< continued from - Summary/Intro
[Part 1] >
The Primacy of Stability
The Saudi foreign policy agenda toward Iraq, now and for the foreseeable future, can be summed up in a single word: stability. As early as November 2003, Adel al-Jubeir, the foreign affairs adviser to then-Crown Prince Abdullah, told a press conference in Washington, "We are concerned that the situation in Iraq, unless we deal with it in a positive way, could erode and unravel."[1] Within less than a year, Saudi officials were privately describing the situation in Iraq as nothing short of chaotic, and the Saudi media had become openly critical of the optimistic assessments of progress in Iraq coming out of the White House.
This emphasis on stability is, in part, characteristic of the Saudi worldview in general.
On both a governmental and an individual basis, Saudis are temperamentally uncomfortable with disorder and unpredictability, which is why the Saudi government has traditionally moved slowly and with extreme caution on issues both foreign and domestic. In the case of Iraq, however, Riyadh's fear of instability is firmly grounded in concrete threats to Saudi national and dynastic interests. As Saudi officials regularly point out, the kingdom's longest international border is with Iraq. It is, for most of its length, remote, undemarcated, and undefended, and, for reasons that have shifted over time, has always been a matter of security concern to the Saudi regime. In recent decades, the concerns about the security of the border were primarily military. During and after the first Gulf War, the size and perceived capabilities of Iraqi military forces, combined with the evident hostility the Saddam Hussein regime harbored toward its conservative monarchical neighbor, forced Saudi decision makers to treat the border as a possible avenue of attack.
But conventional military attack was far from the only threat Saudi leaders feared from Iraq. The difficulty of patrolling in remote desert areas, combined with the ingrained tribal traditions of easy movement across borders, made northern Saudi Arabia,
western Iraq, and eastern Jordan a beehive of smuggling activity. In happier times, what Riyadh was most concerned about was liquor and narcotics, and to a lesser degree firearms. With what the Saudis see as the collapse of government in Iraq, the uncontrolled flow of terrorist operatives in both directions, bringing with them heavy arms pilfered from the former regime, has become the overriding issue. The Saudi government's biggest fear is that disorder will spill over its own borders in the form of experienced, battle-trained fighters who can easily infiltrate into the kingdom, bringing with them newly honed skills in bomb-making and other aspects of insurgent warfare and joining with al Qaeda elements already active in Saudi Arabia.
Conversely, Riyadh also sees the ability of Saudi Arabia's own domestic terrorists to slip through the porous borders -- not just into Iraq but into Kuwait as well -- as an important complication in its own antiterrorist campaign.
It has raised the need for agreements on hot pursuit across these boundaries on several occasions, but without meeting any receptiveness on the part of its neighbors.
The United States for its part has publicly expressed satisfaction with Saudi efforts on its own border with Iraq,[2] but the flow of Saudi terrorists and others seeking to join a "jihad" in Iraq by way of Syria has become a major issue in relations between Riyadh and Washington, as well as between Riyadh and Baghdad. Although foreign jihadists constitute a relatively small proportion of the insurgent fighters in Iraq, they make up the vast majority of the suicide bombers, with some analysts estimating as many as 75 percent of the suicide attacks carried out by Saudis.[3] Moreover, Iraqi officials and U.S. military officers have increasingly evinced skepticism as to whether Saudi authorities are really exerting themselves energetically to prevent Saudi radicals from seeking opportunities for martyrdom outside the kingdom�s borders.
From the Saudi perspective, however, the more serious problem is the potential flow coming from north to south. Given the difficulty of effectively controlling the border, the Saudis have very real fears that an anarchic Iraq growing out of the U.S. occupation has become, as Adel al-Jubeir put it, "a magnet for terrorists."[4] They see the struggle in Iraq replicating to some degree the 1980s experience of foreign mujahideen in Afghanistan, where the experience of fighting the "infidels" not only developed the Afghan Arabs' combat skills but also hardened and reinforced their ideological dedication to violent political change in the name of Islam.[5] Indeed, Interior Minister Nayif bin Abdul Aziz acknowledged in July 2005 that "we expect the worst from those who went to Iraq," predicting that they would be even more dangerous than those who had fought in Afghanistan, although at the same time Prince Nayif asserted that his forces were prepared to meet that danger.[6] The Saudis see this phenomenon both as a threat to themselves and an acceleration of the vicious circle in Iraq: disorder provides opportunities for terrorists, whose operations foster even greater disorder, drawing in yet more terrorists. This circle alone would drive them to support almost any effort the United States may make to restore order in Iraq.
The prospect of Iraq's splitting apart as a result of Kurdish separatism does not seem to be as high on the Saudis' list of concerns as the threat of a general breakdown of order and governmental authority. In fact, Saudi officials have said that the threat of Kurdish separatism in Iraq's north has been exaggerated and have been quick to praise Kurdish leaders for not aggravating separatist sentiments since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. At the same time, they express hope that Turkey's role in the international community, and in particular its aspirations for membership in the European Union, will have the effect of restraining any ambitions Ankara may harbor toward northern Iraq.
Nevertheless, Saudis do concede the possible risk that unbridled Kurdish aspirations might provoke Turkish defensive measures. If the United States, the new Iraqi government, or the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq are unable to quell the resumption of Kurdish Workers Party activity in Turkey, the result might well be renewed Turkish military incursions. Those incursions could, in turn, invite further destabilizing interference from other neighbors as they attempt to counter Turkey. Above all, Riyadh would be gravely concerned if the Kurds did in fact attempt to break away from Iraq, seeing the country's fragmentation as creating the prospect for even greater foreign meddling on the kingdom's northern borders and adding yet another flash point to an already unstable neighborhood.
Of greater concern to the Saudis are the ambitions of Iran, Turkey, and Syria in the region, and particularly about the possibility of their colluding with one another. Iran, of course, is a particular concern, and the announcement on July 7 of a military agreement between Iran and Iraq undoubtedly raised some eyebrows in Riyadh, although any reaction was quickly drowned out by the news of the London terrorist bombings the same day. In any event, the Saudis are clearly concerned about what they perceive as ongoing Iranian attempts to infiltrate Iraqi society through the Shia community and build long-term influence in the country. For example, as early as mid-2004, Saudi officials were contending that Iranians are buying up property in southern Iraq with exactly this kind of long-term plan in mind�it is not what Iran might do next month or next year that worries them, they say, but what Teheran�s aims are ten years from now, or beyond.[7] The political resurgence of hard-liners in Teheran, capped by the election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as president of Iran, has only reinforced Saudi suspicions on this front. The clearest evidence of this concern can be found in Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal's
remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2005:
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The Iranians now
go in this pacified area that the American forces have pacified, and they go into every government of Iraq, pay money, install their own people, put their own -- even establish police forces for them, arms and militias that are there and reinforce their presence in these areas. And they are being protected in doing this by the British and the American forces in the area.. [T]o us it seems out of this world that you do this. We fought a war together to keep Iran from occupying Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason.[8]
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< continued - A
Context of Distrust
[Part 3] >
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Notes contained in Part
8 >
