Sponsored by the Middle East Policy Council

[First in a series]

The Saudi-U.S. Relations Information Service would like to thank the Middle East Policy Council for permission to share this series with our readers.  These presentations were made at the 35th Capitol Hill Conference on U.S. Middle East Policy on January 23, 2004.  The conference was hosted by the Middle East Policy Council.  This item provides the introduction and comments by MEPC President Chas Freeman.  Individual transcripts will be provided separately by email and posted on-line -- see links below. 

We invite you to participate in a discussion of this issue with other SUSRIS readers and web site visitors.  Visit the Discussion Forum to join the dialogue.  Also check below for related items published in the Saudi-American Forum and the Saudi-US Relations Information Service.

Middle East Policy Council
35th in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy
Saudi Arabia: Enemy or Friend?

Speakers:

• David Aufhauser
  Former General Counsel, Department of the Treasury
• Frank Anderson
  Former Chief, Near East and South Asia Division, CIA
• David E. Long 
  Retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer -- Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Morocco and Jordan
• Nathaniel Kern
  President, Foreign Reports, Inc.
• Hussein Shobokshi
  President, Shobokshi Development & Trading; Managing Director, Okaz Printing and Publishing

Moderator/Discussant:

• Chas. W. Freeman, Jr.
  President, Middle East Policy Council

CHAS. W. FREEMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, I think we should come to order. Good morning. I'm Chas Freeman, and it is my honor and sometimes pleasure to be president of the Middle East Policy Council. For those of you who may not know us, we are a small, struggling, impecunious NGO about 25 years old. We do three things:

We come up here on Capitol Hill and we raise neglected or politically incorrect questions for discussion. Saudi Arabia has achieved the status of political incorrectness, so it's appropriate to have this discussion today.

Second, as the first item in our quarterly, Middle East Policy, which is, I'm proud to say, the most often cited in the field, we lead off with an edited transcript of these sessions, the quality of which I think has been exceptional, my own remarks notwithstanding over the recent years.

And third, we, throughout the country, conduct workshops -- teacher training workshops -- to help high school teachers learn how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We've trained something over 14,000 teachers. We reach 1.2 million kids a year and confuse them with a fact or two that they otherwise would not encounter.

We do these three things and we don't really do much of anything else. So if this moves you to contribute, I'd be very happy, but I'll halt the commercial and proceed to the main topic.

Is Saudi Arabia an enemy or a friend? Or if it is an enemy, will it become once again a friend; or if it is a friend, is it on the way to becoming an enemy? The two governments, for very sound reasons, assert that we are friends. None of the interests that drew up together before 9/11 have been altered in any respect. Saudi Arabia still has a wondrous supply of oil and we are still gluttonous consumers of oil. Saudi Arabia still is the birthplace and location of two of the holiest cities of Islam and the United States is, if anything, even more concerned about the temper of Islam than we were. And Saudi Arabia has not moved. It still sits between Asia and Europe, and you cannot travel between Asia and Europe without flying over or circumnavigating Saudi Arabia.

And to these three interests a fourth has been added, the issue of terrorism, where the same organizations and individuals target the royal family and monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and us. We have a common enemy in al Qaeda. So not surprisingly, the two governments are interested in promoting cooperation, but the two peoples have a different view, and both governments find themselves defending this relationship against widespread popular opposition.

With these few introductory remarks about the theme, let me just take a minute to give some impressions of Saudi Arabia, where I was a week ago. And we're fortunate that, Nat, you were there at the same time; Hussein, you live there. So we have up here some very, very fresh viewpoints. Frankly, what I saw in Saudi Arabia startled me. I think everyone knows that the last five or six years have been dynamic in terms of Saudi foreign policy. Saudi Arabia has now settled all of its borders and has some sort of dispute remaining about mineral rights at the Buraymi Oasis, but aside from that the border with Yemen, the border with Qatar and border with Kuwait -- the sea border with Kuwait -- have all been settled.

