Posted on 06/27/2002 6:11:06 PM PDT by RCW2001
In Saudi Arabia, Concern About Rocky Relations With U.S.
Editor's note: Tom Moran, deputy editorial page editor of The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., is touring the Middle East with a group of editorial writers.
By TOM MORAN
c.2002 Newhouse News Service
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- It doesn't take long after our arrival here to see how worried the Saudis are about the rift between our nations torn open by Sept. 11. We arrive at night, but are immediately whisked to the home of a royal family member, where our fellow dinner guests are eager to greet us with their anxious affection.
Our host, Prince Abdullah eben Faisal eben Turki, has assembled a delegation of business and political leaders. Like most of the Saudi elite, they were educated in America and consider it a second home. They have favorite baseball teams. The prince reminds us of our nations' long friendship, dating to the 1940s.
It seems ungracious to raise the issue of Osama bin Laden. But I'm spared the task by a Saudi guest.
"He (bin Laden) is not Saudi Arabia," he says. "Bin Laden had fighters from all over the world -- Pakistanis, Chechens, Kuwaitis. He chose Saudis to be on that plane because he wanted to create problems between us (Americans and Saudis)."
This becomes an ongoing theme. Bin Laden is dismissed as a crank, a criminal, a psychopath. He is compared to Timothy McVeigh by one cabinet minister, to Charles Manson by another.
But bin Laden's appeal here clearly goes beyond the 15 Saudi hijackers. At the military prison camp in Guantanamo, Saudis make up the largest national group. A businessman from Jedda confesses that secretaries in his office cheered when they watched the trade towers collapse on CNN.
While we are in Saudi Arabia, another 13 members of al-Qaida are arrested, and police search for a gunman who took a potshot at an Australian defense worker. Two days after our group of journalists leaves, a car bomb kills a British businessman.
The Saudis are indispensable allies -- because of their oil, certainly, but also because they are the critical Arab players in our prospective confrontation with Iraq and as brokers in Middle East peace talks.
Yet Saudi Arabia is also the prime recruiting ground for al-Qaida and a seat of the fundamentalist Islam that feeds a polarization between the Arab world and the West. The Saudi-U.S. relationship is strained by shared interests without shared values -- and the seams of that relationship are fraying.
The nation that produced both bin Laden and our American-educated hosts is in deep trouble. Average income has dropped by nearly 75 percent since peaking in 1981. The wilting economy can absorb only half of the 200,000 graduates entering the job market each year.
Stability depends on building new industries to employ this army of young Saudis, but efforts to diversify the economy have largely failed. The historian Bernard Lewis, lamenting the inability of Muslim nations to compete in the modern world, notes that without oil, the combined exports of the entire Arab world are smaller than those of Norway.
Huge budget deficits mean the days of free health care, free university education and virtually no national taxes are numbered. The royal family, ensconced in palatial homes, is scrambling for an answer.
At dinner, the smiles are forced.
"They are incredibly spooked, and they are right to be spooked," says Rachel Bronson of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Riyadh, the capital in Saudi Arabia's desert interior, is a product of the oil boom, a modern city of 4.5 million. In the '40s, it had one paved road and a population of 50,000.
To expect Saudi social values -- and with them, the economy -- to change as quickly as this landscape is naive. Change is coming, but fitfully.
"My grandfather was a nomad in the desert," says Heba Fatini, a 31-year-old Web designer who is among the small but growing number of woman professionals here. "I'm proud that we have reached this stage so quickly. We're developing. And we've been able to keep track of our morals."
Fatini wears a head scarf, but, unlike most women in Riyadh, she does not cover her face, and she works alongside men at a modern hospital outside the city. Strictly speaking, that mixing of sexes is illegal. A police force controlled by the religious authorities patrols to look for these transgressions. But their reach is not absolute; they are not the Taliban.
An American banker here tells of hiring a young Saudi woman who had graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She was bright and aggressive, and she was seated next to the men. But when the religious police show up, she is quickly moved to a phony office set aside for this purpose.
"We have to be patient," says one American oil executive with long experience in Saudi Arabia. "This is a country that only banned slavery in the 1960s."
Sometimes the religious authorities are confronted more openly. In March, a student at a girls' school in Mecca threw a lit cigarette onto some discarded paper, starting a fire that killed 15 girls between the ages of 13 and 17. They were trampled to death after their escape was blocked by locked doors.
News reports said religious police locked the girls inside and blocked male rescuers, because the girls were not properly covered. Human Rights Watch supported the accusations against the religious police. At least one Saudi newspaper investigated, though, and found that religious police did not interfere. An official report criticized dangerous overcrowding and inadequate safety measures, but it was silent on the role of the religious police.
Still, the Saudi public was outraged -- and the monarchy soon took control of girls' education from the religious authorities.
"This was the first time a major change like this occurred as a result of a public outcry expressed by the press," says Adel Al-Abdulkarim, a guest columnist at Riyadh's largest paper and an assistant professor at King Saud University. "This is significant."
King Fahd, the official ruler of Saudi Arabia, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995. The kingdom is run by his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, a chain smoker who wears bluejeans at home. He is known to be pious, fair-minded and honest, and his high-profile efforts to broker a peace with Israel are unprecedented in a nation that always rejected Israel's existence.
He is considered the best hope to modernize Saudi Arabia by building its economy, loosening religious restrictions and offering the world a version of Islamic rule that permits the pluralism needed to move into what we think of as the modern world. He wants to allow women to drive and has begun enforcing a law that gives women identity cards so they can more easily travel, open bank accounts and do business. He has begun to open the kingdom to foreign investors, and he told Arab leaders publicly that they must stop blaming outsiders for their problems.
