Myths and Realities: Saudi Arabia Re-examined
The New Republic Symposium on Public Policy
[Part 1]

EDITOR'S NOTE:

This IOI provides portions of The New Republic's symposium on public policy, entitled, "Myths and Realities: Saudi Arabia Re-examined."  This discussion held on October 27, 2004 was moderated by Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief, The New Republic. The panelists included:  Robert Jordan, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Jamie Gorelick, member of the 9/11 Commission; Adam Zagorin, Washington correspondent, Time Magazine; and Faye Bowers, intelligence and national security writer for The Christian Science Monitor.  

The transcript was produced by the Federal News Service, Inc. and is reprinted here with permission. 

This part includes the panelists presentations.  The question and answer segment is provided as part two.

Martin Peretz: ..Let me introduce the panel: Robert Jordan, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Adam Zagorin, who covers business and international economics, presumably a lot about oil, from Time Magazine; Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 Commission and a partner at Wilmer Cutler, and also a former student of mine; and Faye Bowers, intelligence and national security writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

Ambassador Jordan, will you begin?

Robert Jordan: Any way you want. Can you hear me from down here? I thought I'd just make this more informal.

First, I'm really delighted to be here today. I have not spent a lot of time talking to folks at The New Republic, but I have admired the sincerity and the zealousness with which they approach these topics, and I think this is kind of a truly groundbreaking sort of series here today.

You know, for generations, the United States' relationship with the Saudis has been about oil and military cooperation. It's been conducted at elite levels, and our peoples have known very little about each other. I think Saudis in many ways considered themselves almost adjunct American citizens before 9/11. Thousands of them had vacation homes in the United States. They've sent their kids to school here. And, because they were no threat to overstay their visas and take a job away from an American worker, they had easy access to visas to come to the United States.

September 11th changed all that. Because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, we began to ask uncomfortable questions of the Saudis, and they didn't like being treated as terrorists. We began to realize that what the Saudis teach in their schools and preach in their mosques is no longer an internal Saudi matter -- it's a matter of our national security. Issues of human rights, democracy, and countering the ideological support for terrorism took on a new urgency.

The Saudis resented what they saw as a kind of overreaction on our part to 9/11. They saw us as excessively stereotyping all Arabs, especially Saudis, and as being insensitive to Arab and Muslim suffering in the Palestinian territories and then later in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think a significant milestone -- as Marty [Peretz] alluded to -- in the relationship was the terrorist attack on three Western housing compounds on May 12, 2003. I was there at that time. Thirty-four people were killed, including nine Americans. At that moment, I do believe that the Saudi leadership realized that al Qaeda really is intent in bringing them down first. This, I think, was verified by the report of the 9/11 Commission. Let me commend Jamie [Gorelick], by the way, as a representative of the commission, for an outstanding job. I have great respect for the work that they did and for the report they have put out as well as the interim reports.

MR. .. : And, they might win that National Book Award besides.

Robert Jordan: I'm very impressed with the report. And also, by the way, was very impressed with the staff. I met with the staff at some length. The professionalism and quality of the questioning by the staff was also first class.

But, after the attack in May 2003, we saw cooperation from the Saudis improving dramatically. We established a Joint Terrorism Center. We now have Americans and Saudis sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a secret location viewing intelligence in real time. We have had a number of successes in knocking out some of the al Qaeda leadership as a consequence of this renewed and improved effort. So, we're much closer to being partners in the war on terrorism.

But, I still believe that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done in fighting the battle against the ideological support for terrorism that comes from radical imams and teachers. The Saudis have been dealing with the problem, but the inertia of a tribal society that is really, frankly, seething with anger at the United States handicaps our ability to promote true reform and democracy as much as we would like. Now, the
Saudis are going to have to reform from within, and any American kibitzing is going to have to be handled with the utmost delicacy and generally in a more private and less public way, or it will be the kiss of death.

But, we do have a common enemy right now -- Islamist terrorism. This common threat gives us a great opportunity for improvement in our relationship overtime.

So, I'll stop there and pass the torch.

Jamie Gorelick: I agree with everything that Bob has said, and, of course, he's much more of an expert on Saudi Arabia than I am. I'm here, I think, principally because of the 9/11 Commission Report, but we did look at the relationship, and we did write about the relationship. I would just like to share a few observations with you.

First of all, for decades, the relationship has been a central one for the United States, and the basic compact forged by FDR and Abdul Aziz has been that we help protect the Saudis, and they secure a supply of oil for our partners and us. That is not a sustainable basis for a relationship going forward we found. First of all, public opinion in both countries is not in a good place. In this country, we were fast to recognize that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.

