Are the Saudis the Enemy? (fwd)

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Oct 24 22:39:40 PDT 2002


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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