Late in
Senator John Kerry's May 27 speech in Seattle explaining
his national security strategy, he did what he does in
nearly every foreign-policy speech that he gives -
excoriate Saudi Arabia for supporting terrorism and
President George W Bush for supporting the Saudis and
failing to end America's dependence on foreign oil.
"If we are serious about energy independence,
then we can finally be serious about confronting the
role of Saudi Arabia in financing and providing
ideological support for al-Qaeda and other terrorist
groups," said Kerry, neatly eliding several election
hot-button issues. The presumptive Democratic candidate
for the presidency went on to promise that he would
impose "tough financial sanctions" and "name and shame"
nations that launder money for terrorists. "To put it
simply," he warned, "we will not do business as usual
with Saudi Arabia."
Saudi-bashing has been a
national sport in the United States ever since September
11 and revelations that not only was former Saudi
national Osama bin Laden the mastermind behind the
attacks, but 15 of the 19 hijackers had Saudi
citizenship. With effortless demagoguery, the Kerry
campaign has sought to capitalize on this, playing to
Saudi bashers of all political stripes by promising to
do what the Bush administration, with its long ties to
the House of Saud, hasn't: confront the supposed real
villains of the "war on terror" and magically "free
America from its dangerous dependence on Middle East
oil".
There is only one problem with Kerry's
strategy: he may actually win the election. And on his
first day in office reality is going to take a hefty
bite out of his rhetoric as he grapples with the
strategic necessity of the longstanding US-Saudi
alliance and the complexity of the situation inside the
kingdom, which is presently reeling from attacks on
foreigners and its security services. These realizations
could force some embarrassing backtracking.
Bipartisan scapegoating John Kerry's
pillorying of the Saudis is certainly good politics.
From the airwaves of Air America, the new left-wing
radio station, to the pages of the neo-conservative
Weekly Standard, and in a raft of books with titles like
Hatred's Kingdom, by Ariel Sharon's adviser Dore
Gold, and Sleeping with the Devil, by former
Central Intelligence Agency agent Robert Baer, the
Saudis are lambasted as tyrannical, misogynistic,
clandestine purveyors of terror.
Kerry has
scored points with the pro-Israel right, who resent the
Saudis for supporting anti-Israel groups. "The Saudi
regime openly and enthusiastically supports Palestinian
terrorist groups, such as Hamas," he wrote in the Jewish
weekly, the Forward. "The Saudis cannot pick and choose
among terrorist groups." And he has pleased the left by
attacking the financial ties between the House of Bush
and the House of Saud and making insinuations about the
infamous charter flight that spirited the bin Laden
brood out of America after September 11. Finally, he has
serenaded the middle by blaming high gas prices on the
"the Saudi-George Bush gasoline tax", and Bush's failure
to strong-arm the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Nations, while repeating rumors of an election deal
between Bush and the Saudis to lower the price of oil.
Threatening the golden goose Though
politically expedient, Kerry's attacks on the US-Saudi
relationship are ill-considered. Firstly, the kind of
wholesale re-evaluation of the US-Saudi alliance he
suggests is simply unrealistic. In an era of increasing
demand for oil and depleting supplies, the United States
and world economies will be dependent on oil,
particularly from the Gulf, for decades. Saudi Arabia
currently provides 18% of the crude consumed by the
United States and commands 25% of the world's proven
reserves. With 2 million barrels of surplus production
capacity, only Saudi Arabia can keep prices stable, and
it has done so during numerous crises - most recently
after September 11 and during the Iraq war. The United
States is thus poorly positioned to tinker with its
alliance to the present regime.
While some have
speculated that the actual motivation for the invasion
of Iraq was to supplant Saudi supplies with Iraq's
prodigious reserves, the dilapidated state of Iraq's
infrastructure and the current security situation render
such a plan moot.
Kerry does have an ambitious
plan to break this dependency relationship by increasing
fuel efficiency and investing in alternative energy. "As
president, I will not stand by and allow America to be
held hostage to Saudi oil," he has written. "We can
unleash the spirit of American ingenuity to meet this
challenge." His as-yet loosely fleshed out scheme does
not fully kick in until 2020, however, and analysts are
split on whether it will be sufficient to break
America's dependence on foreign oil. What is certain is
that no amount of "ingenuity" is going to break the
dependence of the world economy, on which US prosperity
hinges, on fossil fuels any time soon.
