On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (34 page)

The regime has long fed fears of chaos—
après moi la deluge
—and the religious have preached that chaos is sinful and obedience is the way of Allah. Still, it is not unimaginable that Saudi Arabia’s many deep divisions could erupt into conflict. The kingdom’s security forces are divided into at least three groups—Defense, National Guard, and Interior—under the control of different princes of the family. The religious are divided among themselves, ranging from the tame
ulama
who support the Al Saud to both moderates and fundamentalists unhappy with royal family rule and perhaps open to supporting new leaders. The kingdom’s regional divisions are always there to be exploited. The Eastern Province (home to the oil reserves and to the perennially ill-used and unhappy Shiite minority) and the Hejaz (site of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina with their more open, international outlook) both resent the overwhelming dominance of religious conservatives from the Nejd, home of the
Al Saud, at all levels of national governance. These regional divisions—and tribal divisions within each region—are stronger than any sense of Saudi national identity. The Al Saud princes, of course, never sought to instill nationalism or patriotism but only loyalty to their family. Thus, should royal family divisions, now festering beneath the surface, erupt over succession, little could prevent society’s larger fault lines from cracking. In that environment of civil strife—a Libya writ large—the extremists would see opportunity and the West, especially the United States, would face the agonizing choice of military intervention to safeguard global oil supplies.

Optimists believe that even in the worst of scenarios, even if Islamic extremists were to gain control, they would continue exporting the oil that fuels the global economy. That seems entirely too sanguine an assumption about Saudi religious fundamentalists who believe that society would be better off with a more medieval lifestyle that wouldn’t require earning hundreds of billions of dollars from exporting oil to the infidel West. Islamic terrorists, of course, who seek to destroy the West, have an even clearer reason to curb oil exports. As unlikely as this scenario sounds in a country notable for the passivity and conformity of its people, just as unlikely, in a different way, is a twenty-first-century society totally ruled by a family of seven thousand princes.

M
ost countries predicate their foreign policy on some consensus definition of core national interests. Such national interests can be subject to internal political debate and are not always pursued consistently or successfully, but they do exist. Not so for Saudi Arabia. Only one interest guides Saudi foreign policy, and that is the survival of the House of Saud.

Just as Al Saud survival is based on a policy of balancing competing forces within the kingdom, its foreign policy consists of a constant effort to play off or buy off more powerful regional forces. And just as the Al Saud’s balancing act at home is becoming increasingly precarious, so too is the regime’s high-wire act in the dangerous Middle East neighborhood where the local bully—Iran—is expanding its influence and thus diminishing Saudi Arabia’s. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia’s tether to the United States, its protector for more than half a century, is fraying badly at both ends.

Saudi Arabia is like a rich schoolboy and teacher’s pet who seeks to mask his dependence on the teacher’s protection by currying favor with the schoolyard bullies. While he goes to great lengths to avoid being seen as the teacher’s pet, he also frets that the teacher will be upset at the bad company
he is keeping. As a result, he is not respected or trusted by anyone.

Much as many in the West might like to dismiss the Saudis as religious zealots who are reaping the results of Islamic extremism that they set in motion, the decisions of the Al Saud affect both the economic prosperity of Western societies and, of course, the lives of Western citizens who continue to be targets of radical Islamic terrorists. As a result, the West needs to understand, if not sympathize with, the high-wire act of the Al Saud amid the changing winds that are buffeting the region and the regime.

Theirs is not a neighborhood given to peaceful resolution of differences, and clearly, conducting a successful Saudi Arabian foreign policy is no easy task. The country is rich but weak. It owns massive amounts of modern military equipment but has almost no military might. It is banker to many, but money alone does not buy influence. And the Saudis are surrounded by increasingly hostile and unstable neighbors.

