Web exclusive 8/7/02
Our Enemies the Saudis (Continued)
By Michael Barone
In Tuesday morning's Washington Post, Thomas Ricks, the reporter who has written several stories based on leaks from military leaders who evidently oppose military action against Iraq, tells a rather different story–of how the Defense Policy Board was briefed, back on July 10, by a Rand analyst who depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States.
Analyst Laurent Murawiec, a former adviser to the French Ministry of Defense, pointed out that the Saudis fund terrorist activities and the propagation of totalitarian doctrines of Wahhabi Islam. Ricks reports, interestingly, that only one member of the part-time Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, voiced any demurrals–Henry Kissinger. "I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be a strategic adversary of the United States," Ricks quotes Kissinger as saying. "They are doing some things I don't approve of, but I don't consider them a strategic adversary." This is a very limited dissent. "Strategic adversary" is usually a term reserved for a nation that occupies the position vis-à-vis the United States of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. To say that a country is not a strategic adversary is not to say they are a friendly power.
It is interesting that–to take Ricks's account at face value–no one else on the bipartisan Defense Policy Board voiced disagreement. The board's members include not only conservatives like former Speaker Newt Gingrich but also liberals like former Speaker Thomas Foley; its chairman, Richard Perle, a former aide to Sen. Henry Jackson before his Pentagon service in the Reagan administration, is a Democrat who is usually described as a neoconservative and a defense hawk.
Naturally, Ricks sought comment from administration officials, and, naturally, they said the Saudis are our friends–the official policy, as Ricks notes. Pentagon spokesman Victoria Clarke laid down the boilerplate: "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."
That is still the official line. It is presumably the line as well of retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush administration and now chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, who recently argued against military action against Iraq on the grounds it "could turn the whole region into a caldron." The idea is that we must preserve stability in the Middle East. But stability in the Middle East gave us September 11. What we need to is to destabilize regimes that are exporting terror and totalitarianism–like the Saudis.
Ricks's article verges on the misleading in one respect. It suggests that the recognition that the Saudis are behaving like enemies of the United States is limited to certain members of the Bush administration and "neoconservative" writers. He cites two anti-Saudi articles published in the July 15 Weekly Standard and the August Commentary. He did not cite my own piece in the June 3 U.S. News entitled "Our Enemies the Saudis." The response to that piece was overwhelmingly positive–and not just from conservatives, neo and otherwise, but from moderates and liberals as well. You don't have to be a conservative to regard as an enemy a regime that exports terrorism and totalitarian ideas. The Saudis have been behaving like our enemies and should be treated as our enemies at, to paraphrase George W. Bush, a time and place of our own choosing. The American people and American values will be safer when there is regime change in Riyadh as well as Baghdad.
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