Interview - Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Last year Thomas Lippman wrote "the story of how two cultures from opposite poles of human experience came together to the benefit of both."  Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia was the story of the more than 70 years of direct ties between Americans and Saudi Arabians.  

We are pleased today to bring you a recent conversation with Mr. Lippman addressing developments in Saudi Arabia and in the relationship.  

Mr. Lippman talked with SUSRIS by telephone from his home in Washington, DC on February 25, 2005.

Insight on the Kingdom from the Author of Inside the Mirage --
A Conversation with Thomas Lippman

SUSRIS: Thank you for joining us today, Mr. Lippman, to talk about US-Saudi relations. Let's start with current developments in the Kingdom. What should we know about the recent high profile events in Saudi Arabia, such as the Jeddah Economic Forum, the Counterterrorism International Conference and the elections for municipal council members?

Mr. Lippman: In a way what's interesting is that it shows -- particularly the Jeddah Economic Forum and the elections -- that Saudi Arabia is up and running and doing business. The good news is that everybody has come through the spasm of the previous year. That is not to minimize the threat that remains from terrorism but it does seem that things are more or less under control now, and you can get on with the business of running the country.

SUSRIS: You make a good point about the atmosphere in Saudi Arabia but the image many Americans have is not generally that of business as usual. What do you make of the disconnect?

Mr. Lippman: I don't blame people for thinking that, if they read the State Department's travel warnings -- the notices that tell people about where to go and where not to go. If you visited the State Department Web site, where they publish these notices, what it says about Saudi Arabia is pretty hair-raising.

There is still a security situation, particularly since the Jeddah Consulate attack in December, where the "official" Americans are hunkered down. That filters down into the press and into what Americans think they know about the country. But many Americans go to Saudi Arabia. People go there unmolested. They held the Jeddah Economic Forum that included Americans like Madeline Albright. The Council on Foreign Relations took a delegation over there.

SUSRIS: What about this year's Jeddah Economic Forum?

Mr. Lippman: I've read mixed reports about the forum but I wish I had the opportunity to go. There wasn't the kind of excitement like that created by Lubna Olayan's keynote address a year ago, but they didn't want that.

SUSRIS: Wasn't there an effort at exploring women's issues at the forum this year - a special session. How would you evaluate the status of women in the Kingdom?

Mr. Lippman: Well, even there I don't think people look at it the right way. I was very interested in what Prince Saud al-Faisal had to say recently when he had said for the first time that the Foreign Ministry is going to employ women.

He had some very thoughtful things to say about the course of social change in any society and he made the obvious points about how long it took for America to give women the vote and to elevate women to equal status in professional ranks and so on. He said that Saudi Arabia is feeling its way, but moving. I agree with him on that.

I've had the strong impression from visiting Saudi Arabia that there is a new generation of educated Saudi women who are trying to claim what they think is their proper place in the economic and social life of the country, as indeed they should. For economic reasons if no other they are gradually going to be accommodated. So what you see, as so often happens in Saudi Arabia, is the attempt to balance the progressive instincts of some parts of the society against what I would call the retrogressive instincts of other parts of the society. It's a difficult balance to manage and that's the job of the House of Saud.

SUSRIS: Some observers make the point that it's not the government holding up reforms but that it's the nature of a conservative society.

Mr. Lippman: To which the government has some responsibility. If you read the Basic Law it's clear that no one wants to or is able to exclude the conservative religious forces from the political dynamic in the society. They also have a rightful place -- it's their country. It is also true the ruling family in modern times has been a force for progress not a force against progress. The best example being the education of females. That didn't spring from the bottom up, that came from the top down.

SUSRIS: Peter Bergen recently wrote about what he called a "Saudi Glasnost" in National Review - an interesting analogy with the Soviet case. He went down the laundry list: the counter terrorism conference, the elections and so forth, noting that this was the beginning of something, a new era in Saudi Arabia. Your thoughts?

Mr. Lippman: More and more people in Saudi Arabia, through satellite television and the Internet, are in regular contact with the outside world. You should look at what Richard Cohen had to say in a recent Washington Post column. He went to the Jeddah Economic Forum. I believe it was the first time he had been to Saudi Arabia. After the Forum he visited Riyadh and talked to as many Saudis as he had time to talk to. You won't be surprised to hear that what he found was that many have connections to the United States that they value and treasure in some way or the other. They own property here. They have vacation homes here. They went to school here. Whatever it was. After he got past their connections with America, they were all furious at the United States, partly because of the way they are treated at the airport, partly because of Iraq, and for whatever reason. That's been true for a number of years and that's something that is troubling the bilateral relationship even while the country is making progress in its own way.

SUSRIS: That gets to another issue about the evolution of the US-Saudi relationship. America has been many things to Saudis, but is the Kingdom now looking to others to replace what the United States has been for it?

Mr. Lippman: Well, I think to a certain extent the relationship with the United States, it sort of peaked twenty years ago, was going to climb down anyway. When was the last time that the Saudis made a big ticket defense purchase in the United States? You don't have Bechtel building new airports. What we see now is, what I like to call Saudi Arabia becoming a "normal country."

Think about what happened in Saudi Arabia. This was a country that as late as 1930 had not had the industrial revolution and since it had never been colonized it didn't have a body of individuals who had been raised or co-opted in the European tradition so to speak, the way India did. All of the sudden, overnight, they got rich, were electrified, computerized and industrialized without having had the incremental social changes that go along with that.

Those changes are now occurring and it's only natural that if Saudi Arabia breaks away from or grows out of its dependent relationship on the United States for advise and technology it would begin to look around.

