[iwar] [fc:The.Saudi.Crisis]

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Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 06:59:44 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Saudi.Crisis]
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The Saudi Crisis
21 January 2002 

By George Friedman

Summary

Recent media reports have stated that Saudi Arabia's rulers want to end Washington's 
military presence in the country. Statements by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell 
have been intended to close the issue, but a close reading of what he actually said 
raises more questions than answers. The two countries have a long history, and Riyadh 
has proven invaluable to U.S. interests in the region. But strategic divisions following 
Sept. 11 have made a split increasingly likely.

Analysis

There have been deep tensions between the United States and Saudi Arabia ever since 
Sept. 11. This development was fairly well-finessed by both sides, neither of which 
wanted it to become public. The tensions were there nonetheless. 

On one side, the United States was creating a coalition to fight al Qaeda. Washington 
made cooperation in fighting the group a litmus test of friendship with the United 
States. On the other side in Saudi Arabia, itself a bulwark of conservative Islam, 
the royal family was deeply divided over cooperation with the United States. The 
pressure on the relationship was substantial, and last week it broke out into the 
open.

It began when Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the House Armed Services 
Committee, said the United States should begin thinking of shifting its forces out 
of Saudi Arabia to other countries in the region that might be more hospitable. This 
was followed by a story Jan. 18 in the Washington Post that cited a "senior Saudi 
official" as saying the United States has "overstayed its welcome" in the country. 
He added that, following completion of the Afghan campaign, new forms of "less conspicuous 
military cooperation should be devised." 

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, while on a visit to Pakistan, India and Nepal, 
suddenly found himself with what appeared to be a crisis in the Persian Gulf. On 
the surface, Powell seemed to dismiss the Post story out of hand Jan. 19. However, 
a careful reading of his statement shows something quite different. Powell made three 
statements:

1. "There have been no discussions of such an issue."
2. "There is nothing in that story that warrants my attention at the moment."
3. "We are constantly reviewing our footprint in that part of the world to see if 
we have the right distribution of our presence over the various countries that are 
there. We want to be good guests in all the countries that host our military forces, 
so I know [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld keeps this under constant review."

By the following day, on an interview on the Fox network, Powell shifted from his 
earlier "There has been no discussion of such an issue" comment. Instead, he said: 
"It has not reached any level of discussion that brought it to the top levels of 
the State Department. But it wouldn't be unusual for our people to be discussing 
with the Saudis exactly how we are distributed through Saudi Arabia. . But we have 
not received a kind of notice, or there have been no discussions of the kind suggested 
in the newspaper story or any comment coming from the Saudis, that would suggest 
this kind of action." 

In other words, it wouldn't be unusual to have discussions about troop deployments 
at some level in the State and Defense Departments, but there has been no formal 
request. In any case, it hasn't become an issue to be discussed at the ministerial 
level.

Powell had every opportunity to make a flat, unequivocal statement, which could 
have sounded like this: "There is not a word of truth in the Washington Post article. 
There have been no discussions whatsoever on redeploying U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, 
no one in Saudi Arabia has raised this with us on any level and no one on our side 
is thinking about a redeployment. This is not on the table." 

Powell could have put this to rest with such a statement. He chose not to. Instead, 
he made a series of comments designed to appear to be unequivocal but which, on careful 
analysis, confirms that the military relationship between the United States and Saudi 
Arabia is in danger of coming unhinged. 

A senior senator is calling for a U.S. withdrawal, senior Saudi officials are deliberately 
leaking a change of policy and the secretary of state is trying to spin the crisis 
through carefully worded statements. Bottom line: There is a problem, and it is a 
profound one.

The U.S.-Saudi alliance has been the foundation of both Washington's strategy in 
the Persian Gulf and the Saudi grand strategy since the 1950s. 

When Gamal Abdul Nasser overthrew Egypt's monarchy and installed a secular, socialist, 
militarist pan-Arabism in its place, he challenged the interests of both Washington 
and Riyadh. Nasser's vision was a single, united, modernizing state encompassing 
the entire Arab world -- a United Arab Republic. 

A wave of Nasserism swept the region, creating similar regimes in Syria, Iraq and 
elsewhere. Nasser saw the Saudi regime as both the center of gravity of religious 
conservatism in the Middle East and as the potential financial engine for modernizing 
the Arabs. Were Riyadh's wealth to come under the control of a pro-Egyptian, Soviet-aligned 
regime, the global balance of power could have shifted.

