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Regarding the
Very EFL. Hat tip LGF.The date was April 24, 2002. Standing on the runway at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, the cadre of FBI, Secret Service and Customs agents had just been informed by law-enforcement officials that there was a "snag" with Crown Prince Abdullahâs oversized entourage, which was arriving with the prince for a visit to George W. Bushâs Western White House in Crawford, Texas. The flight manifest of the eight-plane delegation accompanying the Saudi would-be king had a problem. Three problems, to be exact: One person on the list was wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities, and two others were on a terrorist watch list. Oooooops⊠This had the potential to be what folks in Washington like to refer to as an "international incident." But the State Department was not about to let an "international incident" happen. Which is why this story has never been written--until now. "Gotta put the magnet to the disk here." Upon hearing that there was someone who was wanted and two suspected terrorists in Abdullahâs entourage, the FBI was ready to "storm the plane and pull those guys off," explains an informed source. But given the "international" component, State was informed of the FBIâs intentions before any action could be taken. When word reached the Near Eastern Affairs bureau, its reaction was classic State Department: "What are we going to do about those poor people trapped on the plane?" To which at least one law-enforcement official on the ground responded, "Shoot them"--not exactly the answer State was looking for. "We were looking for⊠some other answer." State, Secret Service and the FBI then began what bureaucrats refer to as an "interagency process." In other words, they started fighting. The FBI believed that felons, even Saudi felons, were to be arrested. State had other ideas. The Secret Service didnât really have any, other than to make sure that the three Saudis in question didnât get anywhere near the president or the vice president. State went to the mat in part because it was responsible for giving visas to the three in the first place. Since this was a government delegation--for which all applications are generally handled at one time--the names were probably not run through the normal watch lists before the visas were issued. So thatâs the state of State. Details about what happened to the three men in the end are not entirely clear, and no one at State was willing to provide any facts about the incident. What is clear, though, is that the three didnât get anywhere near Crawford, but were also spared the "embarrassment" of arrest. And the House of Saud was spared an "international incident." That normally staid bureaucrats engaged in incredible acrobatics to bail out three guys who never should have been in the United States in the first place says a great deal about Stateâs "special relationship" with the Saudis. The State-Saudi alliance really does boil down to one thing: oil. At least thatâs what former secretary of state George Shultz seems to think: "Theyâre an important country," he told me. "They have lots of oil. You do pay a lot of attention to that." Foggy Bottom agrees, and has been conditioned to do so by the 1970s oil shocks. When the infamous oil crisis of 1973 was ballooning, America was confident that its tight relationship with the Saudis would ensure an uninterrupted flow of cheap oil. This confidence was shattered--and world oil prices more than tripled--when the Saudis pursued their own economic interests. Saudi power inside Washington skyrocketed, with bureaucrats realizing that the House of Saud could not be taken for granted. When the next oil crisis struck in 1979, prices shot up by more than 150%--but that was mostly driven by other countries: a substantial drop in Iraqi production and the sudden halt in Iranian production. Consumer panic, hoarding by nervous companies and individuals, and price gouging also contributed. Saudi Arabia did little to deepen the crisis--Saudi-controlled OPEC implemented two comparably modest price increases in 1979--and actually was seen by many as an invaluable ally. The balance of power managed to shift even further in the Saudi direction in following years--and State became ever more willing to accede to Saudi demands. The bond between Washington and Riyadh may have deepened because of the oil crises, but it began decades earlier. FDR initiated the oil-for-protection relationship in 1945. President Eisenhower enshrined this arrangement as a strategic goal with his Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, where he declared the protection of the Arab world--with particular focus on Saudi Arabia--to be a national-security priority. While official policy was coziness with the House of Saud and Foggy Bottom was dominated by Arabists, there was some degree of tension, with many officials uncomfortable with the radical Wahhabi clerics who dominate everyday life in Saudi Arabia. In 1962, President Kennedy became increasingly concerned that the civil war in Yemen--in which Egypt backed the pan-Arab revolutionaries, and Saudi Arabia backed the royalists--posed a tremendous threat to the stability of the region. According to Hermann Eilts, a former ambassador to both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Kennedy pushed the House of Saud to engage "in internal economic and political reform and end all aid to the Yemeni royalists." Such pressure, though, turned out to be short-lived. Mr. Eilts, in a review of a book by a fellow Arabist, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Parker Hart, noted that promotion of reform--something Mr. Eilts himself found unpleasant and unhelpful--was abandoned entirely just a few years after it started. I sense a round of layoffs in the near future. Posted by: Atrus 2003-10-13 |
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