The crown prince, of course, took a major and very brave initiative, standing traditional Saudi policy on its head with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab disputes. Instead of confirming previous policy, which was Saudi Arabia would be the last Arab country to normalize with Israel, he proclaimed that Saudi Arabia would be the first and would lead the rest of the Arab League in normalizing with Israel, if a satisfactory peace agreement could be agreed between Israel and its neighbors and its fellow habitats of the former Palestine Mandate.

The crown prince also has led an effort internationally to promote Arab reform, and more interestingly -- and this is where I found my surprise -- that pledge of reform seems to be being implemented. There is a vigorous Islamic debate going on, or a debate among Islamic thinkers in Saudi Arabia, instigated by the crown prince. There is a far freer atmosphere of discussion on public policy issues generally than anyone can recall. The schools, in my view, have been reclaimed from the right wing religious extremists who had, to some extent, gained control of them.

Popular support in the struggle against terror is high, since Saudis observing the May and November bombings of compounds have been able to see that the objective of the terrorists is not just to kill Americans and other Westerners, but to destroy the liberal and cosmopolitan element in Saudi Arabia itself. Middle class Saudis, in other words, are the target as much as anyone in this room.

More startling yet, the economy is booming. The stock market was up 75 percent last year in Riyadh. Construction is everywhere in evidence. Public debt is being retired. A lot of money has been repatriated, much of it from the United States, which is now seen as a politically risky place to invest, and it's come home and it is being used for good purposes.

WTO accession negotiations, which have been in the doldrums, are now in the final sprint, and some predict that as early as February the United States and Saudi Arabia may be able to conclude those discussions with a multilateral session in May, bringing Saudi Arabia finally into conformity with global norms in the area of trade and investment.

So the sense that I had, and some ex-pats, in Saudi Arabia when I was ambassador there from '89 to '92, that the Kingdom's secret motto was progress without change, something only Saudis seem to be able to manage, has been replaced. There is clearly real change going on, and what's more, much of it seems to represent progress.

There are also negative things, of course. Saudi Arabia was the peaceable Kingdom. It is now full of roadblocks, police checkpoints, jersey barriers and barricades, given the high degree of concern - justifiably high degree of concern about domestic terrorism. I think all of these developments, with the possible exception of the latter are, however, essentially invisible to Americans, and the whole relationship is colored by mutual antagonism and antipathy at the popular level that resembles nothing so much as the rage and frustration and anger and bitterness of a divorced spouse or an abandoned lover or a friend who has been betrayed. Unfortunately, neither government seems to have a strategy for changing minds, though it's clear that Saudis are trying harder to change American minds than Americans are to change Saudi minds.

Most Americans, I think, are probably unaware of the shift in attitudes toward us, which I just described, but it's very evident, not just anecdotally but in figures. Applications for visas for the United States are now well below 20 percent of what they were prior to 9/11. Institutions like Saudi Aramco, which were the emblems of Americanization and the American-Saudi connection, now send their trainees elsewhere - almost entirely elsewhere. Saudi Aramco, which used to rebuff European and oriental businesses by saying that we do business the American way and we don't understand your way, so either you conform to American ways or don't do business here, is now visibly learning how to do business European and Japanese style.

So Americans are finding ourselves increasingly displaced, in both the cultural and commercial realms, by our competitors, and the American community in Saudi Arabia has shrunk to a mere fraction of what it was before.

All of this is by way of introduction to the discussion today, where we have an exceptionally well-qualified panel. Those of you who have been to our programs before or who have participated in them know that we try to limit the presentations to about 10 or 12 minutes. In fact, I behave in a thoroughly thuggish and disgusting manner. As the time limit begins I have been known to get up and move menacingly in the direction of those at the podium, and even though some of them are bigger than I am, I assure them I will throw them off the podium if they go on too long.

We're going to proceed in the order of the program, which I hope you have. On the back of the program are the biographies of the speakers, and I'm not going to reiterate those in any detail.

