Last week’s car bombings in Riyadh seemed to bring destruction not just in the housing complexes where the attacks occurred, but also in the tense and increasingly tentative friendship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
The recriminations flared as U.S. and Saudi investigators picked through the rubble.
Robert Jordan, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, bluntly blamed the Saudis for failing to heed U.S. warnings of possible attacks on residential compounds. A top Saudi foreign policy official, Adel Al-Jubeir, explained that U.S. warnings were not specific and said “we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of such complexes.”
Although at a low point, the U.S.-Saudi relationship, according to officials of both governments and foreign policy and terrorism experts, is one of unvarnished self-interest on both sides. The simple fact, they say, is that the countries need each other.
Monday’s bombings are “a useful reminder, perhaps, to Americans that the principal target of Al Qaeda is the Saudi monarchy,” said Chas Freeman, who was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992. “We have been struck for the explicit purpose of bringing about an estrangement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.”
Like partners in a long and sometimes troubled marriage, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia cannot easily be rid of each other.
The Bush administration, for instance, knows it will need Saudi support to carry out its plan for rebuilding Iraq. Riyadh’s influence runs especially strong in the Persian Gulf states, and its support could help tamp down rebellious elements inside, or outside, Iraq.
The U.S. also relies on Saudi Arabia for nearly 20 percent of its oil each year, and in its role as a world market leader, the Saudi government can raise or lower crude oil prices overnight by just hinting at a change in production levels.
For its part, the Saudi government relied on American companies to develop its oil business, and now counts on the U.S. as its major petroleum market. It has also purchased $35 billion in American fighter jets, weaponry, radar and other defense-related goods in the last decade, and it has poured billions into U.S. investments.
About 4,000 U.S. troops have been posted in Saudi Arabia since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and their presence ballooned to 10,000 during the Iraqi war this year.
Troops became irritant
The troops have become an irritant to many Saudis, especially Islamic fundamentalists, who claimed the ruling Saud royal family was becoming a U.S. puppet. So the Pentagon recently announced that it was withdrawing all but several hundred military personnel, who would stay on to help train Saudi troops. That sort of cooperation, Al-Jubeir said, is long-running and not unusual.
“Over the last 50 years,” Al-Jubeir said, “America has sent forces at the request of Saudi Arabia in order to deal with threats to Saudi Arabia, several times.” After each crisis, he added, the U.S. forces left.
For nearly 60 years, the partnership has worked for reasons of oil, the Cold War and commerce. Throughout that period, the Saudis used their money and clout to fight communism and other movements the U.S. found dangerous in the Middle East.
“The Saudis were our clients for years,” a veteran U.S. diplomat in the Middle East said recently.
But politics alone wasn’t the force that kept Saudis and Americans together.
No other Arab country forged as strong a social bond with the U.S. over the years. Rather than sending their children to Arab or European schools, the Saudis sent them to the U.S.
Flush with oil money from the 1970s on, the Saudis forsook a legacy of Arab architecture and physically remade their country in the model of the U.S, with skyscrapers, spaghetti-like super highways and American emporiums of fast food, including Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlors and Starbucks coffee shops.
But the relationship has been rocky, particularly since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Riyadh was slow to admit any Saudi connection to the attacks. But when it was learned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, the government quickly set up a costly public-relations campaign to convince Americans that Saudis are America’s friends.
The Bush administration, meanwhile, released subtle but stinging anti-Saudi rhetoric.
The Saudis were miffed by the leaking last year of a report to a Defense Department advisory group that was highly critical of the House of Saud and its policies. They were convinced that Washington had Riyadh in its sights for regime change.
U.S. officials have also suggested that wealthy Saudi citizens, even members of the royal family, have helped Al Qaeda in order to prevent attacks there. Terrorism investigations have traced Al Qaeda funds and operatives to Saudi charities and several embassies.
“The general perception was that [Osama] bin Laden was a security problem, not an ideological problem,” Gregory Gause, a Saudi expert at the University of Vermont, said during a Brookings Institution forum on terrorism last week. “The bombings might push the Saudis to be more open to the idea that this is a problem they must confront on the level of ideas.”
The Saudis have paid attention to talk in the U.S. about the need for internal reforms, though U.S. pressure on the subject touches a nerve.
“Any reforms have to be applied from within and as needed,” Prince Torki Saud, a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official, said recently in Riyadh. “Reform has to be reform over time. We have problems, yes, but not unsolvable problems.”
The Saudis have been sending signals that they are intent on reform away from religious extremism and toward political pluralism.
“Everything is on the table, and nothing is off the table,” Al-Jubeir said. “The only question is, what is the most effective way for us to broaden political participation in a way that is in line with our customs and our traditions, and that does not upset the balance of our society?”
Attacks may strengthen ties
The attacks in Riyadh could strengthen U.S.-Saudi relations. U.S. officials say the Saudi response to Monday’s bombings was immediate, with swift approval for a team of FBI investigators to enter the country.
“This is the most rapid turnaround I’ve ever seen from them for approval of an FBI team to come in,” a senior State Department official said.
Al-Jubeir pledged Friday that Saudi investigators would cooperate with their U.S. counterparts. He also noted that the Saudi government discovered a huge cache of explosives a week before Monday’s attacks and that the government has been tracking the finances of charities and individuals suspected of aiding bin Laden’s organization.
Saudi police, he added, also have foiled several attacks on American targets.
“The bottom line of it is,” he said, “because we both are in the cross hairs of this organization, and because we both have a desire to destroy it or destroy terrorism in general, we have made great strides over the years in enhancing . . . our counterterrorism cooperation.”
