Saudis May Seek U.S. Exit Military Presence Seen as Political Liability in Arab World
By David B. Ottaway and Robert G. Kaiser Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, January 18, 2002; Page A1
Saudi Arabia's rulers are increasingly uncomfortable with the U.S. military presence in their country and may soon ask that it end, according to several Saudi sources. Such a decision would deprive the United States of regular use of the Prince Sultan Air Base, from which American power has been projected into the gulf region and beyond for more than a decade.
Senior Saudi rulers believe the United States has "overstayed its welcome" and that other forms of less conspicuous military cooperation should be devised once the United States has completed its war in Afghanistan, according to a senior Saudi official. The United States has been using a state-of-the-art command center on the Prince Sultan base that was opened last summer as a key command-and-control facility during the Afghan conflict.
Saudis give several reasons for deciding that the Americans should leave, beginning with their desire to appear self-reliant and not dependent on U.S. military support. The American presence has become a political liability in domestic politics and in the Arab world, Saudi officials say. The Saudi government has also become increasingly uncomfortable with a role in U.S. efforts to contain Saddam Hussein, and earlier ruled out use of Saudi territory as a base for bombing raids on Iraq.
The withdrawal of U.S. aircraft would end an American presence that began during the Persian Gulf War and, administration officials warned, would seriously undermine America's ability to protect Saudi Arabia or Kuwait as well as carry out all future operations in Iraq.
Past and present U.S. officials said a Saudi decision to ask the Americans to pull forces out of their country could also complicate the Saudi-American relationship, which was put under great strain by the events of Sept. 11, and appear to give the impression of rewarding Osama bin Laden, who has vilified the royal family for hosting American troops, about 5,000 at the present time.
Asked whether Saudi Arabia has told the United States it will ask for an American withdrawal, Victoria Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, declined to answer. "We have a very good relationship with the Saudis," she said last night, and "we will continue to work with them in as cooperative a fashion as possible as we go forward."
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said this week that the United States should consider moving its forces out of the kingdom. "We need a base in that region, but it seems to me we should find a place that is more hospitable. . .,. I don't think they want us to stay there."
"The Saudis actually think somehow they are doing us a favor by having us be there helping to defend them," he added.
Saudi officials who spoke about a U.S. withdrawal emphasized that nothing would be done precipitously. They said Crown Prince Abdullah was sensitive to the need to avoid creating the impression that he was responding to pressure from bin Laden. These Saudis emphasized that Saudi-American relations would remain close, and would continue to include a military component. "You [Americans] would still have access" to Saudi bases after a withdrawal, one adviser to the crown prince said.
U.S. troops went to Saudi Arabia in 1990 to fight the Persian Gulf War against Iraq at a moment when both countries feared that Iraq might march from Kuwait into the kingdom. The two governments never signed an agreement about their presence in the country. Though it has long been considered an intimate ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia is the only Persian Gulf nation with which the United States has no formal defense cooperation agreement. "The Saudis argue, 'We're such good friends, there's no reason to put anything in writing,' " said a Defense Department official who has worked intimately with Saudi Arabia.
The same official noted that the United States promised in 1990 to withdraw its contingent from Saudi Arabia - which at its height included 500,000 troops - "when the job is done." Saudis, this official said, interpreted that to mean the job of expelling Iraq from Kuwait, but many U.S. officials think the job remains undone as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power in Baghdad.
The Saudis were nervous about the U.S. presence in their country from the beginning. Saudi Arabia was never colonized by a foreign power, and has long been sensitive about its independence. And the royal family has a special obligation to the Muslim world as guardian of Islam's two most holy places, Mecca and Medina.
Bin Laden has made expelling the Americans from Saudi Arabia an overriding objective. "There is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land [of Arabia]," he said in 1996.
The Saudis' sensitivity has led to numerous restrictions on America's use of their facilities, including telling the United States not to use planes based in Saudi Arabia for bombing raids against Iraq, which have continued sporadically for the last decade. Earlier this year, the Saudis told the United States not to use Saudi airspace for any flights into or out of Iraqi airspace.
Frustrated by Saudi restrictions, the Air Force moved about 20 jet fighters out of Saudi Arabia in 1999, according to a senior Pentagon official, and no longer stations attack aircraft in the kingdom.
U.S. officials say the two countries no longer share a common view on security for the region now that Saudi Arabia has engineered a detente with Iran, its traditional rival in the region, and does not consider Iraq a major security threat.
