Sleeping With The Devil (34 page)

    THE OCTOBER 2001 POLL didn’t answer why the Saudis support bin Laden,
though I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s that bin Laden dares to do what the
United States of America refuses to do: stand up to the thieves who rule his country. Or maybe,
as Washington’s neoconservatives say, it’s that they just hate the West and its values.
Whatever the reason, the practical effect is that a democratic election in Saudi Arabia would
bring to power a militant Islamic government more hostile than Khomeini’s Iran. Good-bye,
cheap, subsidized oil. Hello, $144 a barrel, just as Osama promised.

    The only reason this fairy tale about the triumph of desert democracy
lives on, as far as I can tell, is that it allows those who matter in Washington to sleep
soundly in their Georgetown town houses and suburban mini-mansions and faux châteaus. If Riyadh
is only an election removed from a European-style parliament, then it’s okay to keep grabbing
for the petrodollars; okay to turn a blind eye to the billion-dollar commissions; okay to
conveniently forget that the ambassador prince who showers gifts and sinecures all over
Washington is as deep in the muck as the princes back home; okay to ignore the fact that even
when the Al Sa’ud were offered Osama bin Laden’s head on a platter by the Sudanese, they said
no, thank you; okay to build up that client list and make the calls to sell those private jets
so you can pull down your seven-figure stock-option profits.

    Ned Walker, who is all for democratization in Saudi Arabia, is
president of the Middle East Institute, supported in part by Saudi princes who would rather
crawl on their knees to Mecca than sit still for a popular vote. Chas Freeman, who is so
certain that the Saudi monarchy is leaving no stone unturned in its search for al Qaeda, is
president of the Middle East Policy Council, whose board members, last I looked, included Frank
Carlucci and Fuad Rihani, research and development director of the Saudi bin Laden Group.

    And those are just the small fry, for God’s sake, the innocents - the
ones who are feeding off the crumbs left from all those consulting firms run by former CIA
directors and onetime secretaries of state. At the same time the Defense Policy Board was
shocking official Washington by suggesting that Saudi Arabia might be the real evil axis of
global terrorism, the board’s chairman, Richard Perle, was serving as a managing partner of
Trireme Partners, a venture-capital firm that invests in companies specializing in technology,
goods, and services related to homeland security and defense. While Perle was excoriating the
Saudis and urging war against Iraq, his partners were meeting with leading Saudi businessmen in
an effort to raise $100 million in new investments, according to an article by Seymour Hersh in
the March 17, 2003,
New Yorker
. The chief middleman in arranging the meetings, Hersh
writes, was Adnan Khashoggi, the same Khashoggi who seems to have conveniently left behind that
briefcase stuffed with $1 million during a visit to Richard Nixon at San Clemente. Hersh writes
that Perle himself took part in one of the meetings - in France, at a Marseilles restaurant in
early January 2003 - but he assured Hersh that he would never confuse his public and private
roles. Perle resigned subsequently as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This pattern of
behavior that Sy Hersh paints is one repeated time and again in the nation’s capital. Ask the
Saudis for money, and if they don’t pony up, squeeze them for it. Foment crisis, then figure
out how to capitalize on it.

    This fantasy of a democracy is corrupting foolishness. We all know what
version of “democracy” the State Department has in mind for Saudi Arabia. (Think Kuwait.) It’s
insulting to try to make us believe it’s the real thing, just as it’s degrading for all those
executive-branch officials and spokespersons who get trotted out to pay lip service to the
myth. Say that the truth is something else for long enough, and you’ll forget what the truth
really is.

    There are something like seventeen million Saudis. (It’s the five
million plus “guest workers” who bring the total population up over twenty-two million.) The
average Saudi is too poor, oppressed, and afraid to express any sort of genuine political
opinion. They make do with what they’re given by the Al Sa’ud: mosques, the Qur’an, subsidized
food, one-way tickets to Afghanistan. But they’re not the people I’m talking about. I’m talking
about the people who run the country, the people who control the oil money, the people who take
the bribes and pay the protection money and fly over to Morocco whenever they want to get laid
by someone other than their eleven wives. These are the people who would rather keep Saudi
Arabia stuck in the ninth century and spend the oil money on themselves than build a stable
country.

    Washington abetted the whole thing, even encouraged the Al Sa’ud to run
a kleptocracy. The result is a kingdom built on thievery, one that nurtures terrorism, destroys
any possibility of a middle class based on property rights, and promotes slavery and
prostitution. We can’t get around the fact that the House of Sa’ud underwrites the mosque
schools that turn out the jihadists, just as it administers the charities that fund the
jihadists. It channels the anger of the jihadists against the West to distract it from the rot
in the House of Sa’ud. And by the way - in case I didn’t make myself perfectly clear earlier -
the royals wouldn’t allow a real popular vote unless you wrapped them in Semtex and attached a
burning ten-second length of detcord to help them make up their minds.

    Saudi Arabia is, in a phrase, a goddamn mess, and it’s our goddamn
mess. The United States made Saudi Arabia the private storage shed for our oil reserves. We
reaped the benefits of a steady petroleum supply at a discounted price and grabbed every Saudi
petrodollar we could lay our hands on. We taught the Saudis by example what was expected of
them and neglected the fruits of our own creation. The Saudi Arabia of today flows in a direct,
unbroken line from the $1 million that Adnan Khashoggi allegedly forgot to carry away from San
Clemente in 1968, through Boeing’s reupping Khalid bin Mahfouz as its consultant on the Saudia
airline deal, to all the hands still dipping furiously into the Saudi till even as the place
gets ready to implode.

