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the twinkling of an eye, Saudi Arabia has gone from America's second-best
friend in the Middle East to being the hypocritical financier of
fundamentalist Islam and anti-American terrorism. Furthermore, both
left and right wings of the commentariat have decided not only that
the Saudi regime is covertly hostile to the U.S. but also that this
justifies America either overthrowing it outright or at least watching
its overthrow with detached unconcern.
Behind this
change of mind is a mixed bag of criticisms — in particular
that the House of Saud finances fundamentalist schools that preach
hatred from Islamabad to Istanbul and that the September 11 hijackers
were drawn mainly from Saudi Arabia.
Both claims
are largely true. But they are not criticisms of the same Saudis.
It is the Saudi regime that finances the fundamentalist schools
whereas the hijackings were carried out by bitter opponents of that
regime. So the overthrow of al Saud might not improve matters. Indeed,
it would almost certainly install a successor regime determined
to spread terrorism directly by bombings and hijackings rather than
by the highly roundabout method of subsidizing Islamist schools
whose pupils might bomb and hijack ten or twenty years down the
line.
If a radical
Islamist regime were to take over Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves,
it would be a massive strategic upset. People like Henry Kissinger
fear it would disrupt oil supplies and the world economy and tip
the regional balance against the West. Not to worry. One web pundit
reassures us as follows: Since twenty years of rule by fundamentalists
mullahs produced an anti-fundamentalist public opinion in Iran (pro-American
rioting at soccer matches, etc.), the same happy result can be expected
in Saudi Arabia.
Very well,
let us look at Iran. The overthrow of the Shah there led to repression,
economic backwardness, and social decay at home and to war and terrorism
abroad. These evils have now lasted for 23 years. And despite occasional
riots, fundamentalist mullahs still control Iran's government.
Not exactly an encouraging precedent.
Of course,
it is possible to imagine the House of Saud being replaced by a
democratic administration with local roots. My distinguished columnar
colleague, Mark Steyn has suggested that the moderate reforming
Hashemites — who were displaced by Ibn Saud as the main ruling
family in the Arabia peninsula less than 80 years ago — might
be induced to return and head an Islamic constitutional monarchy
after al Saud's demise.
That's quite
a sound idea in theory. A mullah I raised it with recently told
me it was the daydream of many people in Arabia. But how is it to
be accomplished? In the old days, a small Western expeditionary
force would have landed at Jeddah, marched to Riyadh, installed
a reasonably pliant tribal chieftain, and departed, leaving behind
a "political officer" to run the country under the guise
of giving advice. The U.S. has just done something similar in Afghanistan.
But the U.S. had the clearest possible casus belli in the
form of an attack on the World Trade Center backed by the Afghan
regime.
Unless the
Saudi regime supports a similar attack, the U.S. will never embark
on such a frankly imperialist course. So the C.I.A. would have to
micromanage a Saudi revolution by remote control. What odds will
you give me on the CIA procuring exactly the kind of pro-American
moderate Islamic democracy we would like by such method? Exactly.
Since Saudi
Arabia is likely to be around for some time, therefore, we might
take a calm look at the country. It is neither an enemy nor a friend
to the United States but a close ally with common strategic interests.
It has worked with the U.S. over several decades in joint endeavors
such as driving the Russians out of Afghanistan. It has an educated
and advanced economic elite but its government is an absolute monarchy
based a family network of about 7,000 princes. And the legitimacy
of this primitive political structure rests on its support for a
strict fundamentalist Islam — hence the Saudi subsidies for
Islamic schools in Pakistan and for fundamentalist mosques in Turkey.
The regime
is buying a legitimacy from fundamentalist Islam it cannot claim
from democracy. And this bargain poisons U.S.-Saudi relations because
it promotes the export of a radical anti-American Islamism. But
the bargain is breaking down. Fundamentalist Islam increasingly
threatens the Saudi princes whom the mullahs see as corrupt and
hypocritical. And most of them know it.
Both U.S. and
Saudi interests would therefore be served by the gradual evolution
of Saudi Arabia in a liberal and democratic direction. That, of
course, is merely the beginning of practical politics. As Newsweek
editor Fareed Zakaria has argued, the liberalism of free speech,
free association and free markets should precede the democracy of
multi-party elections in the Middle East as it did everywhere that
democracy has successfully established itself. As National Review
editor Rich Lowry has suggested, it would greatly assist the Saudis
to reform if next-door Iraq were undergoing a similar transformation
after a U.S. conquest. And as the experiences of Turkey and Iran
warn, if democracy and liberalism seem to be attacks on Islam, they
will not take root in an Islamic society for many decades-and perhaps
ever.
So reforming
the House of Saud will be a formidable and subtle task. But it offers
a great deal more hope for everyone than blithely burning it down.
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