Welcome or Not, We’re In for Keeps

From the dust and blood of the bombed out ruins of a compound housing American military personnel in Saudi Arabia, Americans must draw not only anger and sorrow; they must also realize that the United States is facing a budding crisis at the core of its strategic interests: the Persian Gulf.

Designating Iran a “rogue state,” isolating Iraq and unable to employ the tiny principalities of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates as military staging areas, the Clinton administration has placed American defense of the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia is too fragile psychologically and politically to bear the role assigned to it. Therein lies the great threat to the orderly flow of oil vital to the economic health of the industrialized world.

Before being drawn into the vortex of history by the reordering of the petroleum market in 1973, the Saudis lived as an insular people protected by walls of sand and heat. Traditional society based largely on the values of the Bedouin remained undisturbed until the industrialized world’s need for oil and the oil producers’ desire for income met in the fall of 1973. Overnight, unimagined wealth rained down on a people who, for the most part, lived in mud houses or tents and survived on little except lamb, rice and dates. Extremely proud despite their poverty, these people drew their identity from a culture rooted in the tribe and the Wahhabi sect of Islam. Claiming to be the keepers of Islam in its purest form, they resented the outsider, Westerner and non-Westerner alike.

Still the outsiders came, drawn by the oil boom. At the same time, the industrialized world demanded that Saudi Arabia spend its new petrodollars at a rapid rate in order to keep the international financial system afloat. The House of Saud responded by striking a bargain with its anxious subjects: Saudi Arabia would simultaneously build a high-tech infrastructure while retaining traditional values.

In spite of the Saudis’ deep-felt intentions, traditional society began to alter. The old tribal patterns that created government by consensus gave way to bureaucratic structures. Generational conflicts divided families as young men went West on government scholarships and came back speaking the languages and bearing the ideas of others. Women went to school in Saudi Arabia where they developed an image of themselves beyond the harem. In this rapidly changing value system, the religious establishment that for generations had served as the moral guide of the society found itself co-opted by the political needs of the House of Saud. Princes and clerics alike slid into the cesspool of corruption while refusing to open the power structure to either the new middle class or the restive traditionalists. Then came the Gulf War.

The Saudis, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, found themselves on the front line of the 1991 war for Persian Gulf oil. Five-hundred thousand foreign troops, predominantly American, landed on their soil, overwhelming a reticent population torn between fear of Iraq and dread of alien invasion. When the war ended, the government of Saudi Arabia had spent $55 billion and consented to the American demand that contingents of U.S. troops remain in Saudi Arabia to enforce the uneasy peace.

In the compound housing American military personnel in Dhahran, most Saudis saw their anxieties of 1973 realized: a foreign presence in a reclusive society and the ceaseless erosion of traditional values. They also perceived a foreign military power keeping an increasingly discredited regime in power. On Tuesday, a group of men did what most Saudis would never do--exploded a bomb outside an apartment building housing symbols of their resentments.

What the United States must learn from the horror of the Khobar Towers goes beyond Saudi Arabia to the entire Persian Gulf. For nothing less is at stake than a viable American presence at the wellspring of the industrialized world’s energy needs. Prior to 1979, Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter ignored the realities of political discontent in Iran to anoint Muhammad Reza Shah policeman of the Gulf. Now the Clinton administration is investing the most vital interests of the United States in a country of perhaps 10 million people lacking the desire, temperament or political stability to fulfill the role assigned to it. If Saudi Arabia under the House of Saud flounders as the shah’s Iran did, the United States has nowhere else to place the military forces intended to keep the oil of the Persian Gulf flowing.

While expressing outrage about an act of terrorism in Saudi Arabia, the United States must concentrate on the even larger issue: how to begin the arduous process of devising a Persian Gulf policy that engages the region as a whole rather than pitting one state against another. To do less courts disaster.