The Right Should Let Up on Saudis

It’s time to stop demonizing Saudi Arabia.

Relations between Washington and Riyadh are dangerously precarious, a state of affairs being blamed on Saudi “extremists.” But the real extremists are closer to home: prominent American conservatives who are pressuring President Bush to abandon the decades-old alliance, something he has sensibly resisted.

It began after Sept. 11. “A successful U.S. effort to topple Saddam and install a friendly regime in Baghdad,” National Review editor Rich Lowry observed early this year, could make “the U.S.-Saudi relationship far less important.”

Then, in August, hawkish Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle’s guest Laurent Murawiec, at the time an analyst at the Rand Corp., declared at a Pentagon briefing before Henry Kissinger and others that Saudi Arabia was “the kernel of evil” and that the United States should be prepared to seize the oil fields of its “most dangerous opponent.” In the ensuing uproar, Murawiec left his job, but his vision remains. Hawks like Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy and a former Reagan administration Pentagon official, continue to condemn the “Saudi double-game.”

Ousting Saddam Hussein, so the thinking goes, would allow the U.S. to emancipate itself from dependence on Saudi oil, and even allow us to overthrow the repressive House of Saud militarily.

Such visions of U.S. omnipotence in the Mideast are a mirage. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have far more to gain from cooperation than confrontation. They face a common adversary in militant Islam. To make Saudi Arabia an opponent would fulfill Osama bin Laden’s dream of a clash between Islam and the West.

For one thing, the portrait of Saudi Arabia as the spider at the center of a web of funding for Terrorism Inc. is overdrawn. The monarchy has been guilty of wishful thinking and criminal bungling, but not calculated malevolence. In 1994, it froze Bin Laden’s assets but did not act forcefully to cut off private funds headed from Saudi Arabia to his terror network. More recently, the claims that the wife of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington funded two of the 9/11 terrorists turned out to be overblown since the assistance was intended for a Saudi woman who said she needed it for medical expenses.

A more sensible approach is outlined in a new report by Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “A clear distinction must ... be made,” he notes, “between the deliberate Saudi support of Islamic extremism and violence, and the fact that many Saudis have contributed to what appeared to be Islamic charities or gave money to what they felt were legitimate Islamic causes -- such as the struggles in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo -- without knowing the true character of the groups involved or where the money ultimately went.”

After Sept. 11, with the revelation that 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudis, the Saudi government was initially defensive, but it has since cracked down on support for extremists. It has increased its intelligence work with the U.S., arrested several hundred terrorist suspects and improved control over funds.

In October, Riyadh dispatched officials from the Finance Ministry and central bank to discuss with U.S. Treasury officials the most effective ways to halt funding to Al Qaeda. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority has exchanged information on money laundering with foreign banking authorities. Saudi intelligence has also said that it has identified 50 shell companies employed by Al Qaeda to transfer funds. Adel al Jubeir, a senior foreign policy advisor to Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, has announced that the government will heighten its vigilance. It is creating a commission to audit charities to prevent money laundering and ban the anonymous transfer of cash out of the kingdom.

If Saudi Arabia is improving its cooperation in the financial sphere, it has also supported the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. True, the kingdom has waffled on supporting an invasion of Iraq, but it has now announced that the U.S. can use Prince Sultan Air Base as a command center and takeoff point for jet fighters. And it has steadily been upping oil production by more than 800,000 barrels a day to maintain its own market share and to ensure that there is a surplus so that prices do not skyrocket should a war take place. This will have highly beneficial economic effects -- for the U.S. and the world -- since oil shock could spark a severe recession.

But for U.S. conservatives, the corruption of the Saudi monarchy and the general debility of the Middle East are viewed as clear indications than the entire region needs to be re-imagined. The road to Baghdad is simply the first step. According to military scholar Victor Davis Hanson in the Weekly Standard, the U.S. needs to destroy the “entire apparatus of autocracy and [create] in its place the conditions for future political legitimacy and economic growth in the Middle East. Rather than fearing the uncertainty that this would entail, we should understand that sometimes temporary chaos may be better than enduring stasis.”

This is heady stuff. But chaos is not always temporary, as conservatives -- of all people -- should know. It can lead to catastrophe, as during the Iranian revolution. The wiser course is for the U.S. to promote gradual change in Saudi Arabia -- especially since its population is more conservative than the monarchy that rules it. Lawmakers like Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who are pressuring the regime to stop all private funding of terrorists but are not calling for regime change, have it right. Conservatives spoiling for a fight with the Saudis have no idea about who or what would replace the ruling family.

Saudi Arabia is not a nefarious foe of the U.S. It is a despotic regime that has clumsily reacted to the terrorist threat. But it is also a vital strategic ally and supplier of oil riven by deep internal divisions that the U.S. should not attempt to exacerbate. Rather, the U.S. should prod it to reform.

Trashing the Saudis may be emotionally satisfying, but it is hardly the solution to stopping terrorism. Quite the contrary. If Bush were to treat Saudi Arabia as a foe, it might easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.