Thus, Saudi and U.S. interests aligned. The Saudis, increasingly under pressure 
in the Arab world from radical regimes, needed Washington to guarantee their security. 
The United States needed to block the rise of Arab radicalism. Washington constructed 
a Middle Eastern strategy built mainly around Israel, the Shah's Iran and Saudi Arabia. 


In retrospect, the Arab oil embargo and the dramatic increase in oil prices following 
the 1973 Arab-Israeli war was not entirely detrimental to the United States. Whatever 
the economic impact, the rise in oil prices increased Saudi Arabia's power in the 
Arab world and helped turn the tide on Arab radicalism.

Even as such radicalism declined, a new force emerged to bind the United States 
and the Saudis closer together. The Iranian revolution, which combined republicanism 
with Islamic fundamentalism in a Shiite form, frightened the Saudis as much as the 
secular radicals had. Both the United States and Saudi Arabia were obsessed with 
containing this new movement.

One of the mechanisms for containing Iran was Iraq. Their war in the 1980s was not 
unwelcome by either Washington or Riyadh, as it kept Tehran occupied. But the outcome 
of the war was less agreeable, since it deeply weakened Iran and left Iraq as the 
dominant native power in the Persian Gulf, a position it quickly exploited in its 
invasion of Kuwait.

Here, U.S. and Saudi interests again coincided. The United States did not want Iraq 
to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and control a massive share of the 
world's oil production. Saudi Arabia itself understood that it would be Baghdad's 
next victim. The Saudis therefore permitted a massive deployment of U.S. forces into 
the country, which brings us to our current situation in which Saudi-U.S. interests 
are no longer in alignment.

First, the secular-radical Arabist movements are in practical terms a thing of the 
past. Odd remnants remain here and there, but they are no longer the dynamic force 
driving the region's politics. Second, Iraq is a well-contained entity. The Iraq-Iran 
balance has been reasserted, as Iranian power has grown throughout the 1990s. Iraq 
no longer poses a threat to the Saudis. 

Finally, Arab radicalism has been replaced by Islamic radicalism, and the representation 
of that movement has passed from Riyadh's Shiite enemies to a variety of Islam native 
to Saudi Arabia. The United States has lost its Soviet adversary. It has, however, 
encountered a new strategic enemy: the same radical Islam that is part of the fabric 
of Saudi Arabian society. 

Washington expects Saudi Arabia to remain aligned with the United States as it has 
been since the 1950s. But this is an unreasonable expectation. The United States 
has as its strategic goal the defeat of al Qaeda, and in order to accomplish this, 
it must undermine radical Islamists. As part of its strategy, Washington intends 
to strike at any country that supports al Qaeda, including Iraq.

The Saudis have no interest in becoming involved in a war with Iraq and less of 
an interest in becoming an integral part of a U.S. war on radical Islam. The goal 
of the Saudi royal family is to survive and prosper. 

The strand of Islam that gave rise to al Qaeda is powerful. It has strong native 
roots in Saudi Arabia, and the royal family itself has members who are sympathetic. 
In many ways, to fight Islamic radicals would be to fight themselves, and the Saudis 
have no interest in this. This is not their fight, to say the least. 

Therefore, the current political situation logically requires that the Saudis expel 
U.S. forces. In normal Saudi style, this will be neither a quick nor a methodical 
process. It will come in stages covered with good manners. But the outcome is inevitable.

For the United States, if Saudi Arabia were to withdraw from the U.S. coalition, 
it would have tremendous implications going far beyond the fight for al Qaeda. Obviously, 
dreams of a war to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein are toast. Indeed, one of 
the straws that broke the back of Saudi tolerance was constant U.S. discussion of 
whether or not to go to war against Iraq, as if the United States could assume that 
the Saudis would simply follow the American lead.

The more important question, of course, is the future of the Persian Gulf, which 
remains a critical source of oil. There are other countries where U.S. forces can 
be based in the region. But the geography is such that merely basing forces is not 
enough. 

Unless the United States is content with a strictly naval presence in the Gulf, 
then Saudi Arabia alone provides the geography needed for substantial deployments 
of land forces to fight the necessary wars. The country is the heart of the Arabian 
Peninsula; everything else is either peripheral or, like Iraq or Iran, not available 
to the United States.

It is politically and morally impossible to abandon the war on al Qaeda. Therefore, 
in the long run, a split with the Saudis will occur. There is nothing of substance 
holding these two nations together any longer, and increasingly, there is much that 
drives them apart. No one wants to admit this publicly, for good and obvious reasons, 
but the fact is there. For the United States, the split will be a wrenching geopolitical 
shift.

George Friedman is the founder and chairman of STRATFOR.

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