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I LES JANKA: Our first speaker will be Thomas Lippman. Tom spent more
than 30 years with the Washington Post as a writer, editor and
diplomatic correspondent. He is also the author of a number of
significant books, one about Madeline Albright, who also sat here in
this room with me as a SAIS student. His books include: Madeline
Albright and the New American Diplomacy, Egypt After Nasser: Sadat,
Peace, and the Mirage of Prosperity, Understanding Islam: An
Introduction to the Moslem World, and he is currently working on a book
entitled the American Experience in Saudi Arabia. And also, one way of
organizing the panel is sort of in order of which has been most recently
in the Kingdom. And, I think Tom probably wins the prize for being there
most recently. So, Tom can you give us 10 minutes please.
THOMAS LIPPMAN: Thank you Les, and thank you all for coming. I
appreciate your interest in this very important subject. Keep in mind as
you listen to me that I spent most of my professional life as a
journalist, which means I was an observer and an inquirer. My fellow
panelists were practitioners, which means that they knew more before
they got out of bed every morning than I was ever going to find out. So,
you should listen to me from that perspective.
I set out a little over two years ago to examine the entire history and
nature of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. I
did that because I read in close detail the various iterations of bin
Laden�s manifestos -- in my view, we are not guilty as charged. I
thought it would be useful for my book -- coming out in January -- to
put as much of that history into the space that was allocated by the
publisher and as I was able to find out.
I think that in order to talk about where we�re going here, it�s useful
to look at how we got to where we are and where we�ve been in this
relationship. Everyone should understand that the relationship between
the United States and Saudi Arabia has been and is much broader and
deeper and involves many more spheres of human activity than people are
commonly aware of. Oil was the start; oil is not the finish. It
certainly goes far beyond oil and defense.
First, I brought a prop to sort of illustrate what I am talking about.
There�s a silver coin in this little display case. This is a silver
Saudi Arabian riyal coin. It was minted in Philadelphia in 1944. And,
the reason the coin was minted in Philadelphia in 1944 was that during
World War II, the government of Saudi Arabia faced a severe financial
crisis. Saudi Arabia even in those days had two sources of income. The
early phases of the oil industry had begun to produce export earnings
for the Kingdom, but most the Kingdom�s money came from a tax on
pilgrims to Mecca. However, during World War II, there were very few
pilgrims. The result was that the king did not have the money that he
needed to run the country and to hand out the largesse to the tribes
that were the basis of his power.
And, that was the beginning of the point at which the United States,
which had previously left the management of strategic affairs in the
Arabian Peninsula to the British, got involved. During World War II, the
United States began to develop a strategic interest in Saudi Arabia. We
got permission from the Saudis to build an airbase at Dhahran to serve
the Asian theater of the war. And, it became apparent to the United
States, in order to maintain a new ally that we had in Saudi Arabia, we
needed to get involved with the management of the country�s fiscal
affairs. So first, the United States lent the Saudis a huge amount of
silver bullion, and then the United States minted that silver bullion
into coins, which became the currency of the kingdom.
The reason it is in this commemorative case is that the first shipment
of those coins, four million of them, went down in the Gulf of Oman when
the ship was torpedoed by the Germans. And, only many years later did a
diving expedition retrieve any of them. This is one of those coins. So
having sent the four million and lost them, they had to do it again.
That led to a direct involvement by the United States in the financial
affairs of the kingdom, originally in the person of a gentleman named
Arthur Young, who was dispatched under Truman�s Point IV program and who
basically created the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency or the Saudi Arabian
Central Bank. Arthur Young was a very experienced international,
financial management type. He had previously been the financial advisor
to the nationalist government of China. He created the Saudi Arabia
Monetary Agency, which today, of course, is one of the premier central
banks and financial regulatory agencies anywhere outside the OECD.
Now, that led me to the realization that the United States, Americans,
American corporations, and American agencies have involved themselves in
Saudi Arabian life in ways that have had a profound impact, I would say,
on both countries. And, let me just give you a few examples of what I�ve
found out. The relationship began not with the signing of the first oil
contract but with the work of medical missionaries from the missionary
hospital in Bahrain that was established at the beginning of the
twentieth century by the Reformed Church in America. And, as far as I�ve
been able to find out, the first Americans that King Abdul Aziz ever met
were doctors from the Bahrain missionary hospital, who were allowed to
come into the kingdom, and were requested to come into the kingdom,
where medical conditions were terrible. People suffered from
tuberculosis, malaria and all kinds of chronic diseases. And, the
doctors would come in for weeks or even a couple of months at a time and
treat the people. They were not allowed to preach of course nor were
they allowed to establish a permanent presence. But, they did introduce
the king to the notion of people who would come from across the sea and
not be Muslims and who would give, without taking, to the people of
Saudi Arabia. And, in my opinion laid the groundwork for the king�s
favorable view of Americans that was partially responsible for granting
of the oil concessions to American instead of British firms in the
1930s.