    We can walk away from the moral consequences of our actions, but we
can’t walk away from economic consequences. We crow about democracy and talk about someday
weaning ourselves from a dependency on foreign oil, but in the entire history of America’s
dependence on foreign oil, there has never been a single honest, sustained effort to reduce
long-term U.S. petroleum consumption. The oilmen who now occupy the White House would rather
host a Marilyn Manson concert on the South Lawn than get serious about alternative fuels. Not
that I want to let the Clinton people off the hook, or the first Bush team, or the Reaganites,
Carterites, Fordites, or Nixonites: Screwing up Saudi Arabia might be the most successful
bipartisan undertaking of the last half century.

    Not all the wishing and hoping in the world will change the basic
reality of the situation, which is as follows:

    

    • The industrial world is dependent on the oil reserves of the
Islamic world and will be for decades to come, whether it’s the already developed reserves of
the largely Arab states or the soon to be developed reserves of Central Asia.

    • Of the Islamic oil states, none is more critical than Saudi
Arabia, because (a) it sits on top of the largest proven reserves; (b) it serves as the market
regulator for the entire global petroleum industry; and (c) it has the money, the political
will, and the religious zeal to pursue control of the Arab Peninsula and Central Asia.

    • Of all the oil-consuming states, none consumes more than the
United States, none enjoys anything like the most-favored-nation status that the U.S. enjoys
with the Saudis, and thus none is more dependent on Saudi oil to fulfill its appetite and to
keep doing so at a compliments-of-the-house rate.

    • If Saudi Arabia tanks, and takes along the other four
dysfunctional families in the region who collectively own 60 percent of the world’s proven oil
reserves, the industrial economies are going down with it, including the economy of the United
States of America.

    

    Like it or not, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are joined at the hip. Its
future is our future. So what can America do?

    Counterintuitive as it might seem, Syria offers one way out of the
mess. Twenty years ago, Syria was Saudi Arabia: not in the vast sums of money (it’s not a major
oil producer), not in the ruling kleptocracy, but as the epicenter of Islamic terrorism. When I
first set foot in Damascus in 1980, I estimated that Hafiz al-Asad would have maybe three or
four years before he went under. The Muslim Brothers owned the street. The mosque schools were
teaching jihad, just as the Saudi
madrasahs
do today. The mosque public-address systems
blared out a message of hate and revenge, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today. Lebanon next
door was an arms bazaar: You name it, someone had it. Asad had seized power in a military coup
in 1970. What goes around comes around, I figured; the guy’s going to get strung up on a light
pole in downtown Damascus like a lot of other Syrians. Instead, he died in his sleep at age
seventy, wasted by disease but ruler to the end.

    We’ve already been over why: the ruthless assault on the Sunni
stronghold at Hama, the way Asad took control of the mosque schools and silenced and killed
dissent when it wouldn’t shut up, his total control of the armed forces, and so on. Pretty it
wasn’t. “Democracy” it certainly isn’t. But Hafiz al-Asad forced a rule of law on the Syrian
people, the same rule of law the Al Sa’ud have refused to force on the Saudis, most notably
themselves. When Asad handed the country over to his son, it was as stable a dictatorship as
any in the Middle East.

    Whether there’s anyone in the Al Sa’ud willing to impose the rule of
law in the kingdom, I don’t know. Whether anyone has the guts or determination to even try, I’m
not sure. From what I know, Crown Prince ‘Abdallah might. He’s related to Asad through
marriage; maybe something of Syria’s determination has rubbed off on him. But ‘Abdallah will be
eighty years old soon, and he has enough enemies in the family to block anything he might dream
up. In case he or someone else wants to try, Syria is a model, much as the bloodless policy
wonks in Washington might blanch at the suggestion.

    At the end of the day, what we need in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East
is rule of law. I’m not talking about a Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, a free press, freedom
to worship, or the right to bear arms. I’m talking about something more basic - outlawing
righteous murder, jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood. That would be a start; then you could move on
to outlawing grotesque commissions, theft, and bribery. Only when you address those problems
can you think about other rights or true democracy.

    It would also help if we imposed a rule of law on ourselves, like
enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, stopping bribery, and putting an end to officials
retiring from the U.S. government on Friday and going to work for a foreign government on
Monday. A little decency in Washington - and in Europe and the rest of the world that has lived
off the oil bonanza - would go a long way toward cleaning up the mess in Saudi Arabia and
beginning the process of telling the truth about what’s going on in that country.

    Failing that, there’s always the 82nd Airborne.

    IT’S NOT LIKE the United States has never thought about seizing Arab
oil fields. On August 21, 1975, the Congressional Research Service presented to the Special
Subcommittee on Investigations of the House Committee on International Relations a document
entitled “Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study.” By the time the document was
entered into the record, the OPEC oil embargo had been over for almost a year and a half, but
the memory lingered on.

    Gerald Ford, who ascended to the presidency on Nixon’s resignation, and
the holdover secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had talked publicly about the possibility of
seizing Persian Gulf facilities should the embargo escalate into a strangulation of American
industrial capacity. Doing so, the Research Service estimated, would be no cakewalk, even in
the best of circumstances:

    

    If nonmilitary facets were entirely favorable, successful operations
would be assured
only
if this country could satisfy all aspects of a five-part mission:

    

    • Seize required oil installations intact.

    • Secure them for weeks, months, or years.

    • Restore wrecked assets rapidly.