I like to tease people and stir up trouble here in Washington by saying, "Well, look at this from the Saudi perspective, they've always wanted a close relationship with a country that is a big importer of oil, is a nuclear power and has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. That sounds like China to me." People look at me kind of funny. And, by the way, "A country with no track record of supporting Israel." Well of course, I don't think the Saudis are going to propel themselves into a strategic alliance with China, but there's a certain logic to the Saudis wanting to increase their options.

SUSRIS: Playing the "China Card"?

Mr. Lippman: Sure. When Madeline Albright was Secretary of State she played that card the other way. She argued to the Chinese that their growing need for imported oil was a strong argument for them to support stability and tranquility in the Middle East and not go fishing in troubled waters there.

SUSRIS: Besides China, there's been interest on the part of the Russians to increase the scope of their relationships in the Gulf and specifically with Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Lippman: That was always the great bug-a-boo. Think back to when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Everyone thought, "Oh, my God. They've got a foot in the door." Right? But you know, as recently as last spring when I was over there I was encountering Saudi business people who either themselves were so angry at the United States or who had customers and clients who were so angry at the United States that they were looking around for other places to put their money.

I think it's important to make a distinction here, because the bilateral, government-to-government relationship between Washington and Riyadh seems to be in pretty good shape. It is if you listen to American officials, including the President, talk about it, about how much the Saudis are doing on terrorism, terrorist financing and all. But the personal relationship has been badly damaged -- the people to people relationship. Its only natural that some people in Saudi Arabia would look for or feel compelled to look for opportunities elsewhere. In the long run that may turn out to be to the Saudi's benefit, but not necessarily to our benefit.

SUSRIS: That gets to the question: what does the development of new partners mean for the US-Saudi relationship and American interests in the region?

Mr. Lippman: Well here's something to keep an eye on. You know the Koreans rolled that grenade under the table of the international financial market and announced they would sell off dollars and diversify to other currencies.

Through all these cycles in the past -- the US trade deficit, the US budget deficit, the sinking dollar -- the Saudis have held fast and priced their oil in dollars and kept up their holdings of US government securities. So if you were to see any move by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency [SAMA] to move in a different direction that would be a very bad sign. Of course we haven't seen it, but that is something to keep an eye on. When I hear people ask, "What have the Saudis ever done for us?" That's one of the things I tell them.

SUSRIS: Moving beyond the government-to-government relationship let's talk about ties on the people-to people level.

Mr. Lippman: Lets stipulate that the outcome between Israelis and Palestinians and in Iraq will affect the relationship. There's no question. If we can begin to be hopeful about the environment for the Palestinians, and I would say a even more hopeful about the environment in Iraq after the elections, we might get to the point where the most immediate irritants in this relationship can be removed. It would be a good side effect, progress on those two fronts.

Beyond that I've believed for a long time that both sides could do certain basic things that would improve the atmosphere. The United States could invest a little bit of money to improve its visa screening processes so that the vast majority of Saudis who have always come here peacefully can continue or resume doing so. They could go to their ski places in Colorado or go back to Stanford, whatever it is they want to do without being treated like criminal suspects as soon as they get off the plane. We've all heard the stories from Saudi friends about how routine travel to the United States has gotten too difficult.

SUSRIS: What else can improve the relationship?

Mr. Lippman: I think the Saudis can do some things as well. They have never had an effective, what I would call, a public communications campaign in the United States. They've had ineffective public relations in the United States. I don't see why they couldn't organize some kind of grassroots work in this country that would go beyond taking out full page adds in the New York Times. That is not the answer.

What needs to be done is to bring Saudis here. People like you and I know: business people, academics, women, whoever. Then get them out of Washington and out of New York and get them to Buffalo and Beaumont and Boise and Butte. Get them to the Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, the Baptist church cookout or whatever. They will be there as well spoken, peaceful representatives of Saudi society. Both sides will see that they need to feel defensive about each other. That's how to build people-to-people relationships.

SUSRIS: Break the stereotypes?

Mr. Lippman: Exactly, exactly. The Saudis spend huge amounts of money on ineffective PR that's always been aimed at places like Congress. There's no AWACS sale right now, that's not the issue. So I think they could communicate more effectively.

I've mentioned an idea I've had, to a few Saudi friends. I would like to see the creation of a serious, world respected Muslim university in the United States -- kind of a Muslim Notre Dame. If you went go to study chemistry, it wouldn't be Muslim chemistry, just chemistry. It would also represent respectability, authority and the social-cultural dimension.

Part of the problem in the area of person-to-person relationships is that the Muslims of America are so fragmented along communitarian lines that they don't represent any kind of effective public force. You know the Pakistanis tend to stay with the Pakistanis, the Palestinians stay with the Palestinians and they are divided geographically and they are divided by country of origin. You can see it in the perpetual contest for control of the Mosque here in Washington.

Those are all pieces of the same thing. The effort to come to terms with the American people could be better organized and effectively targeted.

SUSRIS: Can you talk about how American public understanding of the relationship is effected when there are events like the recent extradition of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a graduate of the Saudi Islamic Academy in Virginia, on charges of conspiracy to assassinate President Bush.

Mr. Lippman: The fact is the Islamic Saudi academy children go there and study every day. It's a school. So this guy is suspected of having taken part in a plot to assassinate the president and he went to the Saudi school. But this is one of the cases when the facts and truth are not the same thing. Everybody went to school somewhere. Timothy McVeigh went to school somewhere. And so did Nimah Ismail Nawwab, the Saudi woman who has published many inspiring poems. You can't necessarily tar the institution with the failings of the individual.

Next:  
Part 2 -- More of our conversation with Thomas Lippman: Saudi Arabia and the war on terror; perspective on the 1945 meeting between FDR and Ibn Saud

About Thomas Lippman

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.  He has recently returned from a week-long visit to the kingdom.