So, if you begin with the medical missionaries, and you see the
involvement of Americans in stabilizing the financial situation in Saudi
Arabia, then you get into a whole list of things, of ways, in which this
relationship worked. Americans, for example, created the university of
petroleum and minerals, which is the premier institution of technical
knowledge and engineering knowledge and higher learning in the kingdom.
It was created by Americans. The curriculum is English. And, it was done
partly because Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the petroleum minister then could see
the day when Saudis would need technically trained people to run a
nationalized oil industry, which is indeed what happened.
In the 1960s, it became apparent that as the income in Saudi Arabia
increased and as the educational levels increased, the Saudis needed to
develop a government, a basic bureaucratic system that was competent to
run a modern country, which they didn�t have. And so, a team from the
Ford Foundation spent 13 or 14 years in Saudi Arabia trying to establish
a centralized personnel system, civil service, training programs, a
centralized payroll, and a recruiting system for the Saudi civil
service. Now ultimately, the Ford people failed for a variety of
reasons, but when you go the Ford archives of the Ford Foundation in New
York, they are fascinating archives of failure, and they tell you a lot
about the attitudes between Americans and Saudis. As many of you may
know, and as I knew even before I started this, Saudi Arabian airlines,
which is the largest airline in the Middle East, was essentially a
creation of and subsidiary of Trans World Airlines for many years. The
pilots, administrators, maintenance people were Americans; the training
programs and the aircraft were American. That airline grew out of the
original gift of DC-3 that FDR gave to King Abdul Aziz at their famous
meeting in 1945.
I�ll just add one more point about this. One of the most interesting
people that I met in the course of my book was a woman named Mildred
Logan, who today must be close to 80, still alive in Texas. Mildred
Logan went to Al-Kharj in the desert southeast of Riyadh in 1951. She
was a young woman, 23-years-old. She had been teaching school in Texas,
and she took her daughter and went out there to join her husband, a man
named Sam Logan. And, what was Sam Logan doing in Al-Kharj back in
1951-1952? He was part of a team of Americans, who were managing the
royal experimental farms at Al-Kharj. Those Americans were part of a
fundamental American involvement in the development and expansion of
Saudi agriculture. Agriculture today is the second largest component of
Saudi GDP, and I believe it is the largest domestic employer.
Agriculture is a huge industry in Saudi Arabia. A lot of what the Saudis
know they learned from Americans who brought in farm equipment, powered
irrigation, modern fertilizers, and even chickens to raise. You know,
there are several accounts of how fascinating it was for the Saudis who
had never seen such things -- to see chickens come out of a machine and
all the same color. But, it was very basic techniques of agriculture
that today are a fundamental part of the way that Saudi Arabia works.
So, just to come back to my starting point, this is a complicated and
multi-layered relationship. And, it has survived 70 years, in my
opinion, to the benefit of both societies, despite periods of mutual
aversion and the very fundamental social, political, philosophical, and
religious differences between the two peoples. This is a relationship
that now is undergoing its severest test, certainly since its severest
test since the oil embargo in 1973 and 1974. But, it�s a relationship
that should not be written off or thrown over the side. We don�t want to
throw this baby out with the bath water in the fight against terrorism.
There�s too much at stake. Even now, the commercial relationships are
almost as important to us as the political relationships. So, Les began
by asking how much does Saudi Arabia matter? I would say that it matters
a lot - economically, strategically and politically. And, it would be to
our detriment to blow that relationship up.
Thank you.
LES JANKA: Thank you, Tom. You prompted a few flashes in my own memory
about Saudi history. I remember reading that when the kingdom was
founded in 1932, the largest import to the kingdom was oil from
Pennsylvania. So, secondly you mentioned Al-Kharj, and I was in the
kingdom last year and we visited Al-Kharj. And the way you spoke of the
Ford Foundation experiment being a failure, the American agriculture
contribution is a considerable success. In Al-Kharj, I visited the
world�s largest integrated dairy with 36,000 cows. That�s a lot of cows;
it�s enough to make a Texan weep. But, again, Tom is quite right,
agriculture is a very major part of Saudi Arabia that too much in the
American stereotype, we think of it as unending sand.
Complete panel
on audio -- click here.
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