Nine-Eleven and the Rise of Saudi Hegemony in the Middle East. (04/25/2002)
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is in Crawford, Texas, today visiting the family of George W. Bush. That sounds innocent enough. Bush is going to drive him around his ranch in his SUV, show him where he's going to put his cattle if he ever figures out how to grow any. Bush has been planting cow-patties for years and cannot figure out why no cattle grow from them. All he gets are weeds. Dick Cheney told George W that cow-patties were actually seeds and if you planted them a herd would grow in your pasture. Bush has been sneaking out at night to plant the patties, hoping no one will figure out what he's doing, so he can surprise everyone when he turns up with his very own homegrown herd of cattle.
I've been pondering something for a while. If I were President and someone attacked my country, I would ask my advisors who it was that did it. If they told me that 15 of the 19 people responsible for the attack were from Saudi Arabia, and that the person who probably planned and executed the assault was also from the same place, I would probably not decide to bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the attack, especially in light of the fact that no one on the ground who actually perpetrated the assault was even from Afghanistan. I would probably conclude instead that Saudi Arabians were responsible for the attack.
So, all on a sudden, George W. Bush finds himself poised on the brink of doing something he swore to the American people he would never do; that is, negotiate with terrorists, especially the ones who were responsible for launching the attacks against the WTC in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D. C. on September 11th. Crown Prince Abdullah is a terrorist? If that is true, then the only thing Bush can be accused of is that he has been hoodwinked by terrorists, and by Dick Cheney, of course.
The only obvious impediment to my suggestion that Saudi Arabia sponsors terrorism is the fact that the Crown Prince has no credible motive for doing so, on September 11th or on any other day, In fact, the risk of being found out after the event as one of its authors would be so cost-prohibitive to his nation, presumably, that no reasonable person would easily assume that he had participated in the plot and planning of the deed. Several odd facts, however, began to surface recently with respect to the events coming together just prior to the meeting in Crawford between Bush and Abdullah. For instance, Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, met with George H. W. Bush, the former President, on the day before his son and the Crown Prince met at the ranch. This meeting was characterized as a totally informal, non-governmental, get-together of old friends, from the Gulf War days, as it were, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the events in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world. I found this odd piece of information in "Saudi to Warn Bush of Rupture Over Israel Policy," (Patrick E. Tyler, Washington Post, April 25, 2002). Tyler also reported, if only by implication, that Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers had decided at the last minute to fly to Crawford to meet Abdullah and brief him on the progress of America's war in Afghanistan. While not absolutely clear that Rumsfeld and Myers were going as a kind of afterthought, Tyler seemed to imply that the decision was added on to the agenda after an unnamed Saudi, who is "close to the Crown Prince and knows his thinking," told Tyler some of the substance of what Abdullah's warnings were going to contain. One unnamed Pentagon source said that the purpose of the Rumsfeld/ Myers briefing was to show Abdullah that "if he thought we were strong in Desert Storm, we're 10 times as strong today."
The unnamed source "close" to the Crown Prince said the warning to Bush was that his unabashed support of Ariel Sharon and Israel's incursion into the West Back, and his Arafat-bashing, was driving a wedge between the US and Saudi governments that was drawing dangerously close to causing an irreparable rupture in the relationship. Abdullah was under increasing Arab pressure, from both moderates and radicals, both inside and outside Saudi Arabia, to break relations with America, fly to Baghdad, and embrace Saddam Hussein as a long-lost Arab brother. His bargaining chips to coerce Bush were the obvious ones: close down US military bases in Saudi Arabia, end all cooperation with Bush's war against terrorism, and join Saddam's oil embargo against the US. Any one of these measures could be called a disaster for US objectives in the region-all three together would mean an end to the so-called "Bush Doctrine" in the Islamic world. Finally, Bush was expected to endorse the peace plan Abdullah presented at the Arab summit in Beirut in March and force Ariel Sharon to accept every provision of it.
This characterization is how I perceived the material written by Patrick Tyler as he reported it from his unnamed Saudi informant. My view of it may present a harsher tone than was intended by either person. I say that now because the meeting itself was represented by both sides as having been warm and friendly without any outward or overt sign of tension. Abdullah also presented Bush with an updated version of his peace plan which was summarized in the Washington Post this morning in the following eight points:
"[1] the complete Israeli withdrawal from West Bank areas recently occupied; [2] an end to the Israeli military siege of Ramallah . . .; [3] the insertion of a multinational force; [4] the reconstruction of destroyed Palestinian areas; [5] a renunciation of violence; [6] the immediate initiation of political talks; [7] an end to Israeli settlements; [8] and implementation of U.N. Resolution 242, which calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied during the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, including the West Bank and Golan Heights." (Karen de Young, "Saudis Offer Peace Plan," Washington Post, 04/27/2002, A01)
While no mention is made here of the right of return for Palestinians who left Israel after the Jewish state was created in 1948, most exiled Palestinians insist that any settlement leading to the end of the conflict must also include that provision. The absence of this 9th point signals, not that Arabs do not insist on its inclusion, but only that Abdullah realizes how useless it would be to include it, initially, because Ariel Sharon, and virtually every other Israeli who has ever mentioned the idea, has adamantly refused to include the right of return as a condition of any agreement with the Palestinians whatsoever. This point is essentially moot anyway because three of Abdullah's stated conditions for Arab recognition of Israel, and the "normalization" of relations, are ones that Sharon has refused to consider in the past; that is, neither he, nor most Israelis, will accept "the insertion of a multinational force," "an end to Israeli settlements," and a return to the pre-1967 borders. There are people in Israel who will accept the first two, even if Sharon never will, but the idea of giving up the Golan Heights will never appear on a negotiating table.
