U.S. well-served by Saudis
Wyche Fowler, Jr., Mark Weston
Of the six Arab nations President Bush is visiting this week, four are monarchies: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Three of the royal families control over 40 percent of the Earth's oil reserves: the al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, the al-Sabah of Kuwait and the al-Nahayan of Abu Dhabi in the UAE. We are fortunate that all three families are American allies. It is natural for Americans to be suspicious of kings because our nation began by rebelling against one in 1776, but if the U.S. is to have any Arab friends at all, we cannot spurn the support of monarchies.
By far the most powerful royal family is the al-Saud, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the world's only country named after a family. Saudi Arabia is easy to criticize. Women cannot drive, work with men or travel without a man's permission, and the religious police, though less assertive than they used to be, still harass women if they see the slightest bit of hair, arm or ankle. Worse, until 2001 the Saudi people carelessly sent millions of dollars abroad to schools that taught Muslim extremism and to charities that turned out to be fronts for al-Qaida. In November 2007 a Saudi court sentenced a female victim of gang rape to 200 lashes and six months in jail because prior to the rapes she had been in a car with a young man who was not her relative, a verdict overturned only when King Abdullah issued a pardon.
Yet Saudi Arabia has also been a steadfast ally of the West since 1915, first of Britain and then of the United States. Even during the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, when relations were at their worst, the Saudis still sent oil to the U.S. military forces in Vietnam.
Saudi Arabia has modernized much faster than people realize. Sixty years ago, most Saudi men and nearly all Saudi women were illiterate and lived in mud-brick houses. Now most Saudis enjoy modern conveniences and have at least a high school education. Under King Abdullah, newspapers, the Internet and satellite television have ended the monopoly on discussion that Muslim clerics enjoyed until recently. Abdullah has also enacted more than 40 commercial laws to help improve the country's business climate and expand its nonoil economy.
Social progress slow
Women today outnumber men almost three-to-two at Saudi universities. Nearly every Saudi agrees that women will have more rights soon, but even educated women seem content to move cautiously because their goal, many say, is not to free themselves from men, but with men. Few of the Saudi women we talked with would trade places with their American sisters and give up the protection of their extended families. To women in Saudi Arabia, the possibility of raising children as a single mother without any money from brothers, uncles and cousins seems even more demeaning than having to wear a full veil and not being able to drive.
Whether or not we are pleased with Saudi Arabia's social progress, the kingdom is central to the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. King Abdullah's 2002 proposal, endorsed by the Arab League, to establish normal relations with Israel in return for a withdrawal to Israel's pre-1967 borders, remains the basis of the peace initiative renewed by the Bush administration at Annapolis. No peace in Israel and Palestine can succeed unless it has the approval of the Saudi monarchy; President Bush would do well to heed the advice he will hear from King Abdullah this week, something he did not do before our invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It is distressing today to see the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001 aggravated by uninformed commentary about Saudi Arabia in many Western publications and broadcasts, often by people who have never been to the country. One mistake people make is to attribute al-Qaida's violence primarily to the Saudi form of Islam, Wahhabism. This religious movement, which dates from the 1740s, is mainly motivated by monotheism, not jihad, for it emerged as a reaction to the idolatry and superstition of the times. It is just one of several Muslim puritanical movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, the Deobandi movement in India and the Janiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam political party in Pakistan. To lump them together and condemn Wahhabism as the key influence behind global terrorism is a common but serious error.
No good alternative
After 9/11, it took the Saudi government more than a year to fully appreciate the fact that homegrown terrorism had become a major problem. Since 2002, however, the Saudis have killed over 150 terrorists and captured 1,000 more. They have shared valuable information with the FBI and CIA, stopped all Saudi public and private charities from sending money abroad, and fired or retired 1,300 militant clerics and forbidden them to preach. The Saudis have also begun the lengthy process of replacing millions of religious schoolbooks that contain hostile references to Christians and Jews.
To cite cultural differences, however great, as a reason to end America's longstanding alliance with the Saudi kingdom makes no sense, for the prospect of another government friendlier to the United States assuming power in Saudi Arabia is nil. The royal family mediates between conservative clerics and Western-educated businessmen and reformers. Neither group is satisfied. Clerics warn of the danger of changing too fast, liberals warn of the peril of moving too slowly � which suggests the royal family performs its mediation with care and skill.
Americans on both the right and the left who want the Saudi monarchy to fall are shortsighted and na�ve. They ignore the hard fact that the Saudi people are more conservative, anti-Israeli and anti-American than the ruling family. The alternative to Saudi Arabia's royal family today is not some Arabic-speaking version of the Swedish parliament, but a Sunni version of Iran's Shi'ite theocracy.
America's 60-year friendship with the Saudi government needs to be nurtured, not censured. Without Saudi Arabia as an ally, the world's oil supplies would be less secure, and peace between Israel and Palestine is improbable.
� Wyche Fowler Jr. is chairman of the Middle East
Institute. He served as U.S. ambassador to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 1996 to 2001. Mark Weston is the author of "Prophets and Princes: Saudi Arabia From Muhammad to the Present."
This oped appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Jan 7, 2008
and is reprinted here with permission.
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