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Thomas Lippman

"Good Morning, Mr. President"
Thomas Lippman's Briefing for POTUS

Editor's Note:

President George Bush has begun his eight day, six country visit to the Middle East and will be in Saudi Arabia on Monday and Tuesday. He has met with King Abdullah twice at the "Western White House" in Crawford, Texas in 2003 and 2005, but it is the President's first visit to the Kingdom.

SUSRIS asked someone who has been in Saudi Arabia many times to size up some of the top issues that could be on the table when the President of the United States (POTUS) and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz sit down to talk about the challenges that face the historic US-Saudi relationship.

What we got was Thomas Lippman's frank lay down of many of the bilateral and regional issues that could be on the minds, if not the agendas of the leaders when they meet in Riyadh.

Mr. Lippman serves as an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute. He is author of "Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Relationship with Saudi Arabia," and his career journalism included assignments for the Washington Post across the Middle East. We also recommend a review of the SUSRIS exclusive interview with Mr. Lippman following the Crawford 2005 Bush-Abdullah summit.

"Good Morning, Mr. President"
Thomas Lippman's Briefing for POTUS

Click for larger image and details. Mr. President, you asked for a candid assessment, so I’ll take you at your word. You can assume that everyone you encounter in Saudi Arabia, beginning with King Abdullah, will be courteous and polite when you visit there next week. The rulers of Saudi Arabia value their longstanding good relations with our country and they will give you a generous welcome. Perhaps the King will even want to hold hands, as he did when he came to your ranch in Texas in 2005.

But don’t be deceived, Mr. President. Behind the smiles, the Saudis are just as irritated at us as we are at them. It’s not their style to be rude or confrontational or demanding, but they are very unhappy at the turmoil and uncertainty that are upsetting their entire neighborhood and they blame you for a lot of it.

Even if you didn’t travel there on John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” you still might give the Saudis a piece of your mind. Just to summarize some of the things they have done lately that didn’t exactly sit well with us, we can start with the Mecca Agreement and the legitimation of Hamas. And there was the king’s speech at that Arab summit – the one where he denounced our liberation of Iraq as an “illegitimate occupation.” Maybe that’s why he has refused to send an ambassador to Iraq, even though we have asked him to do it several times.

Don’t forget that the king invited that nasty Iranian, Ahmadinejad, to make the hajj as his guest, and he even let the Gulf Cooperation Council invite the guy to the GCC conference in December. The GCC was created to resist Iran, not welcome it.

Remember, Mr. President, King Abdullah rejected your invitation to come to the White House last year, after we had started planning the state dinner. And we don’t even need to talk about $100 oil. Where are those 12.5 million barrels a day that their oil minister has been promising forever? The Saudis will tell you that they don’t control the price of oil, that it’s Wall Street speculators who set the price, but they could do a lot more to jawbone the market.

In all honesty, though, Mr. President, it might not be a good idea to go there with six-guns blazing over these matters, because Abdullah is no pushover and he has quite a list of his own. Let’s take them in ascending order of importance.

The king was really annoyed when you let Dana Perino speak out about that Qatif Girl rape case. It’s true that he pardoned the woman, but the Saudis were upset that the White House stuck its nose into a sensitive domestic issue – and not privately, either, but in full view of the world.

And the Saudis can’t understand why so few U.S. corporations are investing in Saudi Arabia or bidding on projects there. They’re rolling in cash and have invited many companies to come in and share the wealth, but they can count the deals on one hand and they see this as reflecting an anti-Saudi attitude in America. It only stokes the anger of everyone in the Saudi business community at how hard it is to get a U.S. visa—even people who have been coming here for years and own homes here. The Saudis know you don’t make corporate investment decisions, but their attitude is, they’re doing us a big favor by continuing to price oil in dollars and buying Treasury securities even in this market, and you ought to be telling Americans that the business climate in the Kingdom is favorable now.

And then there’s the follow-up to Annapolis, or rather the lack of it. The Saudis think we bludgeoned them into attending, and they came after we assured them that you really meant it this time. And what happened? More violence, and more new Israeli housing in Har Homa. The Saudis’ Mecca initiative is in ruins, and what has replaced it?

But what’s really eating the Saudis now, Mr. President, is that NIE about the Iranian nuclear program. They were blindsided by it. And because it came at a time when American officials have been saying Iran is cutting back on weapons deliveries to Iraq, the Saudis think you did a deal with the Iranians: Tehran stops making trouble in Iraq, we back off on the nuclear issue. But we’re still urging the Saudis and their Gulf neighbors to take an aggressive anti-Iranian stance. They don’t want to do that, Mr. President, and they’re certainly not going to do it if they have the idea you won’t be standing behind them. They just don’t understand our policy here, but they are clear on what their own policy is: survival. They’re not sure any more if we’re part of the solution or part of the problem.

You can argue that the NIE has been misinterpreted. You can tell the king that the Iranians are still determined to acquire nuclear weapons and you are still determined to stop them. Maybe one way to deal with this is to let Abdullah and Prince Sultan see the entire classified NIE, instead of just the declassified summary—it would be like Dick Cheney showing King Fahd those recon photos of the Iraqi troops on his border back in 1990. It worked then.

If you do that, maybe the cardamom coffee at the photo op will taste better.

ABOUT

Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. In four years as the Washington Post's Middle East bureau chief, three years as the Post's oil and energy reporter and a decade as the newspaper's national security and diplomatic correspondent, he traveled extensively to Saudi Arabia. He is the author of Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy, Understanding Islam, and Egypt After Nasser. A writer and journalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy and Middle Eastern affairs, he lives in Washington, DC. MORE

ABOUT

The Middle East Institute -- "Since 1946 the Middle East Institute has been an important conduit of information between Middle Eastern nations and American policymakers, organizations and the public. We strive to increase knowledge of the Middle East among our own citizens and to promote understanding between the peoples of the Middle East and America. Today we play a vital and unique role in expanding the dialogue beyond Washington, DC, and actively with organizations in the Middle East.."

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