"Everyone wishes he were 10 years younger," former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Richard Murphy says of Abdullah, 78.
At the crown prince's vast summer residence on the Red Sea coast north of Jedda, we are served chocolates and mint tea while we question him for 40 minutes. Disappointingly, he dodges questions on Israel, suicide bombers, economic reform and Saddam Hussein. Asked about the ban on women driving, which requires Saudi Arabia to import 400,000 chauffeurs, he is dismissive.
"The first thing is for a woman to keep her house, raise her children and protect her reputation," he says in Arabic.
"Besides, I hear most American ladies do not like to drive."
Saudi Arabia has a daunting task in navigating these economic and social challenges that are a wedge between Saudis and Americans. But, in the short term, there is no greater source of anger and discontent -- and friction with the United States -- than Israel.
The Saudis we talk to are outraged at Israel's occupation of the West Bank and quick to excuse suicide bombers as desperate people faced with no other means to fight an occupying force. Some Saudis see the Sept. 11 attacks as deserved punishment for our support of Israel.
Among our dining companions, American support of Israel is explained as a result of a devious Jewish lobby.
"The Jewish lobby controls the United States," says the vice minister for education, Khider Al-Qurashi. "They control your economy. They control your media. I'm not against Jews. I'm just against aggressors."
We ask the minister of information, Fouad Al-Farsy, about Arab news reports saying the Mossad was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and that 4,000 Jews were warned to stay away. He knew it was false, he says. But "we don't defend our enemies," he says.
At such moments, the breach that opened Sept. 11 seems irreparable. But the Saudi elite clearly love America. The prospect of being regarded as an enemy seems to be an emotional blow.
"What happened to the 1960s spirit in America?" asks a member of the Shura. "I used to go to America, and there was great interest in our culture, in our different ways, even our dress. Now Americans seem to want to tell us how the world should be, how we should treat our women, and have democracy."
Yet American troops protecting Riyadh cannot build a church -- because preaching Christianity is illegal. At a restaurant, a woman member of our group is barred from joining two men at a table for breakfast, and must sit apart. We travel near Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, but we can't visit. Infidels are not allowed.
Some Westerners here worry that the U.S.-Saudi relationship could spin out of control, especially with tensions rising over Israel. "For the crown prince, this is a personal issue," one diplomat said.
"He's seen the TV images, and he's deeply concerned. The U.S. relationship is -- I wouldn't say it's at stake, but I'd say it's at play."
(Tom Moran is deputy editorial page editor of The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at tmoran@starledger.com.)
Yep. But into what? Let's just call it "devolving", shall we?
And we've been able to keep track of our morals
You should be able to - you have so few. And still you seem able to mislay them all the time.
Here's why.
In the event that a "human wave" of these folks who "hate us," runs fuel-laden fire trucks or tankers into local schools, or hospitals, or shopping malls, or apartment complexes ... how are Americans going to react?
The Bush [still running 75% of the Clinton] Administration will attempt to control the people.
The people, much to the surprise of the Bush [still running 75% of the Clinton] Administration, are going to feel differently.
They're going to be lookin' around for who caused such a thing, and President Bush's pleadings on behalf of the House of Saud will not hold, nor control much of, the wrath.
The Saudis seem to be intent upon committing suicide in the name of trying to "save" their Royal butts from "Western Culture."
The result, it still appears to be on course, to be some serious work, inspite of what dependence upon Saudi oil is the notion "over there."
To put it mildly.
When the Sa'ud family is toppled, there is going to be a whole new dynamic in the ME, and that dynamic is the glitter of the 11th century, with Persia as ruler of the Known World. We in the West have either to bone up on medieval customs, or be prepared to exterminate the ME.
Sure they are buddy. And it's not that they just want to talk to you, they're scared - for your life and their rep. Well protected and kept off the streets - just one mid-level American journalist getting killed would do wonders to further destroy the relationship.
Oh, by the way Princey, you twerps were too dumb to find oil. You're just figureheads for Aaramco and have just about outlived (and out spent) your usefulness.
The South Koreans are concerned that many sysadmins are blackholing all e-mail from the country. The solution is for them to root out their infestation of spammers.
The British are concerned that nobody wants to buy their beef. The solution is for them to root out their cattle infected with mad cow disease.
The Saudis are concerned that their relationship with the US is going sour. The solution is to... anybody? Bueller?
The author forgot to mention that the newspaper in question was the Religious Police Gazette.
Yeah, right.
The biggest lesson I learned during my eighteen months in Yanbu (on the Red Sea) was that when approached by a smiling A-Rab extolling his great love for his A-mare-li-can friend, was to correctly guess in which hand he is holding the knife.
This does not bode well for Western Nations.
These 100,000 graduates per anum will seek and gain employment in the West. Many will be good citizens...others will not be and their presence will undermine security.
Those that do not find work in the West, Arabia or somewhere else in the middle East will grow bitter and ply their sizable intellects towards more devious exploits.
Can I prove this scenario? Heck no.
Is it true? Yep.
It is time for the house of Saud to make radical, sweeping changes inside of its country. To move its people to socialogical and cultural moderation. The window is still open for them to do so.
If they do not...they will become the enemy. It is raw mathmatics.
The press of the time made you seem interesting, exotic and larger than life. Now that we've grown up, we know better. There is nothing interesting about you, nor exotic nor big except for your hatred of Christians, Jews, western culture, women, children and integrity.
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