Military

DATE=08/08/02

TYPE=U-S OPINION ROUNDUP

TITLE=SAUDIS:FRIEND OR FOE?

NUMBER=6-12587

BYLINE=ANDREW GUTHRIE

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

EDITOR=ASSIGNMENTS

TELEPHONE=619-3335

CONTENT=

INTRO: The Bush administration is distancing itself from a private analyst's report concluding that Saudi Arabia is an adversary of the United States. The comments came from a Rand Corporation expert to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board sometime last month. The Washington Post reported it in a front-page story that quickly produced a flurry of editorials. We get a sampling now from ____________ in today's U-S Opinion Roundup.

TEXT: In the briefing, Rand analyst Laurent Murawiec suggested that: "Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies" and went on to describe the oil-rich land as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East. That was only the opinion of this Rand Corporation scholar, but giving it voice at the U-S defense headquarters caused problems for the Bush administration which tried to smooth relations with Riyadh.

At the same time, The Post reported that the views, while counter to official U-S policy, have "growing currency within the Bush administration - - especially on the staff of Vice President [Dick] Cheney and [among] the Pentagon's civilian leadership." It did not take long for this dispute to roar into the editorial columns, like this on in The Los Angeles Times.

VOICE: The discovery that 15 of the 19 hijackers September eleventh were Saudi Arabian was a shock to Americans who had seen the kingdom as a solid ally despite its deep cultural differences with the United States. The alliance remained after 9/11, but the U-S view of the Saudis began to shift. This week's disclosure that a briefing for a Pentagon advisory board called the kingdom an adversary of the United States and a backer of terrorism strains the ties even more.

The Bush administration hurried to distance itself from the comments and reassure the Saudis. But that doesn't mean either nation can entirely dismiss the harsh views in the briefing, given by a Rand Corporation analyst. [He said] . that "Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies" and is "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Mideast.

. The Defense Policy Board, which advises the Defense Department, consists of former government officials including Henry A. Kissinger, who according to The Washington Post, disagreed with the analysis. The briefing said that if the Saudis did not do more to crack down on terrorism, their oil fields and overseas financial assets should be "targeted."

The Saudi government views itself not just as a civil authority but as a custodian of the holy places of Islam, the religion that began on the Arabian Peninsula. . The Wahhabi school of Islam, which dominates Saudi Arabia. is the most conservative and the one often taught abroad in Islamic schools financed by the Saudis. . Although it is wrong to blame September eleventh on religion, it is reasonable to ask why so many hijackers came from one country. Saudi leaders owe it to the 9/11 victims to seek answers instead of brushing aside that painful fact.

TEXT: On New York's Long Island, Newsday seems resigned to both the hypocrisy and the not so thinly veiled hostility, noting that America is held hostage to Saudi oil.

VOICE: There is enough truth in the report's findings to raise uncomfortable questions about the unavoidable hypocrisy and political compromises that characterize U-S relations with Arab allies. ... The devil's bargain the al-Saud family has made is to allow Islamic fundamentalists to focus their vitriol on the United States and Israel as long as they do not try to depose the royal family.

In a sense, Washington has gone along with that bargain for its own reasons. The Saudis are hardly models of democracy, but as long as they can keep their nation out of the hands of radical Islamists - - and control the oil supply they sit on - - the United States will tolerate distasteful, even hostile behavior. So be it, at least for now. Creative hypocrisy is a tool of diplomacy, after all, and morality is about as welcome in foreign policy as a preacher in a bordello. But someday the contradictions may become unsustainable.

TEXT: Turning to the Midwest, Wisconsin's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says there is more than a grain of truth in what the Rand analyst had to say. And therein lies the problem.

VOICE: Stripped of some of their most incendiary contents . the remarks do reflect the beliefs of many people in official Washington, and they focus attention on a country whose behavior deserves far more scrutiny and criticism than it has received. The briefing was conducted . by Laurent Murawiec, a policy analyst with Rand . a defense and foreign-policy research group. Among other things, [Mr.] Murawiec said, "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain. . Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies."

. amid the tumult, the defense board, the U-S government and Rand [all] insisted that [Mr.] Murawiec was expressing merely his own opinions. The Saudis point out that they contributed billions to resist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. During Operation Desert Storm, Saudi Arabia defied Islamic purists by allowing its bases to be used by the U-S to attack Iraq. In March, the Saudi crown prince unveiled a sensible plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But some of the other rooms in the House of Saud are not so accommodating. Saudi Arabia's human rights record is abysmal. Democratic elections and institutions are unknown. The nation's state-run press publishes anti-Semitic garbage and promotes anti-American sentiment. . The U-S tolerates these and other affronts because Saudi Arabia is the custodian of Islam's holy sites and because it is the world's largest oil producer. Saudi Arabia . may be, willy-nilly, an ally. But it can hardly be called a friend.

TEXT: Lastly, in the U-S edition of London's Financial Times, we read concern at both the Rand comments and some other things Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said about the region.

VOICE: The signals from Washington about its intentions toward Iraq and the Middle East have been getting steadily more confusing. Now they are beginning to get alarming.

Bad enough were the revelations . that Pentagon advisers have tossed around the idea that Saudi Arabia - - Washington's long-standing ally in the Gulf - - may in fact be "the kernel of evil" in the region and the U-S's "most dangerous opponent." Donald Rumsfeld . distanced himself from this thesis, presented last month by the Rand Corporation . But not only did his public reassurances to Riyadh sound half-hearted, he went on to tell Pentagons staff that focusing on Jewish settlements in [the] "so-called occupied territory" in the Israel-Palestine conflict "misses the point," which is to get a new Palestinian leadership for Israel to negotiate with.

If we are to take Mr. Rumsfeld at his word, he is overturning decades of international law, under which all the land captured by Israel in the 1967 six-day war, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as all of east Jerusalem, is occupied territory. . These two incidents will add to the worries of Washington's European and Arab friends about U-S Middle East policy.

TEXT: With those words of unease from the U-S edition of London's Financial Times, we conclude this sampling of comment on the recent Rand assessment of Saudi Arabia as an enemy, not friend, of the United States.

NEB/ANG/MEM