Briefly, I think David Aufhauser, who was until recently, very recently, general counsel at the Treasury Department and who is now at CSIS doing research, both on the financing of terrorism and on economic sanctions more generally, will go first. Frank Anderson, who we welcome back to this podium, former director of CIA on the operational side for the region and now a very distinguished member of Foreign Reports will go second. David Long, retired Foreign Service officer with extensive experience in the Gulf, will talk about charitable giving, religion, and educational matters. And Nat Kern, who is the president of Foreign Reports, and as I said, just back from a visit to Saudi Arabia, will address the economic modernization of the Kingdom, correct everything I said about the economy, and refute my remarks about Saudi Aramco. And finally Hussein Shobokshi, who is the head of Okaz publishing house, and among many other distinctions has been - was it Morgan Stanley financial analyst? -- and done all kinds of other strange things over the course of his life, but who is now a power among the molders of Saudi public opinion, will correct all of us and set us straight with a firsthand Saudi perspective on the issues.

Links to transcripts of individual speakers:

• David Aufhauser
  Former General Counsel, Department of the Treasury
• Frank Anderson
  Former Chief, Near East and South Asia Division, CIA
• David E. Long 
  Retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer -- Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Morocco and Jordan
• Nathaniel Kern
  President, Foreign Reports, Inc.
• Hussein Shobokshi
  President, Shobokshi Development & Trading; Managing Director, Okaz Printing and Publishing

Ambassador Chas. W. Freeman, Jr. succeeded Senator George McGovern as President of the Middle East Policy Council on December 1, 1997.

Ambassador Freeman was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993-94, earning the highest public service awards of the Department of Defense for his roles in designing a NATO-centered post-Cold War European security system and in reestablishing defense and military relations with China. He served as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm). He was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the historic U.S. mediation of Namibian independence from South Africa and Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola.

Chas. Freeman served as Deputy Chief of Mission and Charg� d'Affaires in the American embassies at both Bangkok (1984-1986) and Beijing (1981-1984). He was Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 1979-1981. He was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon's path-breaking visit to China in 1972. In addition to his Middle Eastern, African, East Asian and European diplomatic experience, he served in India.

Ambassador Freeman earned a certificate in Latin American studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, certificates in both the national and Taiwan dialects of Chinese from the former Foreign Service Institute field school in Taiwan, a BA from Yale University and a JD from the Harvard Law School. He is the recipient of numerous high honors and awards. He was elected to the Academy of American Diplomacy in 1995. He is the author of The Diplomat's Dictionary (Revised Edition) and Arts of Power, both published by the United States Institute of Peace in 1997. Ambassador Freeman is Chairman of the Board of Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based business development firm that specializes in arranging international joint ventures, acquisitions, and other business operations for its American and foreign clients. He also serves as Co-Chair of the United States-China Policy Foundation and Vice Chair of the Atlantic Council of the United States. He is a member of the boards of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the regional security centers of the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Washington World Affairs Council.

Previous Positions
1995 - Present Chairman of the Board, Projects International, Inc.
1994-95 Distinguished Fellow, United States Institute of Peace
1993-94 Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs
1992-93 Distinguished Fellow, Institute for National Strategic Studies
1989-92 U S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
1986-89 Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, African Affairs

Recent Honors
1995 Elected to American Academy of Diplomacy
1994 Distinguished Public Service Award (Policy innovation in Europe)
1994 Distinguished Public Service Award (Contributions in Defense Policy)
1994 Order of 'Abd Al-'Azziz, 1st Class (Diplomatic Service)
1991 Defense Meritorious Service (Desert Shield/Storm)
1991 CIA Medallion (Desert Shield/Storm)
1991 Distinguished Honor Award (Desert Shield/Storm)

Recent Major Publications and Writings
Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy, U.S. Institute of Peace Press, Washington, D.C., 1997.
The Diplomat's Dictionary, Second Edition, revised, U.S. Institute of Peace Press, Washington, D.C. 1997

Source: MEPC.org  

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