Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  In the summer of 2008 the hottest show on Saudi television was a Turkish soap opera in which a husband took care of his wife in precisely that way. It cleared the normally crowded streets every evening. According to MBC, the Saudi-owned satellite channel, between three and four million viewers tuned in nightly to watch Noor, a 141-part series whose romantic and supportive hero, Muhannad, treated his wife Noor, a fashion designer and the title character, with respectful tenderness—as both a love object and an equal. The show became the rage of the season, with newspapers reporting divorces after men found pictures of Muhannad on their wives’ cell phones. Several cartoonists slyly depicted husbands who missed the point by getting plastic surgery to try to look like the twenty-four-year-old Turk. Saudi women swooned over the blond and blue-eyed hero who was not afraid to show his soft side. Saudi men dismissed him as “gay.”

  Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, Bin Baz’s successor as the Kingdom’s grand mufti (and blind, like Bin Baz), was concerned with episodes in Noor that depicted dating and pregnancy outside marriage. He issued a fatwa condemning the show as “a declaration of war against Allah and his Messengers”—while the chairman of the Supreme Judiciary Council, Saleh Al-Laheedan, went further, denouncing the owners of Westernizing TV channels as being “as guilty as those who watch them. . . . It is legitimate,” he said, “to kill those who call for corruption if their evil cannot be stopped by other penalties.”

  The chief justice was well aware that the principal owners of MBC were the Al-Ibrahim family, brothers-in-law to the late King Fahd, and he would only issue a halfhearted apology, pointing out defiantly that he had forty years’ experience of shariah law, and was the oldest Islamic scholar in the country. The religious establishment was finally hitting back at the Al-Saud for its trickery over the introduction of the TV satellite dishes.

  Meanwhile, the Turkish embassy announced that the number of Saudi travelers to Turkey that summer had increased to over one hundred thousand—from about forty thousand the year before.

  “Basically,” says Mashael, “Saudi men behave the way they do because their mothers indulged them as kids. We all know that Arab women put the man-child on a pedestal, which swells his head and encourages him to lord it over his sisters and other women. So if wives want husbands to change one day, the answer is quite simple—the solution lies in our own hands. The mothers of Arabia have got to stop spoiling their sons. They must treat them as true equals with their daughters.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Illegitimate Occupation

  The first time that George W., son of Bush, met face-to-face with Abdullah, son of Saud, they got on better than either of them had expected. It was April 2002, and few Americans could imagine why their president should extend any welcome to the leader of the country that had just given them 9/11, let alone greet him respectfully in a suit and tie—the first and only time Bush cleaned up so formally at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The tie had been his mother’s idea.

  “This is royalty, George,” said Barbara Bush. “You’ve got to dress properly.”

  After a communal lunch that lasted an hour, the two men retired to talk alone, with just their translators. It was four hours before they emerged. Abdullah had insisted that the president look at a ten-minute videotape he had brought along showing extracts of Arab news reports from Palestine. This is what his people saw every night on TV, he explained—these images were coming right into their homes. Tears came to his eyes as he appealed to Bush: “You’ve got to fix this.”

  Bush came out of the meeting slightly shocked, but also impressed by Abdullah’s candor.

  “This is a man I can trust,” he said to his aides. “He’s telling it to me like it is. All the others say one thing to me when they come over here, then go home and say something else when they get back to their country.”

  They went on a drive around the ranch together—the two leaders alone again, with just their interpreters.

  “I think it helped that they were both very religious,” recalls one of Abdullah’s aides. “They were two men of faith, even though their faiths were very different.”

  All through the traumas of 9/11, Abdullah had remained preoccupied with Palestine. It was the reason why he had refused to meet Bush the previous summer, pushing the president to the brink of a new initiative, when 9/11 had intervened. Now, in 2002, the crown prince felt even more pressure. The intifada was in crisis. Yasser Arafat was a virtual prisoner in Ramallah, where the Israeli Army was surrounding his compound. Al-Jazeera burned with reports of West Bank violence, and Saudis were following the drama avidly on their satellite channels. Abdullah had been denounced on both Islamist and liberal websites for going to the United States at such a moment, and his Information Ministry had had to scrape the barrel in his defense. The crown prince, a spokesman announced, had loaded the hold of his Boeing with several thousand translations of the Koran that he would be distributing to educate Americans about Islam.

  Abdullah had made careful preparations for the meeting. In the post- 9/11 majlises that he had summoned in Riyadh for the businessmen, academics, members of the Shura, and for the ulema, his correspondence with Bush and Condoleezza Rice had been read out for all to hear. His staff had noted the feedback from the different crowds. During a February 2002 interview the crown prince startled the author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman by opening a drawer in his desk to produce a fully worked-out peace proposal that offered Arab recognition of Israel and normalization of relations in exchange for an Israeli return to its pre- 1967 borders. A few weeks later Abdullah went to Beirut to push his peace plan through the twenty-two-member Arab League summit—the most developed and comprehensive Arab olive branch ever.

