New York Times October 22, 2002
Are the Saudis the Enemy?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
R IYADH, Saudi Arabia Osama bin Laden succeeded magnificently, it
seems, in at least one of his goals: creating a rift between the
United States and Saudi Arabia.
Odds are that Osama shrewdly sought to create discord by deliberately
choosing Saudis to be the grunts of 9/11, picking them to fill 15 of
the 19 hijacker positions, even though the teams were led by an
Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, and other key players were from Lebanon and
the United Arab Emirates. Al Qaeda had plenty of Yemenis, Kuwaitis and
north Africans whom it could have tapped, but it apparently went out
of its way to choose Saudis to be the foot soldiers.
The plan, if that's what it was, worked perfectly. The 60-year
friendship between Saudi Arabia and the United States is now in
tatters, and it will probably get even more poisonous in the coming
months if we invade Iraq. It turns out that Saudis have as much
animosity for us as we have for them.
"Our people very much hate the U.S.," said Soliman Al-Buthy, a Saudi
engineer with flowing white robes and even more flowing black beard.
"The No. 1 reason is that it supports Israel with no limits. Then
there's homeland security measures, and now we hear that all Saudis in
America will be fingerprinted."
Mr. Buthy has plenty of company: A poll released this month by Zogby
International found that 87 percent of Saudis have an unfavorable view
of the United States.
Even among the many Saudis who lived for years in America, there is a
deep sense of betrayal that matches our own. Everywhere I go, I run
into American-educated Saudis whose eyes light up as they recall how
they lived in Kansas City or Chicago or Portland, how their children
were born there, how their neighbors were the nicest people in the
world. Then, bitterly, they complain that Americans now slander them
as terrorists, deny them visas and vilify their country.
"Now all Saudis are guilty, are unwelcome," complained Fahad Aslimy of
the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce and Industry. "Most Saudis
were educated in the U.S., and it is our second home. So this is very
frustrating."
Indeed, it's become fashionable in America to see Saudi Arabia as "the
most dangerous, the most fanatic regime on the entire planet," as a
reader e-mailed me recently. Richard Perle's influential Defense
Policy Board convened a hatchet-job hearing in July in which Saudi
Arabia was described as America's "most dangerous opponent."
There's plenty to criticize about Saudi Arabia, but this vision of it
as a dangerous enemy is way over the top.
Sure, the Saudi monarchy bears some responsibility for fundamentalist
Islamic terrorists. King Faisal, together with the United States,
deliberately nurtured fundamentalist Islam in the 1960's as a
counterweight to Nasserists and leftists. It was Saudi Arabia that, at
America's request, backed the jihad against Soviet troops in
Afghanistan, thus forming the basis for Al Qaeda.
Later, prestige-seeking Saudi businessmen wrote checks to radical
Islamic charities, financing the spread of radical Islam in much of
the Islamic world in the same way that zealous but misguided Americans
helped underwrite I.R.A. terrorism in the 1970's and 1980's, as our
own government pretended not to notice. Read Margaret Thatcher's
memoirs and you find the same kind of outrage at American financing of
Irish terrorism that we feel at Saudi complicity in Islamic terrorism.
Saudi Arabia's responsibility, in other words, arises more from
stupidity than venality. It's absurd to imagine the Saudi government
intentionally promoting people like Osama bin Laden when Osama's first
target was the Saudi royal family itself.
The Saudi royals can fairly be criticized for fecklessly looking the
other way as clerics commandeered schools and preached poisonous
nonsense about foreigners. More broadly, America and the kingdom have
almost no values in common; Saudi Arabia is a corrupt monarchy that
stands for religious intolerance and the repression of women.
But we also need a bit of common sense in the discussion. To my ear
the harsh denunciations of Saudi Arabia as a terrorist state sound as
unbalanced as the conspiratorial ravings of Saudi fundamentalists
themselves.
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