultaneously underestimated the Saudi problem and overestimated the potential near-term efficacy of American influence in regard to it. On the one hand, as a matter of first principle, the United States should not "learn to live" with a Saudi Arabia in perpetuity. A Wahhabi-inspired country controlling the Hejaz and that much oil wealth will never be desirable from the perspective of either American interests or values. Arabia has not always been Saudi or Wahhabi, and some day it will probably stop being both; should it become prudent for the United States to advance that day, it would be worth considering. On the other hand, we must recognize that this time is not at hand. The Saudi version of weak realpolitik is becoming an increasingly tense management problem, but it is not just a Saudi problem; it's our problem, too.

As we wait for such a time, there is a lesser but not trivial benefit to seeing the Saudi problem for what it really is. If we stop kidding ourselves about the fit and affection of the two societies for one another, we may grasp the enormous distortion that Saudi money has wreaked on our common sense about the Middle East. Yes, tens of billions of dollars passed around hither and yon over a few decades can do that. But there is hope. Rudy Giuliani provided an object lesson in how to handle Saudi lucre with strings attached. And if even oilmen like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney show signs of getting right about Saudi Arabia, then so can the rest of us.

(1.) R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 248.

(2.) Collingwood, "The Theory of Historical Cycles", Antiquity (1927), in Essays in the Philosophy of History, William Debbins, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 87.

(3.) Quoted in the Washington Post, February 12, 2002.

(4.) Shultz, "Terror and States", Washington Post, January 26, 2002.

(5.) See Neil MacFarquhar, "Anti-Western and Extremist Views Pervade Saudi Schools", New York Times, October 19, 2001.

(6.) Quoted in the Washington Post, December 15, 2001.

(7.) Cited in the New York Times, January 27, 2002.

(8.) See Joshua Teitelbaum, "Deserted", The New Republic, October 22, 2001, for an account of these changes.

(9.) The New Republic, November 5, 2001.

(10.) Abdallah Bin Matruk Al-Haddal on Al-Jazeera TV, January 22, 2002, as reported in MEMRI Special Dispatch 343, February 8, 2002.

(11.) This history is summarized in Robert G. Kaiser and David B. Ottaway, "Saudi Leader's Anger Revealed Shaky Ties", Washigton Post, February 10, 2002.

(12.) Quoted in the Washington Post, February 10, 2002.

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I will say this much for the nobility: that tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious.

--Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Adam Garfinkle is editor of The National Interest.

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