  “We had carried out private polling inside Israel,” recalls one of the crown prince’s aides. “We hired a local company and never told them it was for Saudi Arabia. We found that 70 percent of Israelis thought that the Abdullah peace plan was a fair deal. Unfortunately 70 percent of them also supported Ariel Sharon—but I suppose that showed we’d gotten some authentic sampling.”

  The crown prince had had his staff prepare a scrapbook of news photographs to go with the heartrending video footage he took to Crawford. His aides had stayed up late the previous night in Houston sorting through a pile of news agency images and making photocopies at the local Kinko’s.

  “I’m not asking this for myself or the Kingdom,” said Abdullah. “I’m asking for the sake of the Palestinians.”

  The pictures seemed to have a stronger impact on the crown prince than on his audience.

  “It’s the blood issue,” he told Bush, returning to the theme that had made him emotional the previous summer. “You seem to care more about the lives of Israelis than of Arabs.”

  Bush demurred, but Abdullah would not be brushed off.

  “You said you were willing to do something,” he asked. “But what? I didn’t want to come here, but you kept asking. Now you are giving me nothing. I can’t go home empty-handed.”

  And with that the crown prince gathered his robes about him and rose to his feet. The meeting was over, he declared—there was no point in staying. He and the rest of his party would be going home at once. Bush sat on his screened porch with Condoleezza Rice, nonplussed.

  “Are they playing games?” he asked.

  Elsewhere on the ranch, Bandar bin Sultan and Colin Powell, usually the best of friends (and occasional racquetball partners) got into a shouting match.

  “What the hell did you do?” the U.S. secretary of state demanded roughly of the Saudi ambassador. “How did you let it get to this?”

  Their voices grew so loud that Bush himself appeared to investigate.

  Powell suspected the ultimatum was a ploy that the Saudis had planned in advance, but Abdullah’s staff denied it. Whatever their plain-speaking boss did came from his heart, they said—and the king’s anger got results. Bush agreed to go public with a new U.S. approach on Palestine, essentially as he had worded it in private in
the days before 9 /11.

  “My vision,” the president declared, speaking in the White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, flanked by his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, “is of two states, living side by side in peace and security.”

  No American president had ever committed so explicitly or firmly to the creation of a Palestinian state, which flatly contradicted the vision of both hard-line Jews and the Christian Zionists. Bush hedged his promise with a multitude of caveats to comfort the Israelis; he consistently refused to deal with Yasser Arafat, and he proved over the years to be considerably less resolute in acting to secure his pledge than he had sounded in the Rose Garden. Still, the words had been uttered. The creation of a Palestinian state was now, for the first time, a declared objective of American policy, and Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz could take much of the credit for it.

  The triumph—and the harmony—were short-lived. Several observers of the Crawford meeting noted how the king and the president appeared to be talking “past each other,” for while the Saudi was focusing on the current emergency in Palestine, the American’s vision was clearly set in another direction. Sixteen months earlier, as the new Bush administration was entering office, its defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had proposed a startling new template for U.S. policy in the Middle East. “Imagine what the region would look like,” he told a meeting of the National Security Council, “without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond.”

  A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum presented an even more explicit version of this Iraq-centered strategy to the New York Times Magazine: “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”

  September 11, 2001, offered the chance to put this grandiose vision into practice. America clearly needed to lash out at somebody sinister and Arab. Donald Rumsfeld frankly testified to the official 9 /11 Commission that immediately after the attacks, on the afternoon of September 11, “his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein,” and the next day President Bush ordered Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism czar, to explore possible Iraqi links. Within hours the principal consequence of the Saudi-manned assault on Manhattan and Washington had been to open up the American path to war in Iraq.

  Saudi reaction to this knee-jerk response was a mixture of suspicion and disbelief. As Sunni Muslims they knew instinctively what intelligence reports later confirmed, that 9 /11 and Iraq were not connected—a pious Salafi like Bin Laden would never have serious dealings with a secularizing regime like Saddam’s. U.S. attempts to prove a Saddam-Al-Qaeda conspiracy seemed laughable. At the same time, many Saudis fell victim to their own conspiracy theories. The fact that the U.S. was exploiting 9/11 as a pretext to direct its military power in the direction of Iraq confirmed their suspicion of Zionist involvement in the September 2001 attacks: Saudi reasoning ran that America’s wish to be “wholly in charge” of the Middle East could only be to provide extra protection for its client state Israel.

  Abdullah instructed his personal spokesman, Bandar’s young, Westernized aide, Adel Al-Jubeir, to go out and make clear his opposition to a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

  “There is no country in the world that supports it,” declared Al-Jubeir in August 2002. “There is no legal basis for it. There is no international sanction for it. There is no coalition for it.”

  Al-Jubeir did the rounds of U.S. TV newscasts systematically rebutting a speech Vice President Cheney had recently made that called for invasion. So far as the Saudis were concerned, the same reasoning applied in 2002 as ten years earlier, when there were calls for the victorious Gulf War allies to march on Baghdad: better the devil you know . . . Saddam might be a villain, but he was a Sunni villain whose power kept the Shia—and the ayatollahs of Iran—at bay. Bringing down the Iraqi dictator risked making Tehran, not America, the new Rome in the Middle East.

