Letters

Sept. 8, 2003
As someone who has been a consultant to the oil and gas industry over the past 30 years, with particular emphasis on Saudi Arabia, I was appalled to read your editorial (OGJ, Aug. 4, 2003, p. 17) "The Saudi-US Quarrel" in part because OGJ has generally not stooped to slurs when addressing issues of serious importance to the industry.

Saudi-US quarrel

As someone who has been a consultant to the oil and gas industry over the past 30 years, with particular emphasis on Saudi Arabia, I was appalled to read your editorial (OGJ, Aug. 4, 2003, p. 17) "The Saudi-US Quarrel" in part because OGJ has generally not stooped to slurs when addressing issues of serious importance to the industry.

You write: "Revulsion towards Americans and other westerners—or at least to their culture—is endemic in the rigidly Muslim kingdom, where freedom of expression is limited to disparaging infidels." You then write that the Saudi monarchy might have been under "internal pressures" to dispatch the suicidal fanatics of 9/11, but charitably suggest that it would not have done something so self-destructive.

You entirely misread, or misrepresent, the level and nature of such anti-American sentiment as does exist in Saudi Arabia. Having lived in the Kingdom and visited it continuously and interacted across many different levels of its society, I have personally been overwhelmed by the amount of positive feelings towards Americans, their culture, and their values by Saudis, marred only by long and deeply held frustrations over US policies in the region. These frustrations stem largely from the perception that US policies towards the Palestinians have been unjust.

Repeated polling in the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia has shown that unfavorable Arab attitudes towards the United States "are a function of US policy toward the Arab world" and that Arabs—and Saudis—display favorable attitudes toward American freedom and democracy and toward many manifestations of America in their midst, including its people, products, technology, and culture. "It is clear that what drives down Arab attitudes towards America is, quite simply, US policies in the region."(What Arabs Think and Impressions of America, both by Zogby International, published in April and September 2002.)

By asserting that "revulsion towards Americans" permeates Saudi society, you create a false logical predicate that the Saudi government has a domestic political reason to obstruct the war on terrorism and to hinder US investigations, which you call "intolerable." While there have been numerable assertions to this effect in the press by pundits and journalists quoting unnamed US government officials, President Bush and every other member of his administration speaking on the record have praised and commended the Saudis for their cooperation.

There has been one canard after another advanced by detractors of Saudi Arabia as examples of the Kingdom's alleged record of obstructionism, from spiriting Bin Laden kin out of Boston after 9/11 without approval from the FBI (false) to persistent charges that Saudi Arabia was uncooperative in the FBI's long investigation of the 1996 Al-Khobar bombing. While these canards can be challenged, they rarely are and thus take on the imprimatur of truth.

The Al-Khobar bombing canard has been one of the longer-lived ones and may be worth refuting in some detail to illustrate how some anti-Saudi canards have been advanced in order to serve other purposes.

In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on May 20, former FBI Director Louis Freeh laid out on the public record what happened to the results of the Al Khobar investigation. As Freeh tells it, the Al Khobar bombing occurred 10 months before the winds of political change swept through Iran with the election of President Mohammed Khatami. Once Khatami was elected, the Clinton Administration didn't want to deal with the evidence of Iranian complicity in the Al Khobar bombing, preferring instead to duck the issue by blaming Saudi Arabia for not cooperating with the investigation. In his op-ed piece, Freeh disclosed that, despairing of the Clinton Administration's desire to duck the issue, he sought help in September 1998 from former President Bush, who was in Washington at the time meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah. Pursuant to the former President's request, the Crown Prince immediately agreed to let FBI agents conduct one-on-one interviews with six of the imprisoned Hezbollah members who actually carried out the Al Khobar attacks—interviews which the Clinton Administration had claimed the Saudis refused to agree to. All of these Hezbollah members, Freeh wrote, "directly implicated the Iranian Republic Guards, Iran's Intelligence Ministry, and senior Iranian government officials in the planning and execution of this attack." It was only after President George W. Bush took office, Freeh writes, that an indictment against 13 Hezbollah terrorists was obtained, identifying Iran as the sponsor of the attacks.

Obviously, Saudi cooperation in the war on terrorism hasn't been perfect but has been accelerated when Riyadh itself was struck by terrorist bombings on May 12, as you have correctly noted.

But, please, a responsible journal such as yours shouldn't fall into the trap of characterizing the world's leading oil exporter and the US's main crude supplier as a place where "revulsion against Americans" is endemic. It's a disservice to your readers.

Nathaniel Kern, President, Foreign Reports Inc.
Washington, DC