"There is the lack of a shared strategic vision," said Joseph McMillan, a former Pentagon official responsible for Saudi affairs. "The Saudis deny there is any reason for the United States to be there to defend the kingdom against Iraq," he told a Capitol Hill forum on U.S.-Saudi relations this month.
Crown Prince Abdullah has taken the lead of the faction within the royal family arguing that the kingdom would be safer without the U.S. military presence, Saudi sources said. In contrast to King Fahd, still technically the monarch though he is completely incapacitated after strokes and other illnesses, Abdullah has not had long years of a close working partnership with the United States. He is described by Saudis and American experts on the kingdom as an astute politician with a good sense of Saudi public opinion, who has concluded the American presence is more trouble than it is worth.
One big problem for Abdullah, said several past and present officials, is anti-American sentiment in Saudi society. "For the first time since 1973, we actually have a situation in which the United States is so unpopular among the [Saudi] public that the royal family now thinks its security is best served by publicly distancing itself from the United States," remarked Chas. W. Freeman Jr. a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh and frequent visitor to the kingdom.
"The crown prince will do it slowly and carefully over an extended period of time," predicted Nawaf Obeid, a Saudi oil and security analyst, speaking of Abdullah's intention to ask for a U.S. withdrawal. "From his and a logical Saudi national security perspective, it is clear that the American military presence in Saudi Arabia is no longer a viable option," Obeid said. "That has been the predominant thinking in Riyadh well before the September 11 incidents." Obeid has extensive contacts in Saudi Arabia.
Some American officials and experts agree. F. Gregory Gause III of the University of Vermont, an academic expert on Saudi Arabia, said yesterday it "would be in our interest" to withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia. "If our major interest is the stability of Saudi Arabia," Gause said, "then we want to take away whatever pretext there could be for opposition [to the royal family] to arise."
In various ways, the Saudis have been signaling their growing discomfort with what has come to look increasingly like a permanent U.S. military presence in their country. Both sides talk of growing frustrations in dealing with each other. "We tend to step on each other's toes," said one senior U.S. officer who spent several years in the kingdom.
In a paper for the National Defense University, McMillan, the Pentagon official, has given a rare public description of how and why U.S.-Saudi military relations have steadily "withered." According to his paper, since American troops in the kingdom were moved to a remote desert base after the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks, there has been little contact between Saudi and U.S. pilots or ground personnel; fewer joint training exercises to promote cooperation; increasing cross-cultural frictions stemming from quick rotation of U.S. personnel (who now serve brief tours of three months to a year in Saudi Arabia, without their families); and mounting Saudi grievance at being overcharged by the Pentagon for spare parts and training courses.
For more than a decade, U.S. officials have debated whether it would be wiser politically for the United States to move its military aircraft and personnel out of Saudi Arabia and assume their pre-Gulf War "over the horizon" posture on aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea.
Gen. Chuck Horner, the U.S. Air Force commander during the Gulf War, said he had argued "very hard to get all of our people out of there" when most of the 500,000 U.S. soldiers were withdrawn months after the U.S. rout of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
"We make it very difficult for our Arab friends by being there because they have to defend our presence," he said.
Again after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, then-U.S. Ambassador Wyche Fowler Jr. suggested it might be better to withdraw rather than see the American forces confined to a desert air base. But then-Secretary of Defense William J. Perry rejected the proposal, arguing it would make a continuation of U.S air operations over southern Iraq impossible.
Before Sept. 11, said one senior Saudi official, "You [Americans] were scared to leave and that people will say, 'You cut and run.' We [Saudis] were scared to tell you to leave and that people will say, 'Hey, you are not grateful.' Nobody has the political courage to say, 'Hey, guys, this [continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia] is dumb.',"
U.S. analysts and Pentagon officials say there is a lot more than perceptions at stake. The U.S. military presence at Prince Sultan Air Base, they say, is crucial to Washington's entire security system for defending America's oil-wealthy Arab allies against Iran and Iraq.
"It would be vastly more difficult to defend Kuwait, much less the kingdom [Saudi Arabia], if we didn't have substantial [U.S.] air power in place at the begining," said Walter B. Slocombe, undersecretary of defense for policy in the Clinton administration.
"We need it [Prince Sultan Air Base] if we go to war with Iran or Iraq. You don't deter from 'over the horizon' the way you can from the ground," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a specialist on the Middle East at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The United States needs Saudi airspace depth in case of an attack on Iraq."
Cordesman and several Defense Department analysts said the idea of transferring U.S. aircraft and personnel to bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman was not realistic because those countries were already "saturated" with U.S. ships, aircraft and emergency war materiel.