  The Saudis were also opposed to the neoconservative principle that America could intervene as it wished to reshape the area. In July that year Laurent Murawiec, a French analyst with the RAND Corporation, had given a twenty-four-slide presentation to the prestigious Defense Policy Board, an arm of the Pentagon, suggesting that the United States should consider “taking [the] Saudi out of Arabia” by forcibly seizing control of the oil fields, giving the Hijaz back to the Hashemites, and delegating control of the holy cities to a multinational committee of moderate, non-Wahhabi Muslims: the House of Saud should be sent home to Riyadh.

  “Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies,” argued Murawiec, a protégé of Richard Perle’s, the neocon advocate of war with Iraq who chaired the Policy Board. “The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.” They were “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” in the Middle East.

  The Pentagon rushed out a disavowal. “Neither the presentations nor the Defense Policy Board members’ comments reflect the official views of the Department of Defense,” said a spokeswoman in a written statement. “Saudi Arabia is a long-standing friend and ally of the United States. The Saudis cooperate fully in the global war on terrorism and have the Department’s and the Administration’s deep appreciation.”

  But it was not difficult to find voices in Washington who welcomed the airing of Murawiec’s aggressive views, which he would later set out in a book, Princes of Darkness, praised by Perle as “brilliant” and “powerful.”

  “People used to rationalize Saudi behavior,” said a Bush administration official to the Washington Post. “You don’t hear that anymore. There’s no doubt that people are recognizing reality and recognizing that Saudi Arabia is a problem.”

  The unnamed official set out the grand neoconservative strategy, with a menacing sting in its tail for the Kingdom: “The road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad. Once you have a democratic regime in Iraq, like the ones we helped establish in Germany and Japan after World War II, there are a lot of possibilities.”

  “I think this view defies reality,” hit back Adel Al-Jubeir, quoted on Abdullah’s behalf in the same newspaper report. “The two countries have been friends and allies for over sixty years. Their relationship has seen the coming and breaking of many storms in the region, and if anything it goes from strength to strength.”

  It was believed in the Washington press pool that many of these anti-Saudi sentiments were being promoted by the office of the pugnacious Dick Cheney—with the vice president also suggesting that, despite their public protestations, the Saudis were secretly in favor of an attack that would oust Saddam. Al-Jubeir let it be known that the crown prince had personally contradicted this suggestion face-to-face with Cheney when the two men had met earlier that year.

  “No,” Abdullah had said. “The answer is no. I said ‘no’ in Saudi Arabia. I say ‘no’ now, and I will say ‘no’ tomorrow.”

  The trouble was that Cheney had solid grounds for his suspicions, since the allegation that most of the leaders of the Arab world—including Abdullah—secretly wanted the United States to bring Saddam crashing down came from no other source than Abdullah’s own ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

  It seemed to be a case of the flamboyant Bandar “flying solo.” According to many, the Saudi ambassador had a long-standing personal grudge against Saddam Hussein. In the summer of 1990, only hours before Iraq’s troops started rolling, the dictator had tricked Bandar into conveying solid personal assurances to both Margaret Thatcher and President George H. W. Bush that there would be no Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Since then, Bandar believed, Saddam had also put out a contract to have him assassinated. The Saudi prince had strengthened his already substantial security squad.

&n
bsp; A professional colleague of the prince’s dismisses this idea as “utter nonsense.”

  “Prince Bandar” he says, “does not take things personally. And it is quite untrue to suggest that he would ever depart from officially determined Saudi policy.”

  But that was not how many observers saw the prince operating in Washington in the autumn of 2002. While Crown Prince Abdullah was doing his best from Riyadh to oppose and prevent a U.S. attack on Iraq, his nephew and ambassador seemed to be doing quite the opposite—effectively serving, as David Ottaway of the Washington Post put it, as “a de facto member of the U.S. neoconservatives’ ‘war party.’ ” In a replay of the previous Gulf conflict of 1990-91, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were once again Bandar’s best chums—indeed, on January 11, 2003, according to the investigative journalist Bob Woodward, the two men briefed Bandar on Bush’s decision to go to war before they told Secretary Powell. Reinvigorated by the coming conflict, the Saudi envoy bustled to and fro between Riyadh and Washington. When finally questioned at home, he presented his rationale without apology—the United States was going to attack Iraq whatever anyone said, so why not make the best of it?

  Abdullah’s conclusion from the same grim reality was that Saudi interests were now best served by visibly distancing the Kingdom from Bush’s America. The crown prince regarded the prospect of a U.S. presence in Iraq as bad for Iraq, bad for America, and bad for Saudi Arabia—an “illegitimate occupation,” as he would subsequently put it publicly in a speech to the Arab League. Abdullah was appalled that Bush and his advisers did not even pretend to listen to the firsthand experience offered by those who knew the region. In Abdullah’s own case, he could offer the perspective of his mother’s tribe, the Shammar, to whose powerful chiefs he remained close and whose writ ran deep into the deserts of Iraq. Two of the crown prince’s wives were (and are) Shammar.