Weak realpolitik: The vicissitudes of Saudi bashing

National Interest, The, Spring, 2002 by Adam Garfinkle

This is why, despite longstanding and obvious differences between U.S. and Israeli views of a settlement, despite Arafat's having visited the Clinton White House more often than any other foreign dignitary, and despite the fact that the U.S. government has provided more financial support to the Palestinian Authority than has the Saudi government, Saudi leaders still say publicly that U.S. policy has been "absolutely, 100 percent" biased toward Israel during the second so-called intifada. Such a view sounds self-evident to most Saudis because it is accompanied by a parallel belief that any support for Israel is unjustified because Israel's very existence is illegitimate. Over the past 17 months of Palestinian-instigated violence, most Saudis see the Israeli state as terrorist and the Palestinians as blameless targets and martyrs.

Whether Crown Prince Abdallah and his court privately hold the same attitude is not clear. But it is clear that, both before September 11 and since, the Saudi government has acted as it has because it is far more afraid of its own domestic shadow than of Washington's glare. It knows that its own internal peril paradoxically gives it enormous strength in its dealings with the United States because as difficult as the Saudi status quo is, serious people in Washington realize that all the available alternatives are worse.

It is from this mix of motives and assessments that the Saudis brought considerable pressure on the Bush Administration last spring and summer to change its standoffish public diplomacy with regard to Palestinian-Israeli troubles. An August 24 press conference in which the President laid the major share of blame for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse on Arafat touched off a particularly intense Saudi effort. By early September, that effort resulted in two promises: one very defer-rental one from the United States to put its views of a settlement into the public realm, and one from Chairman Arafat to do what needed doing to resume negotiations toward a ceasefire if not a setdement. (11)

September 11 intervened before either of those promises could be kept. But the promised speech from the United States was nevertheless made, by Secretary of State Colin Powell on November 19, with significant foreshadowing from the President on October 2 and November 10. With these pronouncements, a Republican administration went on record supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Arafat, however, did not keep his promises to Abdallah. Instead, he connived to bring Iranian arms and influence into the Levant, right up to the shores of the Red Sea. In secret league with Hizballah through Iran, Arafat seemed to be planning a kind of re-run of the 1973 Middle East War, with Iran playing the Soviet role, Hizballah in place of Syria on the northern front and the PLO tanzim in place of Egypt on the southern front. The aim was basically the same: to cause such danger and fear as to trigger outside intervention on the Arabs' behalf.