Bush Breaks With Right on Policy Toward Saudi Arabia

WASHINGTON -- President Bush’s deepening embrace of Saudi Arabia is dividing the administration from the dominant current in conservative opinion as much as any domestic or foreign issue.

Since Sept. 11, conservative leaders and publications have urged Bush to pursue a harder line against the Saudis, whom the right accuses of encouraging anti-Western attitudes and, at least indirectly, subsidizing terrorism.

Instead, Bush has praised the Saudis as partners in the war against terrorism and has provided them a growing role in the search for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush moved to deepen that alliance at his meeting last week with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, when the sides agreed on what one senior White House official termed a “complementary effort” to push the Israelis and Palestinians toward agreement.

The prospect of the United States working with the Saudis and other Arab states to simultaneously seek concessions from their respective allies--the Israelis and the Palestinians--has raised alarms among some U.S. Jewish groups and conservative leaders.

“The idea . . . that the Saudis are going to lean on [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat while we lean on our Israeli friends to force a political solution is disgusting,” said Gary Bauer, a leading conservative activist.

While insisting that that characterization oversimplifies the strategy, administration officials show no sign of accepting the conservative calls for reducing reliance on the Saudis. Some White House aides acknowledge that it is difficult to think of another foreign policy issue in which Bush has so thoroughly rejected the central strain of conservative opinion as in his promotion of closer ties with Saudi Arabia.

In that tilt, some conservative critics see the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney and the president’s father, ex-President George Bush, both of whom have long advocated close Saudi relations. “I suspect the explanation is blood is thicker than loyalty to conservatives,” said one conservative closely watching administration policy.

As he has zigged and zagged in search of a sustainable Middle East policy, Bush regularly has drawn flak from conservative critics. Most agitated have been the Jewish and Roman Catholic intellectuals, known as neoconservatives, and leaders of the evangelical Christian movement, which has become a staunchly pro-Israel constituency.

But on virtually all of the policy issues under dispute--how much to rely on Arafat, whether to seek to restrain Israeli military action--Bush has reflected at least some of the conservative argument, even if he hasn’t gone as far in that direction as his critics prefer.

Bush’s favorable posture toward Saudi Arabia may be the great exception in that pattern. “I can’t think of anything in foreign policy that would be as much a repudiation of the conservative view,” one White House aide said.

That may be partly because the critics are urging such a wrenching shift in U.S. policy. For decades, presidents of the two major parties have pursued close ties with the Saudis, who sit atop a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves and also have been seen as a source of stability in the turbulent region. In 1990, the first President Bush sent U.S. troops to protect Saudi Arabia against a feared invasion from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

But since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, the Saudi regime has come under withering fire from U.S. critics, mostly conservatives. In a steady stream of articles, conservative publications such as the National Review and the Weekly Standard have accused the kingdom of exporting its domestic discontent by funding militant Islamic groups and schools that teach anti-Western attitudes abroad.

“The Saudis, in short, have created a radical Muslim network from the Philippines to Chicago,” National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote earlier this year in an article titled “Desert Rats.”

Other critics have accused Saudi leaders of failing to adequately investigate the links between Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who is the son of a prominent Saudi family, and individuals and institutions inside the kingdom. A state-sponsored Saudi telethon to support Palestinian “martyrs” and the publication of a poem by the Saudi ambassador to Britain praising Palestinian suicide bombers have only deepened the strains.

“Since Sept. 11, most conservatives, and I dare say most Americans, have considered Saudi Arabia more part of the problem than part of the solution in the war on terrorism,” said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard.

Administration officials privately echo some of the conservative complaints about Saudi links to extremism. Bush, in his closed-door meetings with Abdullah, stressed that Arab nations “had to address the issue of incitement of violence,” one senior aide said.

But it’s not clear how forcefully Bush raised those concerns. And in public, he has only praised the Saudis and Abdullah for their contributions to seeking peace. “He’s been very strong in the condemnation of terror, for which I’m grateful,” Bush said of Abdullah.

More important, Bush has tightened coordination with the Saudis in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While conservatives see the Saudis mostly as a problem in the region, the administration sees them as part of the solution to a perplexing dilemma: how to revive a peace process without relying on Arafat, whom the president has made clear he doesn’t trust. The Bush administration’s answer is to increase the role of other Arab nations--led by the Saudis, the Egyptians and the Jordanians--in any talks. Bush administration officials say they believe one reason that President Clinton’s efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian deal failed was because he didn’t involve other Arab states until the last moment.

“One thing we have been consistently trying to do is get the Arabs involved in a productive way on this,” the White House aide said.

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.