Weak realpolitik: The vicissitudes of Saudi bashing

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Adam Garfinkle

Just as recognition of these realities was penetrating minds in and around the Beltway, Saudi behavior fed the growing sense of American disquiet. First, Saudi leaders refused to publicly acknowledge that the United States might use Saudi bases against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and for a while it was not clear if the U.S. military would even have unfettered unpublicized use of them. At the same time, the Saudi government raised barriers to U.S. law enforcement agencies' efforts to learn about the Saudi terrorists of September 11. Americans were incredulous at being told by Saudi officials, long after it had become even remotely plausible, that few if any of the terrorists were Saudis but had stolen Saudi passports and identities. V/hen subsequently asked to help U.S. officials in the critical task of "following the money", Saudi officials at first denied, pace Mr. Berger, that any public or private Saudi money had financed any terrorist organization. This raised the question of whether the Saudis were lying, which would have been bad, or whether they were clueless as to what was going on under their noses, which would have been worse. The New Republic bluntly summed up the emerging conclusion: "In fact our Arab 'coalition partners'-particularly Saudi Arabia-are actively sabotaging our efforts to identify the wider terrorist international, made up in large part, of course, of their citizens." (9)

Before long, too, recognition of the inadvertent but unmistakable Saudi complicity in September 11 begged the reinterpretation of older data into something of a pattern. The Saudis had impeded the U.S. investigation into the Riyadh and Khobar Towers bombings that killed 23 American soldiers in November 1995 and June 1996. Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that has refused to participate in an FAA-run airplane manifest agreement that lets U.S. officials know who is arriving into the United States from abroad. The Saudis have at times been unhelpful to sensitive U.S. Arab-Israeli diplomacy; actively dissuading Yasir Arafat during and after the summer 2000 Camp David summit, for example, from accepting compromises over Jerusalem that are a sine qua non for a settlement.

More pointedly with regard to Al-Qaeda and company, the Saudis refused to take Osama bin Laden into custody in 1996 when the Sudanese government offered, with American encouragement and support, to deliver him there. As egregious, in April 1995 the FBI learned that Imad Mughniyah was on a flight from Khartoum to Beirut that was scheduled to stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. FBI agents rushed to Jeddah to apprehend Mughniyah, who was responsible for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which a U.S. Navy diver was murdered in cold blood, and for the October 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine complex in Lebanon. But the Saudis refused to let the plane land. (Mughniyah went on to become an important liaison between Hizballah and Al-Qaeda, and is even now helping to host escaped Al-Qaeda terrorists in Lebanon.)