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Zionist remark could mean new rift with Washington
Only days after the State Department praised Saudi Arabia for its “aggressive” and “unprecedented” campaign to hunt down terrorists,” Crown Prince Abdullah—the country’s de facto ruler-has startled Bush administration officials by blaming “Zionists” and “followers of Satan” for recent terrorist acts in the kingdom. “We can be certain that Zionism is behind everything,” Abdullah told a gathering of leading government officials and academics in Jeddah as he talked about the weekend attack on attack on oil workers, which killed six people, including two Americans. “I don’t say 100 percent, but 95 percent.”

The comments were cited by stunned Bush administration officials and other Mideast watchers today as an ominous sign of possible new rifts in the U.S.-Saudi alliance. Although some top Saudi officials, notably Interior Minister Prince Nayef, have in the past made similar remarks, Crown Prince Abdullah has never before appeared to blame his country’s internal troubles on the Israelis—a position that is anathema to Washington.

The U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James C. Oberwetter, plans to meet Wednesday with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal to seek “clarification” of Abdullah’s comments, a State Department official told NEWSWEEK late Tuesday. “We’ve seen these remarks and, if the Crown Prince in fact made them, we would strongly disagree with such an assertion and consider it unhelpful,” the official said, adding that the State Department planned to withhold further comment until after the meeting.

Yet the normally smooth and pro-Western Saud may not prove the most receptive audience for Oberwetter’s visit. The Saudi Foreign Minister seemed to echo his brother’s remarks in his comments today, telling reporters in Jeddah that last Saturday’s attack on oil workers in the industrial city of Yanbu-which have jolted the oil industry— had fed into “a Zionist campaign” to shake the Saudi monarchy, according to a Reuters report.

In an apparent attempt to provide some evidence for his comments, Saud claimed that one of two Saudis who had been linked to the attack were believed to be followers of two well-known London-based Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Fagih and Mohammed al-Mas’ari, who, according to the Saudi foreign minister, are being financed by Israel. No evidence of such links has ever been made public. "This shows how desperate and hopeless they are," Fagih told NEWSWEEK in a telephone interview from London. "This is like saying George Bush is sponsoring bin Laden."

Some former Mideast diplomats today seemed flabbergasted by the remarks by the two Saudi leaders and at a loss to explain them. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Chas Freeman, a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Bush administration. “I just can’t understand it.”

“It’s terribly disappointing that they [the Saudi rulers] resort to this kind of stuff,” says Edward Walker, a former veteran U.S. diplomat and now president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington based group that has received funding from Saudi Arabia. “They know damn well what’s happening.”

For Crown Prince Abdullah to now engage in the same rhetoric creates awkward new dilemmas. The U.S.-Saudi relationship has been under persistent political attack in the United States, especially from leading members of Congress who blame the Saudis for failing to crack down on terrorist financing in their country and promoting religious extremism. One such member, Democratic senator Charles Schumer of New York, today suggested that Abdullah’s comments were evidence that the Saudi regime may be disconnected from reality. “If the Saudis are going to continue to deny reality and live in a dream world, then their regime will be short-lived,” Schumer told NEWSWEEK.

Ironically, the Bush administration attempted to quell such criticism by issuing a new report last week that lavishly praised the Saudis for a renewed effort to crackdown on terrorism in the wake of last May’s deadly bombing at a housing compound in Riyadh. “I would cite Saudi Arabia as an excellent example of a nation increasingly focusing its political will to fight terrorism,” U.S. Ambassador Cofer Black, the State Department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism, said in a statement accompanying the department’s release of its annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.

Stating that Riyadh bombings and other attacks had “served to strengthen Saudi resolve,” Black praised the Saudis for a number of initiatives that included arresting more than 600 suspects and working more closely with U.S. officials on anti-terror financing and money laundering initiatives. Black also complimented the Saudis for initiating an ideological campaign against Islamic terrorist organizations that included statements by senior Saudi officials espousing “a consistent message of moderation and toleration.”

As is often the case with controversial comments by Saudi rulers, U.S. officials were a bit at a loss as to how to respond to them. One official noted that there were different translations of the Crown Prince’s comments and that some Saudi newspapers had deleted Abdullah’s references to “Zionists,” using instead the less inflammatory word “foreigners.” The country’s leading English-language newspaper, Arab News, which is widely read in the West, did not carry any account of Abdullah’s remarks.

An account in the Arab language Al-Riyadh newspaper, translated for NEWSWEEK and running on Sunday under the headline, “Our Country is Targeted, Zionist Hands Behind What’s Happening,” states that Abdullah expressed anger to a group of visitors over the Saturday attack in Yanbu. In the attack, a group of Saudi militants sprayed gunfire in the offices of a Houston-based oil contractor, killing two Americans and four others and injuring 25 people.

“Our country is targeted,” the story quotes Abdullah as saying. “You know who is behind all of this. It is Zionism. This is clear now.”

The attack—the latest in a spate of terrorist incidents in the kingdom—was particularly alarming because it threatens to cause further disruptions in world oil markets. The U.S. Embassy has redoubled its efforts to warn American workers in the country to leave and that exodus alone could threaten Saudi oil production.

Oil industry expert Philip Verleger, a fellow at the Institute for International Economics, said that the incident in Yanbu was especially worrisome because the Saudis have repeatedly assured American contacts that security in that oilfield complex is very tight. What is troubling, Verleger said, is not that incidents in the Saudi oil fields will stop the production of Saudi crude, but rather that such incidents will cause both foreign and Saudi engineers and skilled workers to leave the region or the kingdom.

Even more potentially damaging, Verleger says, would be for terrorists to somehow shut down, either through a direct attack or by intimidating operating personnel, a number of oil refineries in Saudi Arabia which produce special gasoline blends formulated for the American market. Although those refineries have not been attacked and are still believed to be operating normally, they are fragile, heavily automated plants which could be hobbled by a loss of a relatively small number of personnel, or, alternatively, by a serious terror attack.

If terrorists succeed by one stratagem or another in taking down some of the Saudi-based refineries, Verleger said, "it is really, really frightening." A shutdown or big attack on one of the refineries could produce a quick rise in U.S. retail gasoline prices of 50 cents to $1 per gallon, Verleger told NEWSWEEK. If crude production is ultimately curbed by the flight of personnel or a direct attack, Verleger says, the world price of crude could soar to $60 to $70 per barrel unless the United States and other oil-consuming countries dipped into their strategic petroleum reserves to help stabilize the market.
Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-05-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=32247