Vodkapundit - How Did She Get My New Number?

How Did She Get My New Number?

Posted by Stephen Green · 22 August 2002

Jim Hoagland says the Saudis might be able to save themselves.

Thus the accusation of "enemy" misses the point: It gives the Saudi regime credit for a decision-making ability and a focus on regional and world affairs that it has in fact lacked for years. Saudi Arabia has stumbled into causing harm to the United States and its own interests. It has not charged in with premeditated malice.
This Saudi vacuum was not inevitable. And it may not be immutable. In the early 1970s, King Faisal mixed shrewdness and ruthlessness to make the sparsely populated kingdom a major player in world politics. In a series of interviews over a decade with Faisal, his two successors, Khalid and Fahd, and the current day-to-day leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, I developed a sense of a flawed but still workable system that could adapt, slowly, to global and local change.

Hoagland is too optimistic. The time for reform was ten years ago. Five years ago was late, but still feasible. Today, the Kingdom is the walking dead.

I’m not among those warbloggers who think the end will come in Riyadh just days after we bring our force to bear on Baghdad. I’m also not among the loons who think we can quickly and easily impose our own order on Arabia.

The reality will be more subtle. The Saudis will want to continue their current game of saying nice things to the US while giving plenty of leeway to their homegrown hotheads. The radicals will grow in numbers and in strength, until they have de facto veto power over Crown Prince (eventually King) Abdullah’s major decisions.

In other words, the Kingdom will be run tomorrow just like it is today, only more so.

There will be no dramatic breakpoint with Washington. There will be no single event we can point to and say, “Ah-hah! I told you they were evil.” Events, and leaders, and decisions, and life will keep rolling forward, with continuing mutual suspicion, reliance, regret, and, yes, genuine friendship on both sides.

Our relationship with Riyadh will become increasingly like grudge sex, only without ever the release of a bitter orgasm.

Like that twisted ex-girlfriend you can never completely detangle from, the Saudis will perform some very sweet gestures, cause a lot of grief, and sometime down the road, force us to come in and pick up the pieces of their shattered selves.

Comments

Maybe. Or, maybe they'll change their most public ways (e.g., funding the most extreme elements of Islam).

Why would they do that? Because we'd have shown that we have not only the ability (never really in doubt) but the WILL to topple governments and folks we don't like.

There is a Chinese saying of "Kill the chicken in order to scare the monkey." The Western equivalent is probably "pour encourager les autres." Sometimes, through a massive outpouring of violence, you scare others into shaping up.

I would suspect that the Saudis respect massive force and the will to use it more than, say, sweet reason and diplomatic implorings.

Posted by: Dean at August 22, 2002 09:46 AM

10 years ago I would have argued with you but now.... I’m not so sure.

I deployed to Saudi during the Gulf War and spent a lot of time roaming the country doing my job, counterintelligence.

I made many non-Saudi friends, some of who had been working in the country for 30 years. A British male nurse who spoke fluent Arabic (I still speak some from my childhood in Libya) told me that the Saudis had to have been absolutely terrified to allow 1/2 million foreign troops (mostly American) into the kingdom. His take was the social changes inadvertently wrought by our mere presence would encourage a small middle class community to make some modest but bold requests for recognition.

Alas, I fear that his optimism was premature if not totally false. I did observe young Saudi following some of our U.S. officers around trying to learn new ways of doing thing. I even remember a U.S. female officer was asked to teach some classes to some junior Saudi officers on how to manage a large supply depot. Out of curiosity, I attended the class and listen in to the Saudis talking among themselves.

All of them were sincere and genuinely interested in learning a new skill even from a woman.

While it's not much, maybe there are some small sparks of modern thinking present?

Incidentally, the nurse worked for the Saudi Ministry of Health as a traveling health nurse. He said that during the whole time he was in Saudi most (over half) of the "upper class" marriages were generally between first cousins which contributed to a higher than normal rate of birth defects as well as high levels of inheritable diseases. Maybe they'll just all die off!!!

Posted by: Jim at August 22, 2002 01:22 PM

I say we overthrow the house of Saud and give Arabia to the Palestinians. Sure, they'll lose the third holiest site in Islam but they'll gain the first two. And since the PA's leadership was elected, Arafati Arabia will instantly become democratic.

Stay tuned while I solve all the problems in Africa next...

Posted by: xian at August 22, 2002 03:16 PM