The Arab Spring of 2011, which some in the West viewed with optimism as a long-overdue force for freedom in the region, shocked and alarmed the Al Saud. Most shocking was the fate of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, toppled largely by angry youth. To the Al Saud, the revolution in Egypt was a double disaster. Not only did the Saudi regime lose a longtime friend and ally; even worse, the United States, Saudi Arabia’s ultimate protector, conspired in forcing the Egyptian president to resign after thirty years of faithful cooperation with Washington. Not surprisingly, Saudis within and without the royal family wondered how loyal the United States one day might prove to be to them. The regime showed its pique by refusing a visit from U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates. Meanwhile, next door to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s Sunni royal family faced widespread civil unrest from its Shiite majority, prompting the anxious Al Saud to dispatch one thousand troops to help shore up a beleaguered fellow monarchy.

Across the Arabian Gulf, Shiite Iran is spreading its regional tentacles via proxies like Hamas in Gaza and
Hezbollah in Lebanon. On the Saudis’ northern border is Iraq: under Saddam Hussein it was pugnacious but at least Sunni-dominated, but now Saudis see their neighbor as an unstable Shiite-led country that is falling under the sway of Iran. On Saudi Arabia’s southern border sits the semifeudal nation of Yemen, where a longtime and largely pliable dictator has been displaced by prolonged citizen protest, where Iran surreptitiously supports anti-Saudi rebels, and where Al Qaeda plots terrorist attacks against both the Saudi regime and the United States. Just beyond and across the narrow Red Sea lie the failed rogue states of East Africa, Somalia and Sudan.

Small wonder that Saudi Arabia needs a protector, and it long has had one in Uncle Sam. If security for loyalty is the regime’s domestic compact with its people, Saudi-U.S. relations for more than half a century have been based on an implicit pact of oil for security. The United States gets oil at reasonable world prices and implicitly guarantees Al Saud security.

This pact began with a handshake, when President Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz aboard the USS
Quincy
off Cairo in 1943, and it has been strengthened, or at least sustained, by every American president since. There have been periodic strains, as when Saudi Arabia embargoed oil to the West to protest U.S. support for Israel in the October 1973 war with Egypt. There also have been moments of intense embrace, as when the two countries cooperated in the 1980s to arm and fund mujahedeen in evicting Soviet occupiers from Afghanistan, or when the United States dispatched half a million troops to the kingdom in 1990 to drive Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait and thwart his ambition to occupy Saudi oil fields.

Ironically, even as tensions were escalating during the 1973 oil embargo, Prince Fahd, then the minister of interior, summoned his security officers to show them clips of the U.S. airlift of war matériel to Israel. “
This is why we need to maintain close relations with the U.S.,” Prince Fahd told them. “They are the only ones capable of saving us in this manner
should we ever be at risk.” Indeed, in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, then king Fahd called on the United States, which responded with an even more massive airlift of men and matériel to Saudi Arabia.

The last decade has seen the rising tide of radical Iranian influence and, particularly in the last few years, an ebbing of U.S. prestige in the Middle East. That severely complicated the U.S.-Saudi oil-for-security relationship even before it hit a new low with U.S. acquiescence in the ouster of Mubarak. Further complicating the Saudi-U.S. relationship is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region, largely fueled over the past thirty years by the Saudis themselves. Ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Saudi regime has faced a deepening dilemma between catering to Islamic fundamentalists to protect its reputation and rule at home and risking further alienating, through this support, its U.S. protector, so often the target of Islamic terrorists. The Saudi dilemma is on display in Palestine. There Iran’s shrewd diplomacy over the past decade has made Tehran, not Riyadh, the widely perceived champion of Palestinian aspirations. The more Iran establishes itself as the Palestinian defender, the harder it is for the Saudi regime to acquiesce in requests by its U.S. protector to support peace efforts requiring Palestinians to compromise with Israel.

On this issue, as on so many others, the regime’s foreign policy is driven less by the rights of the Palestinians or others than by the needs of the Al Saud. The royal family believes it must present itself as the leader of Islam and defender of the faithful in order to sustain its legitimacy and rule at home. Maintaining this posture in the face of competition from the real revolutionaries in Iran and without further upsetting its U.S. sponsor might be an insurmountable challenge for any regime, and it is proving ever more difficult for the Al Saud, as politically aware young Saudis wield Islam as a weapon in criticizing their government for being disingenuously Islamic.

