Saudi Arabia - Thomas Lippman Interview

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Item of Interest
September 30, 2007

SUSRIS EXCLUSIVE

Saudi Arabian Students in America
A Conversation With
Thomas Lippman

Editor's Note:

A tour of Middle Tennessee by Middle East Institute scholar and veteran foreign correspondent Thomas Lippman included discussions with Saudi Arabian students from Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee. SUSRIS is pleased today to share his observations on questions arising from student exchanges in general and the perspectives of the Saudi students he met.

This SUSRIS Exclusive interview with Lippman is the second item in a series of articles about his speaking tour with the Tennessee World Affairs Council. For four days last week he met university and high school students, civic organizations, international students and others in a variety of venues and forums. You can find more information about the visit at a new SUSRIS Special Section -- click here.

Saudi Arabian Students in America
A Conversation With Thomas Lippman

SUSRIS: Today we are pleased to be joined by Tom Lippman, Adjunct Scholar at the Middle East Institute and veteran foreign correspondent including tours in the Middle East as Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. Thanks for being with us, Tom.

Thomas Lippman: My pleasure.

SUSRIS: You recently had an opportunity to talk with Saudi Arabian students at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville Tennessee. Can you give us a summary of what issues were important to them and what you learned from them?

Lippman: Well it was very interesting to talk to them. These are young men who, they�re not here as representatives of their government. They are here to get their engineering degrees and to master English. And they�re in Cookeville Tennessee, which is a little bit isolated. It�s not as if they were in Manhattan, you know. But they gave me an opportunity to think about the larger issue of Saudi students returning to the United States.

As you well know in the year or two after 9-11 there was a very, very sharp drop-off, an alarming drop-off, in people to people contact between the two countries. Whatever was going on between the governments, the traditional way of Saudi Arabia sending students to the United States to come home educated in modern technology and modern sciences to work for the development of their country was really in jeopardy.

At the time, I went to Saudi Arabia and I encountered quite a few people who simply said they were afraid to come here, and those who were not afraid to come were not coming because they could not get visas -- the sheer difficulty of it!

I think with the passage of time, with the commitment on the Saudi side to increase the flow of students, the general easing of visa requirements to go to Saudi Arabia and the need for business contacts, and the commitment by American diplomats -- the recognition by Americans that bringing Saudi students here is a good idea -- I think we are beginning to get a handle on this.

There was a time when it seemed as if everybody I talked to in Saudi Arabia had some horror story about how his brother�s daughter couldn�t come back and finish her degree at Stanford or somewhere. Because when she went home she lost her visa. It is still true that Saudi students cannot, however fully vetted by whatever authority, they cannot get multiple entry visas. Once they go home they have to start over. But there were apparently more than 11 thousand visas issued to Saudi students last year. That�s the last year for which I have any numbers. And it�s true that the overall number of visas issued to Saudis is still down by more than 50% from the level it was at before 9-11, and it is more difficult for Saudis to get visas.

As you know they can only get their visas in Riyadh no matter where they live and work in Saudi Arabia. They have to go to Riyadh to get their visas. Other American diplomatic posts over there don�t issue visas anymore.

I think the fact that the students are here, that they are not afraid to be here, that the Saudi government is committed to sending them here in increasing numbers, that American officials at every level recognize the importance of this issue -- I think those are positive signs. I think the trend is upward. It�s an issue that has at least stabilized, the deterioration has stopped.

If you accept the premise, which we always have, going back sixty years that it�s a good idea to do this, that it�s a good idea to have young Saudis to come here, then I think we�ve we�re back on a positive course.

SUSRIS: Let�s look at the question of what the impact has been. As author of �Inside the Mirage� you�re in as good a position as anyone to comment on the issue of bringing Saudi Arabians to the United States in the early years of the relationship and what the impact has been on strengthening the relationship.

Lippman: It�s really been remarkable. Going back to the earliest days of American presence and investment in Saudi Arabia with the development of the oil industry by Aramco over in the Eastern Province, young Saudis who, in no previous generation, had the opportunity for a serious university education, not in their own country or anywhere else, were selected by Aramco as promising individuals and sent to the United States to get the technological, geological education that they would need to contribute to their own enterprise over there.

One of the best-known examples is the current Saudi oil minister ali-Naimi who was a diminutive teenage �go-fer� when he started out at Aramco, I guess in the 1940�s. Aramco sent him to Lehigh to get his undergraduate degree and then he went to graduate school and today he is the oil minister of Saudi Arabia.

Not everybody gets to be oil minister but over the years tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Saudi students have come to the United States, gotten their education, and have gone home to be the economic pillars, and social leaders of modern Saudi Arabia.

I�ve always been struck by the fact that the Saudis who come here and get their education, having completed their studies, go home and contribute to the economic productivity and social development of Saudi Arabia.

Plenty of students from other countries once they get here try to stay because they don�t won�t to go home or don�t have opportunities at home. But the Saudis go home and take with them an understanding of America, friendship with Americans, and it has been very positive. I�m personally encouraged to see that although we�re not at the level that we were at before 9-11 we�re certainly now on a positive curve.

SUSRIS: Did you get any indication as to how the students you talked to are received in the United States? How are they integrated in the campus life? Do they feel comfortable in their new American environment?

Lippman: They seemed to be quite comfortable. Both of them, the two that I talked to the other day from Tennessee Tech -- I�ve talked to others elsewhere --but both of them had been elsewhere before. One of them was in North Dakota and one of them was in North Carolina, before they came to Tennessee Tech so they have seen other parts of the country. They said that they found Americans to be at least polite, often effusively friendly. Nobody seemed afraid of them and they didn�t have any reason to be afraid of Americans.

They found a campus life where there were many Muslim students from other countries, and a Muslim center where they could to their prayers and their Ramadan Iftar. They were surprisingly, in my opinion, surprisingly upbeat.

You know generally when Saudi students are sent here they go to whatever university they can get into, or whatever university they are sent to. That usually doesn�t mean Harvard, or Columbia or Stanford. It often means lesser-known institutions on the world scale, for example Tennessee Tech. Not to belittle those institutions, but just to say that they go to places where they can get a perfectly good education, not for status reasons. You know they�re not the kids who think it�s the end of the world if they don�t get into Yale. It�s not like that at all. They are here to learn engineering and economics and communications technology and geology and go home and put them to work in Saudi Arabia, and they do that.

SUSRIS: Any last observations on the situation with Saudi students coming to the United States in terms of numbers, trends, welcoming?

Lippman: There is still a conflict within the US government. It is essentially between the diplomats who want to do more to bring more students, and more Saudis in general, to the United States, to make visas easier to get, to extend the number of multiple entry visas. It is a conflict between those people and the security people who have an understandable concern to make sure that we don�t again allow into this country people who wish us harm and do violence to Americans.

That tension is built into the nature of the world wide situation in which we find ourselves and I can only hope and believe as they say that everyone is working in good faith to try to resolve it.

SUSRIS: Well it sounds like the system is working through some of the problems and achieving at least a little bit of balance as demonstrated by the increase in the number of Saudi Arabian students that are in the United States.

Tom Lippman, thanks for sharing your observations on this important element in the relationship.

Lippman: You�re very welcome.

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.

[Mr. Lippman was interviewed in the editorial offices of SUSRIS.org in Cookeville, Tennessee on September 27, 2007.]

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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