On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (35 page)

The hapless secretary general had hoped to avoid the whole imbroglio by flying to Los Angeles for a previously scheduled visit with California’s governor and some of Hollywood’s top movie stars, including Angelina Jolie, but the Saudis demanded—and won—cancellation of those plans in order that he be on hand to meet the king and attend the Interfaith Dialogue.

More complex even than the seating arrangements was securing a final statement at the close of the event. The Saudis wanted a statement, but they did not want a UN resolution that would have to be negotiated among 180-plus nations. The king’s staff drafted a statement and negotiated it with the United States and the Vatican, but the ever prickly French and some other European Union nations objected to the statement because it mixed religion and politics and, perhaps more relevantly, because they had no hand in writing it. One UN official said the Saudis called President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was scheduled to visit the kingdom a few weeks later, and told him not to come if the impasse over the UN statement wasn’t quickly resolved. This same official says the French president called his UN ambassador and relayed a blunt message: Get the European Union on board or resign his post. (France was head of the European Union’s rotating presidency at the time.)

When the conference concluded forty-eight hours later, Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al Faisal stood alongside the grounded Ban Ki-moon, who read the statement, said
to represent a “sense of the United Nations” in support of greater religious tolerance. In a final irony, the statement was not reported in the Saudi press. It was Saudi foreign policy at its most elaborately artificial.

To be fair to King Abdullah, most Saudis believe he is a deeply religious man and also a tolerant one. Some approve of his tolerance, while more conservative critics see his willingness to allow mixing of men and women at KAUST or small steps to reduce discrimination against Shiites in the Eastern Province as evidence that he is a pawn of the liberal-minded United States. But whatever Abdullah’s true sentiments, the driving priority of Al Saud survival means he does not directly challenge the conservative religious orthodoxies that still dominate Saudi Arabia.

To further calm angry Americans after the events of 9/11, then crown prince Abdullah unveiled a new Arab-Israeli peace initiative in 2002, promising to recognize the Jewish state as soon as Israel withdrew from all occupied territories and permitted the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Here again the Saudi initiative was more public relations than foreign relations. While it was the first offer by a Saudi regime to accept the state of Israel more than half a century after its founding, the conditions for that acceptance—withdrawal from all occupied territories with no border rectifications to enhance Israeli security—had been rejected repeatedly by Israel for decades. Thus the offer of normal relations with Israel may have sounded good in the United States and Europe, but it wasn’t likely to become a reality that would upset conservative religious Saudis inside the kingdom. Sure enough, nearly a decade later, Saudi Arabia remains in the shadows of international efforts to bring Palestinians and Israelis to an accommodation.

Whether in the presidency of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, whenever Israeli and Palestinian leaders are brought together at the White House flanked by moderate Arab leaders, the Saudis are conspicuously absent. Whatever efforts the Saudis might make to please an American president by encouraging Palestinians to make peace are whispered from
far offstage. The Saudi regime would like a resolution of the Palestinian issue because it would deny Iran further opportunity to exploit Middle Eastern tensions to Riyadh’s detriment, but the Al Saud are unwilling to take any risks that might backfire with religious conservatives and with political cynics inside the country who already see the royal family as handmaidens of the United States.

Given Saudi Arabia’s fear of Iran and its increasingly strained alliance with the United States, the Saudi regime has been busy spinning a wider web of diplomatic relationships. Upon becoming regent in 2005, King Abdullah’s first foreign trip was to China, an emerging economic powerhouse hungry for Saudi oil.
China, Japan, South Korea, and India over the past decade have become the primary purchasers of Saudi oil production, with nearly 60 percent of Saudi oil exports going to Asia. Since then, Saudi-Chinese relations have deepened, including the signing in 2012 of an agreement to cooperate in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.

Abdullah also reached out to Russia, welcoming Vladimir Putin to Riyadh and awarding him the kingdom’s highest honor, the King Abdul Aziz Medal. More significantly, Saudi Arabia and Russia concluded a joint venture between Saudi ARAMCO and LUKOIL to develop new Saudi gas fields. During his February 2007 visit to the kingdom, Putin said that in a world of growing energy demand, Saudi Arabia and Russia are “
not competitors but partners.”

Clearly Saudi Arabia has shifted from singular dependence on the United States to more of a multipolar foreign policy. Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al Faisal has succinctly summed up the shift in Saudi-U.S. relations: “
It’s a Muslim marriage, not a Catholic marriage.” This is a clever way of saying Saudi Arabia now has multiple marriage partners, as allowed in Islam. That said, however, there is no doubt that the United States remains Saudi Arabia’s first and paramount wife.

For all the outreach and obfuscation, only two powers are central to Saudi survival—Iran and the United States. Fearful Saudis see Iran as their major threat for both religious
and political reasons. Many Saudis are convinced Iran’s goal is to occupy Islam’s two holiest sites and to declare a Shiite state in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and in the neighboring Gulf sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, where Shiites are a majority. For the Al Saud, the loss either of its oil or its religious legitimacy would spell the catastrophic end of the dynasty.

Prince Turki al Faisal, one of the Al Saud’s most thoughtful public servants (he served for two decades as his country’s head of intelligence and more recently as ambassador to Great Britain and then to the United States) shies from this apocalypse but expresses concern at Iran’s goals. “
We talk to some who say Iran wants a Shiite crescent or that Iran wants to take Mecca and Medina and create a Persian empire. I don’t know.” But he adds, “I see no benign scenario with Iran. The question is how actively malignant it is. We have to be very careful and always on our toes in Bahrain, UAE, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.”