As so often is the case, the Saudi regime finds itself hoist on its own petard. After the 1979 triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of his theocracy in Iran, Sunni
clerics inside Saudi Arabia began to chafe at sharing power with the Al Saud and sought a larger role in ruling the country. To thwart this power play and to appear as devout as the
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, the late King Fahd shoveled money into spreading radical Wahhabi Islam around the world and granted the religious leaders at home wide sway over virtually every aspect of Saudi life. A former U.S. Treasury Department official is quoted by
Washington Post
reporter David Ottaway in a 2004 article as estimating that the late king spent “
north of $75 billion” in his efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam. According to Ottaway, the king boasted on his personal Web site that he established 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, and 2,000 schools for Muslim children in non-Islamic nations. The late king also launched a publishing center in Medina that by 2000 had distributed 138 million copies of the Koran worldwide.
Indeed, a meeting with almost any Saudi royal concludes with the gift of a copy of the Koran.

To this day, the regime funds numerous international organizations to spread fundamentalist Islam, including the Muslim World League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the International Islamic Relief Organization, and various royal charities such as the Popular Committee for Assisting the Palestinian Mujahedeen, led by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, now minister of defense, who often is touted as a potential future king. Supporting
da’wah
, which literally means “making an invitation” to Islam, is a religious requirement that Saudi rulers feel they cannot abandon without losing their domestic legitimacy as protectors and propagators of Islam. Yet in the wake of 9/11, American anger at the kingdom led the U.S. government to demand controls on Saudi largesse to Islamic groups that funded terrorism. “Iran is buying Muslim loyalty throughout the Middle East for a fraction of the money we used to provide until the U.S. blocked us,” says one Al Saud prince, who argues that the United States is wittingly or unwittingly helping Iran against Saudi Arabia.

Trapped between the twin needs for maintaining domestic
legitimacy and sustaining U.S. protection, King Abdullah did what the Saudi government so frequently does when confronted with a challenge: it said one thing and did another. After initial denials that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudis, the government finally launched a verbal campaign against extremism inside the country and an even more visible campaign abroad to champion religious tolerance. But a decade later, the rigid religious authorities inside Saudi Arabia seem as entrenched as ever. Despite widely publicized visits by King Abdullah to the Vatican and his organization of an Interfaith Dialogue in Madrid, followed a few months later by another among heads of state at the United Nations, the kingdom’s estimated 1.5 million Christians (almost all foreign workers) still are not allowed to worship publicly. Saudis insist that the Prophet Muhammad established the tradition that only Islam can be practiced within Arabia, home of Islam’s two holiest sites. Nor has Saudi Arabia’s Shiite Islamic minority seen any real decrease in government-sanctioned discrimination.

The Saudi-sponsored Interfaith Dialogue at the United Nations in November 2008 was typical of Saudi diplomacy—much more show than substance. UN organizers who worked with the Saudis to arrange the king’s visit—the first ever by a Saudi king to the UN—say his primary goal was to present himself as the “pope” of all Islam, thereby diminishing Iran’s Shiite sect and pleasing the conservative clerics in Riyadh, for whom Shiites are heretics. For this reason, the king’s staff insisted that protocol for his visit parallel that of Pope John Paul II’s visit to the United Nations. The chief of protocol, the Saudis insisted, must meet the king at the airport, and the UN secretary general must greet him at the base of the escalator bearing him up to the General Assembly, an honor given to no other head of state.

“The Interfaith Dialogue meeting was one of the toughest we’ve ever dealt with,” recalls a UN official shortly after the many heads of state departed. Despite hosting an interfaith dialogue, King Abdullah declined to meet or shake hands with Israeli president Shimon Peres. So those arranging dinner
for the many Arab heads of state, the Israeli president, U.S. president George W. Bush, and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon had to ensure the Saudi and Israeli leaders never got close enough to have to shake hands. The solution: since the secretary general had sat by Peres at the October General Assembly opening dinner, this time he sat by the Saudi king, while Peres sat at another table. All this seemed at odds with the king’s brief four-minute address in which he said, “
Human beings are created equals and partners on this planet,” and added, “We can leave our differences for God to make His judgment on the Day of Judgment.”