Likewise,
Kerry's threat to "shut [Saudi Arabia] out of the US
financial system" if they don't end alleged support for
al-Qaeda is far-fetched. "The Saudis keep around a
trillion dollars in US banks and another trillion on the
stock market," wrote Baer in the Atlantic Monthly. "If
they were suddenly to withdraw all their holdings in
this country, the effect ... would be devastating." The
fine print of Kerry's remarks suggests he is cognizant
of this reality. "The truth is that, for the moment, we
have deep and inescapable energy ties - corporate and
energy dependence," he has said. This admission makes
his bluster seem all the more rash.
Kerry's
sound-bite rhetoric also trivializes the seriousness of
the crisis unfolding inside the kingdom. A low-intensity
guerilla war has left the House of Saud teetering, with
the extremists feeding off popular discontent with an
authoritarian royal house that has been unwilling or
unable to staunch the excesses of its 30,000 members,
reverse an economic tailspin, or separate itself from
unpopular US policies in the region. And the May 29
Khobar attacks, in which 22 foreign oil workers were
killed, demonstrate an ominous strategic premeditation
to the militant operations that have swept the kingdom.
While both Kerry and the Bush administration's
calls for reform in the kingdom have centered on the
need to curb "extremism", neither has echoed the calls
of Saudi reformers, liberal and conservative alike, on
the need for genuine political power-sharing. An
awareness that genuine democracy will bring to the fore
the priorities of Saudi rather than US interests may be
behind this reluctance. Some, though not all, of the
organized Saudi opposition is conservative Islamist in
nature and deeply critical of the royal family for its
alliance with the United States.
In any event,
given the unpopularity of US policies inside the
kingdom, the internal debate on Saudi Arabia's future is
not one that the United States should lend conspicuous
voice to. So for better or worse, America's position in
Saudi Arabia is married to the future of the House of
Saud for the present. It is a corrosive embrace, to be
sure, but necessary to maintain a consistent ally in a
critical region, especially when the alternatives are so
unpredictable. If a president Kerry were to ramp up the
rhetoric, he would risk destabilizing a regime whose
collapse could cause a worldwide recession.
Kerry's critique of the Bush administration's
ties to the Saudi royal family is also somewhat
disingenuous. The Saudi gravy train, an endless,
multibillion-dollar carousel of kickbacks from
"recycled" oil sales, arms shipments and industrial
contracts facilitated by companies like the Carlyle
group and Halliburton, has benefited Kerry's Democratic
colleagues as much as the Republican elite. "Almost
every Washington figure worth mentioning has been
involved with companies doing major deals with Saudi
Arabia," wrote Baer.
Kerry of
Arabia There is, of course, a grain of truth in
Kerry's assorted critiques of the Saudi government, even
though he unfairly fails to credit their efforts to
regulate Saudi charities or clamp down on the
conservative religious establishment. But there is
nevertheless something unbecoming in a candidate who has
presented himself as the anti-Bush continuously laying
into a convenient foreign scapegoat. Intentionally or
not, Kerry's attacks play heavily into racist
stereotypes of duplicitous, intolerant Arabs who spend
their leisure time teaching their children to hate.
The liberal Massachusetts senator seems
genuinely oblivious to how patronizing his tone toward
the Arab world has sounded. "We must make avoidance of a
clash of civilizations the work of our generation," he
told the Council on Foreign Relations, "engaging in an
effort to bring to the table a new face of the Arab
world - Muslim clerics, mullahs, imams and secular
leaders." In addition to offering to promote acceptable
Arab and Muslim leaders, the senator has lectured the
Arabs on their obligation to "create" a "credible"
Palestinian negotiating partner for Israel. Likewise,
his demands that that the Saudis alter their textbooks
and fire "extremist" imams not only oversimplifies the
root causes of terrorism but echoes the arrogance of the
Bush administration. "We need more than promises," from
the Saudis, Kerry has written. "We need to see the new
textbooks. We need to hear what the government-financed
clerics are preaching."
Indeed, Kerry's entire
Middle East policy is shaping up to be as one-sided and
tin-eared to Arab sensibilities as the Bush
administration's. While the candidate has presented
himself as the man to repair America's image abroad and
rebuild her alliances, his feeble critique of Bush's
Iraq policy and giddy love affair with Ariel Sharon is
unlikely to win back the disillusioned Arab masses.
As the campaign rolls towards its climax in
November, candidate Kerry continues to perfect an
anti-Saudi routine that offers a cost-free shot to
Bush's solar plexus. If he really intends to win the
race, however, he should consider pulling that
particular punch. Whatever the merits of his arguments,
he risks oversimplifying a complex strategic conundrum
and scapegoating a loyal ally. A president Kerry could
end up repeating Bush's Iraq blunder by painting the
United States into a rhetorical corner in which its
vital interests are at stake and in which it has no
obvious strategy for success.
Ashraf
Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern
affairs based in New York and London.
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