The Saudis have every reason to be fearful. Iran now is the dominant influence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and with Hamas in Gaza. Its rising influence across the region is encouraging Shiites in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia to become more assertive and to agitate against Sunni rulers. In some Saudi neighbors such as Yemen, Iran actively is supporting terrorist groups targeting the Al Saud. The skittish Saudis pay periodic courtesy calls in Tehran, and King Abdullah invited Iranian president Ahmadinejad to Riyadh in 2007, where he posed smiling and holding hands. But the Saudis understand it was the smile of a crocodile.

As one effort to protect the kingdom, the Saudis have nuzzled up to Islamic Pakistan, in hopes the Pakistanis will provide a nuclear umbrella. But this reliance is problematic given that Pakistan is a fragile polity held together by an army that is showing signs of cracking under the pressure of Islamic radicalism.

While the Iranians focus their hostile rhetoric almost entirely on Israel and the Great Satan of the United States, the truth is that neither has as much reason to fear Iran—at
least in the short run—as does Saudi Arabia. As the world’s leading military power, the United States is unlikely to be attacked militarily by Iran. Israel, as a not-so-secret nuclear power, surely would respond in full force to any Iranian attack.
Saudi Arabia, however, is a much softer, weaker, and more tempting target. Saudi oil fields are a short distance across the Persian Gulf from Iran, and former CIA operative Robert Baer estimates Iran could seize those Saudi fields in less than forty-eight hours.

The kingdom’s military spending has totaled nearly $500 billion over the past quarter-century, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And in 2010 the government won approval from the United States Congress to purchase another $60 billion in modern aircraft from the United States. Still, few believe the Saudis could defend against such an attack without major U.S. intervention. While the United States doubtless could drive out the Iranian invaders with aerial bombing and boots on the ground if needed, the retreating Iranians likely would disable or destroy Saudi oil fields, crippling some or all of the country’s oil production, with calamitous global economic consequences.
Repairing the Saudi oil fields could take at least two years in Baer’s view.

Or, Iran could, as it threatened in December 2011, try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway though which some 17 million barrels a day, or 20 percent of the world’s traded oil, pass daily. The United States would take military action to reopen the strait with Saudi cooperation, inevitably raising a new wave of Islamic rage against America, underscoring Saudi dependence on American military might, and creating a new opportunity for fundamentalists to condemn the Al Saud as lapdogs of the United States.

Despite Prince Saud’s elliptical talk of multiple wives, the truth is that Saudi Arabia is stuck in a very “catholic” marriage with the United States. While Saudi Arabia may not always be a faithful marriage partner, it dare not risk divorce, considering the consequences of going it alone in its dangerous neighborhood. At the same time, being perceived in the
Islamic world as being too friendly to America is a problem for the Al Saud—one that extremists inside and outside the kingdom exploit to undermine the legitimacy of the regime. Any situation in which the Saudis again would require U.S. military intervention could well be the kiss of death.

Prince Turki al Faisal acknowledges the mutual reluctance to cooperate too visibly. Asked if an Iranian invasion of Kuwait or another Gulf sheikdom would elicit the same Saudi request for U.S. military protection as in 1990, the prince says, “
It would not be as clear-cut now as then. We would need more time for our public to be brought along.” He hastens to add the obvious: “America too would have a little more hesitation to organize public opinion there for supporting Saudi Arabia.” Nevertheless, he says, “It is good sense for the two countries to maintain a relationship that would allow them to cooperate in such a situation.”

If marriage to the United States is an embarrassment to the Saudis, it has become increasingly embarrassing to U.S. administrations as well. The spectacle of newly elected President Obama bowing to King Abdullah at their first meeting was a reminder of several things that Americans would prefer to ignore or forget—the degree of U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the role of Saudis in the horrifying events of 9/11, Saudi Arabia’s funding of extremist Islam, and a relationship with an absolute monarchy that pays little heed to civil society and human rights.

The relationship is so fraught with mutual chagrin that the U.S. ability to influence the Saudi regime in the direction of modernity and reform is virtually nonexistent. Indeed, the American government is so unpopular in Saudi Arabia these days that overt promotion of reform would only arouse greater opposition to it. King Abdullah’s critics already attack his modest reforms by charging they are intended to please “liberal” reformers, a code phrase for U.S. sympathizers in Saudi Arabia. So cautious is the United States on this point that President Obama didn’t even mention Saudi Arabia in a major speech enunciating U.S. Middle East policy and priorities after the Arab Spring.

Notwithstanding the tension and embarrassments on both sides, protecting the flow of Saudi oil to the world market is unquestionably a high national interest of the United States. That is no less true today than when Saudi Arabia embargoed oil to the West in 1973 and the Nixon administration alarmed Great Britain by discussing a military seizure of Saudi oil fields. Britain in 2003 declassified long-secret documents revealing that Percy Cradock, head of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, considered a U.S. move against the Saudi oil fields likely to be executed “without any prior consultation of allies.”
Indeed, James Schlesinger, Nixon’s secretary of defense, had warned Britain’s ambassador to Washington that the United States would not tolerate threats from “under-developed, under-populated” countries and that it was no longer obvious to him that the United States “could not use force.”

Only five days into the 1973 war, Defense Secretary Schlesinger called Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to warn that the United States was going to find itself in a position in which its interests in Saudi Arabia were at risk and suggested that they review the “fundamentals of our position.”

Oil has been the glue in the Saudi-U.S. relationship. Shown here in 1973 is the late King Faisal, with then secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who warned him of “incalculable consequences” should the Saudis again embargo oil to the United States. (
AP PHOTO
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