There are few defenders of Saudi Arabia in the public arena. That's not to say that there aren't people who have high regard for the country, but the public is not enamored of the Saudis, and the same is true about us as Americans in Saudi Arabia. We rate very poorly among the population in Saudi Arabia -- and perhaps my three co-panelists, who are more knowledgeable about this, might want to address it. But, our policies in Israel and Iraq and our perceived hostility to Islam make it very difficult, I think, for the royal family to move because they have public opinion very much against us. So, we have an interesting quandary. We have this historical relationship, and we have mutual antipathy among the populations.

We were struck -- all 10 of us on the commission -- by former President Clinton's remarks to us about Saudi Arabia. He recounted a conversation that he had with Crown Prince Abdullah on the margins of the World Economic Forum meeting where he said, "You know, I have very high regard for the crown prince. And, I said to him, you know, you should look at where you want this -- where you want to be as a ruler of your country in 10 years. Can you imagine yourself in the place that you want to be on the current course that you have set?" That was a rhetorical question because he viewed the answer to that as obviously no. Therefore, there is a need for reform to deal with both the violent aspects of the culture within Saudi Arabia and externally in the embodiment of al Qaeda, and also with the discontent within the middle classes of people in Saudi Arabia, who do not feel really invested in the system.

Our principal recommendation with regard to Saudi Arabia is that we speak with candor with each other and that both sets of governments speak with candor to their populations and express why the relationship is important, what needs to change, and to engage. Here we were very specific in saying that public lambasting by the United States of the Saudi government and vice versa is not helpful. It's simply not helpful. Now, we can talk about specific things that could be done, but the need for reform has always fallen to the bottom of the bilateral talks, and I'm sure that Bob [Jordan] can talk about this. There was always something more pressing, whether it was basing or something that we wanted the Saudis to do or pay for, and reform just was number eight in the talking points. And, you don't get to number eight, and nobody takes number eight seriously.

We hope to do our part in clearing the air a little bit by dealing with some of the myths. There is no getting around the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, but there is no evidence that the Saudi government had any participation in or funded in any way the attacks of 9/11, or for that matter al Qaeda, which is a notion that is strongly believed within our country in numerous quarters. However, there are many individuals within Saudi Arabia who have funded al Qaeda and have been reliable funders of al Qaeda, and they have funded the madrassahs, which spew out people who have no skills and are filled with hate. Both of these are big problems.

Now, as Bob said, after the attacks of 2003, the Saudi government came face-to-face with, I think, their own mortality. They really felt threatened. Their attitude both in terms of cooperation in the intelligence arena and looking hard at what they might do changed, and included within that were steps that they took to try to clamp down on the funding of al Qaeda. Now, they don't have the same kind of banking system we have, so they have no ready regimes for doing this. So it's harder than one might think if one only thinks about our or other Western financial systems. But, our [9/11 Commission] report called for the United States to be a partner with the Saudis in moving it toward reform and in changing the conversation between the United States and Saudi Arabia from just about oil and security. It has to go beyond those two.

I think I'll stop there.

Adam Zagorin: I thought I would say a couple of things about oil and then some of the structural impediments to an improvement in the relationship, which I think we're probably going to have to live with for quite some time.

On the oil front, perhaps some people remember a book, the latest expose of Mr. Woodward in which he asserted that there was some kind of arrangement between the administration, presumably brokered by the ambassador here, Prince Bandar, with respect to the idea that the Saudis would keep the oil price low and this would somehow help the reelection of our current president. Whatever reality that reporting may have had at the time -- various people have denied it and so forth -- I think we can all constitute, with a good deal of certainty, that the relationship somehow didn't work out because the oil price has not stayed low. Whether the predicate to that thought impinges upon us, namely that and therefore the president will not be reelected, I think is far from self-evident either. But anyway, that reporting -- whatever validity it may have had -- was certainly a major headline when Mr. Woodward's book was published.

It's a perfect example of the kind of headline that people around the United States can read and appreciate without knowing anything in particular about Saudi Arabia because, as has been pointed out by previous panelists, oil is the thing that people think about. So then, they are invited to entertain the possibility of this kind of collusion and so forth, which for all I know may have occurred. I'm not trying to pass a judgment as to whether there was some sort of a deal or not. I feel pretty confident that the price of oil is a lot higher right now than it was when Mr. Woodward wrote that.

The point about Saudi Arabia's oil is that -- I forget what the latest numbers are -- but Saudi Arabia is not the top supplier of oil to the United States, and neither is it the second -- maybe the third, fourth, I don't know.

[Editor's Note: The Energy Information Administration reported Saudi Arabia as ranked number two behind Canada for US supplies of crude plus refined products, and number one supplier of crude to the United States for 2003. During 2003, Saudi Arabia's share of U.S. crude oil imports was 17.8% (up from 16.6% during 2002).]