What we seem to have then is a peace plan given to George W. Bush by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia with the warning that, if the President fails to force Sharon to accept these terms of peace, then US and Saudi interests in the region will come to a radical parting of the ways. There are several problems with the possibility that this scenario for peace will actually work. There is little reason to suppose that George W. Bush can force Ariel Sharon to accept peace conditions the Israelis have already insisted they would never accept. Take the idea of the "multinational force" of peace-keepers as an example. Yesterday (04/28/2002), Bush managed to convince Sharon the abandon the seige at Ramallah allowing Arafat to travel anywhere he wants to go. Sharon agreed to this because a joint force of US and British "guards" will take up positions in the compound to watch the people the Israelis want held for trial for the assassination of their tourism minister in October 2001. That was one reason Sharon encircled Arafat's compound in the first place. This may seem a contradiction to the idea that Sharon will never accept foreign peace-keepers in Israel. Not so, however, because the "guards" will not be armed, are not soldiers, and have authority only to insure that the "assassins" cannot escape trial. At the same time, Sharon still insists that the international committee from the UN that is supposed to conduct an investigation of the Jenin incursion on the West Back, which the Palestinians claim was a massacre of civilians, will not be allowed to enter the refugee camp where the atrocities supposedly occurred. Hence, Sharon's objection to international organizations remains monolithic because he believes they are inherently biased against Israel. His fear, I suppose, is that a "multinational force" keeping the peace in Israel and the West Bank will simply become a tool of the Palestinians and do damage to Israeli interests.
The other, and equally serious, problem Bush has with the role Abdullah has forced upon him concerns the fact that Bush's core-constituency on the far right, the people responsible for the fact that he almost won the election against Al Gore, are probably even more intractable over what constitutes acceptable peace conditions in Israel's favor than Ariel Sharon is. Any of the eight points of Abdullah's plan is capable of sparking denunciation from the right wing of the Republican party if Bush is perceived as "forcing" Sharon to accept it against Israel's best interests. In other words, there is no way any of these provisions can be advocated by Bush if he expects to maintain the support of his right-wing money-men. Forget re-election.
So, if Bush pushes Abdullah's plan, he can resign himself to being a one-term President just like his father. To assume that Abdullah and Saud al-Faisal were unaware of the impossibility of Bush being able to advocate the Saudi position and to force Sharon to accept conditions that he adamantly refuses to consider, is the same as assuming that Middle Eastern politicians, even if they are Crown Princes and Kings, do not understand the nuances of American's Twenty-first century political landscape. The more likely possibility is that Abdullah, acting for the Saudi royal family, has decided that he is better served by breaking relations with the US than he would be by helping Bush maintain an Israeli presence in the region. Abdullah's plan gives Bush two choices: he can support it and lose whatever ground he has gained in the Jewish community and sacrifice his core-constituency; or, he can embrace the rupture between the US and Saudi Arabia and lose any chance he has of pursuing his war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
Given the fact that Bush has boxed himself in between two unacceptable choices and that a relatively unknown Saudi Crown Prince has suddenly assumed a central role in international politics, if only by taking full advantage of every available opportunity, some of which seem to have required elements of pre-planning, it seems reasonable to suggest that Saudi interests lie as much with the September 11th terrorists (16 out of 20 were Saudi citizens) as they do, or recently have, with the US. The most conservative voices in our democracy (William Kristol and David Brooks, for instance, of the Weekly Standard, in editorials on 04/26/2002) have already argued that Saudi Arabia has sided with the terrorists and that Bush has no reason to listen to anything Abdullah has to say. Both perceive the Kingdom as essentially powerless to influence US foreign policy and dismiss the threat of the Saudis "oil weapon" as meaningless. What neither recognizes is the threat from the Wahhabi faction of Islam (Osama bin Laden's branch) to the long-term prospects of the royal family's chances of retaining power over the Kingdom. Abdullah is being pushed by the fact that a near majority of Saudi citizens already adhere to the teachings of the Wahhabi sect and, without exaggerating the circumstances, that majority is responsible for the WTC attack, since bin Laden belongs to it.
The point I make here is that Abdullah rose from relative obscurity as a player on the international scene to a major force in its structure in as little as six months. The position he advocates for the peace settlement between Israel and Palestine is essentially the one favored by Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia and by Osama bin Laden. Forcing Israel to accept a return of exiled Palestinians and a withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders, with or without US coercion, renders Israel susceptible to annihilation from its Arab neighbors all over again. Win or lose, in the short term, Abdullah wins. Win or lose, in the longer term, the US and Israel lose.