But, the point about Saudi Arabia is that since you have a global market in petroleum, and since it's fungible, if you cut off a major source of supply or indeed the largest possible source of supply, in the case of Saudi Arabia, then prices everywhere rise. Whether it's from Caracas being shipped up here or whatever source it is, the price of oil is going to go up. I don't know what the figures are with respect to each of our individual allies -- or what used to be called our allies -- but there's obviously a great dependency globally on having a stable, secure supply of oil, and just because the United States itself does takes oil from many sources doesn't really undercut the importance of Saudi Arabia in the market.

Now, the fact that prices have gone up recently, some people have suggested that this means that OPEC is loosing its grip or that they can't control anything. Other people have suggested that they're quite happy to have the price go up as long as they don't have to carry the blame for it because they're racking it up on the cash register, so it works for them.

I certainly think if you look at Saudi actions over the course of this price increase that we've had recently, it may be true that Saudi Arabia's role as the swing producer in OPEC and as the lever and kind of arbiter of world oil prices has been shown to be somewhat deficient during this latest run up. On the other hand, the Saudis have taken action to increase their supplies of oil. Therefore, one has the potential proposition that things would be worse had they not done so.

Finally, there are a lot of exogenous, non-Saudi factors that are related to the price of oil -- like the price of natural gas, and its role as a substitute for oil and various production factors within the United States in particular, and so forth and so on. So, it's a complex picture. But obviously, if you've got a global market and you've got a huge producer like Saudi Arabia, all of these factors -- in one sense, one wants to take them into account, but in another sense, the notion that Saudi Arabia is not a hugely important interest of the United States in the oil sector -- I mean, that still remains a fact.�
If they were taken over by radical Islamic elements tomorrow, they'd still have to sell their oil, of course. So, one could posit to some degree that oil would be sold because the needs of whatever successor government that there might be -- and I certainly don't see any on the horizon -- would include the need for oil receipts.

Now, on the structural side, we've got big visa restrictions on this country, which are going to continue forever. They're not specifically aimed at Saudi Arabia, but there are many targets of these visa restrictions. I don't see those going away. The military drawdown of the United States in Saudi Arabia has been somewhat significant in recent years. That has not prevented us from using certain facilities at the Prince Sultan Air Base and elsewhere in the Kingdom, but the presence of foreigners generally and U.S. military in the country has been drawn down. I don't see that changing. In fact, one might think that it would. I think we'll have access to the facilities probably when and if needed but the less said about it, the better.

Exxon-Mobil and other U.S. companies recently did not get some important contracts in Saudi Arabia. We aren't selling them military stuff right now. That's very visible. When Colin Powell, I believe, last visited the Kingdom, there were some constitutional reform-type people who -- responsible by some lights -- were not at liberty during -- I think that they were invited into barred spaces for a period surrounding his visit. We had a woman, who Ambassador Jordan may know, because she worked for him -- named Abercrombie Wynn Stanley, who tried to meet with some people in Saudi Arabia, not Islamists, but people who would like to see more reform and so forth. That was criticized by the Interior Minister.

Now, we've got so many problems in this country, why are we harping on all of this stuff in Saudi Arabia? I mean, these things happen, but these are kind of structural elements that I wanted to point to in the sense that I think that they will be relatively durable. I don't see any of these kinds of problems going away all that quickly.

The last point is that the entire regime is bracketed by the unresolved, and at the moment, unresolvable succession issue. It's difficult for me to imagine that there would be very dramatic steps in the Kingdom towards reform or anything else, absent a resolution of the succession issue. I don't see that happening all that quickly, and even when it does happen because of, for example, the death of a leading figure, which would then precipitate a reshuffle of the responsible hierarchy, I see that process as being slow and gradual as much else in the Kingdom has been over the years. So, I guess we're in for a period of more of the same where discipline and candid assessments of our interests and that kind of thing will be required to maintain the relationship on the best footing that can be had under the circumstances.

Faye Bowers: Well, I think the other three panelists have done a very good job of laying out all the underlying issues of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. I, as Marty mentioned, report on national security issues, which is mainly the United States' war on terror and certainly looking at the Saudi aspects of that -- what they do. I traveled to Saudi Arabia last December to report and write a four-part series on the effort Saudi Arabia is making alone both in security and financial and other types of reforms and what they're doing jointly with the United States and other partners. I talked to a broad array of people, from officials in various levels of government to consular officers at other embassies to a broad array of women, a group of schoolchildren -- that was extremely delightful -- and I even got invited by 12 conservative Wahhabis to [an informal discussion session] one night. So, I had a really interesting sort of overall picture of the country presented to me.

Indeed, I found reform was taking place or at least a great discussion of reform. Almost everyone I talked to seemed to be really excited about the possibilities for the future. They seemed to have really bought into Saudi Arabia's efforts to track down the terrorists and were on board with that. I think the religious and educational reforms are another story. That's something we would see in our country as moving at a snail's pace. But to them, I think, it was rather earthshaking.

So with that, I think we'll just let you get on to your questions..

[The question and answer segment is provided as part two.]

Copyright �2004 by Federal News Service, Inc.