About sixty years ago, R.G. Collingwood wrote, "Every new generation
must rewrite history in its own way." Inasmuch as his thinking was
suspended somewhere between hope for a science of history and an
awareness of its practical limits, philosophers of history have been
arguing ever since about what he really meant. But one thing he must
have meant is that what interests us about the past is at least
partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the
present. As Collingwood said, "As far as we can see history as a
whole . . . we see it as a continuous development in which every
phase consists of the solution of human problems set by the preceding
phase."

Human affairs generally move so ponderously, or in such complicated
ways, that contemporaries have trouble seeing "history as a whole",
or detecting the phases to which Collingwood pointed. But as a
glacier or a tectonic plate may slip to dramatic effect, so sometimes
major events rattle us into historical awareness. When they do, it is
uncanny how we find ourselves reassessing the significance of dates
as symbols of the touching points of historical phases. On September
1, 1939, 1918-19 suddenly shrunk in significance for Britons and
Frenchmen and 1870-71 suddenly grew. When the Berlin Wall fell and
the Soviet Union dissolved, 1917 suddenly became a less important
date, and 1914 a more important one. September 11, 2001, was such an
event, so it is worth asking how our historical perceptions may
change as a result of it.

To be sure, some movement in our historical awareness may be detected
already. In the past six months many Americans have grown intensely
interested in the Middle East and Islam in general--and in Saudi
Arabia, Saudi Islam, and the U.S.-Saudi relationship in particular.
So far, however, relatively recent matters have monopolized our
attention, and an abundance of detailed newspaper feature series has
contributed to that focus. The seriousness of our historical thinking
is also affected by emotion. We Americans are more than just curious,
and more than merely bothered, about these Saudi subjects. Some are
better described as very, very angry.

For starters, it soon dawned on us that while the targets of initial
U.S.-led military operations would be the Al-Qaeda organization
nestled in the bosom of the Taliban regime, the real source of the
problem lay in our two most tactically significant allies: Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia. As to the former, we knew that Pakistan's military
and intelligence services had created and supported the Taliban, thus
providing sanctuary and foot soldiers for mass-casualty terrorism. As
to the latter, not only were 15 of the 19 terrorists Saudi nationals,
but the open secret that the Saudi regime deflects popular
frustration and opposition away from itself and onto the United
States and Israel became more widely confessed in public. As Sandy
Berger put it once out of office, "the veil has been lifted and the
American people see a double game that they're not terribly pleased
with." Though silent on whether he had been displeased with it while
in office, he continued: "They see a regime that is repressive with
respect to the extremists that threaten them, but more than
tolerant--indeed, the more we find out, beneficent--to the general
movement of extreme Islamists in the region."

It soon occurred to others that even this deflection game--what
George Shultz has termed "a grotesque protection racket"-- was not
the deepest root of the matter. The clerically-run Saudi educational
system inculcates an intense religious and cultural chauvinism into
its youth--and youth under the age of 16 are today about half the
Kingdom's population. Saudi ulema have tutored generation after
generation in what amounts to jihadist incitement against
non-Muslims. The late Hamud al-Shuaibi, a Saudi cleric who followed
Wahhabi Islam to its logical conclusion, put it exactly right: "The
Saudi people follow the sheiks that relay the truth and the ones who
follow Quran and Sunna, not the ones who follow the political side.
Jihad is the highest form of worship. This is a very high station. So
all look for this station. If the government allowed people, all the
Arab Muslims would go to war." This explains why, in a recent poll
conducted by Saudi intelligence and shared with the U.S. government,
more than 95 percent of Saudis between the ages of 25 and 41
expressed sympathy with Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia's political culture, then, is caught in a double-bind
owed to the Kingdom's very origins: the alliance between the power of
the Al Saud and the theology of Abdel ibn al-Wahhab. Saudi society
naturally generates resentment against its own political leadership,
for that leadership's power is far too scant to implement the
jihadist teachings of its own schools. Moreover, the Kingdom relies
on outside physical protection and a welter of sheltering financial
and institutional arrangements with the United States while at the
same time exporting its excess religious zeal in the form of
opposition to that protector. This double bind has been managed with
only modest breakage for most of the last half century, but as U.S.
protection has become more visible since the Gulf War, and as the
excess of zeal has grown from both demographic trends and the
establishment's essentially reactionary approach to economic
liberalization, an always tricky balance has grown more problematic.

Just as recognition of these realities was penetrating minds in and
around the Beltway, Saudi behavior fed the growing sense of American
disquiet. First, Saudi leaders refused to publicly acknowledge that
the United States might use Saudi bases against Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, and for a while it was not clear if the U.S. military would
even have unfettered unpublicized use of them. At the same time, the
Saudi government raised barriers to U.S. law enforcement agencies'
efforts to learn about the Saudi terrorists of September 11.
Americans were incredulous at being told by Saudi officials, long
after it had become even remotely plausible, that few if any of the
terrorists were Saudis but had stolen Saudi passports and identities.
When subsequently asked to help U.S. officials in the critical task
of "following the money", Saudi officials at first denied, pace Mr.
Berger, that any public or private Saudi money had financed any
terrorist organization. This raised the question of whether the
Saudis were lying, which would have been bad, or whether they were
clueless as to what was going on under their noses, which would have
been worse. The New Republic bluntly summed up the emerging
conclusion: "In fact our Arab 'coalition partners'--particularly
Saudi Arabia--are actively sabotaging our efforts to identify the
wider terrorist international, made up in large part, of course, of
their citizens."

Before long, too, recognition of the inadvertent but unmistakable
Saudi complicity in September 11 begged the re-interpretation of
older data into something of a pattern. The Saudis had impeded the
U.S. investigation into the Riyadh and Khobar Towers bombings that
killed 23 American soldiers in November 1995 and June 1996. Saudi
Arabia is one of the few countries that has refused to participate in
an FAA-run airplane manifest agreement that lets U.S. officials know
who is arriving into the United States from abroad. The Saudis have
at times been unhelpful to sensitive U.S. Arab-Israeli diplomacy,
actively dissuading Yasir Arafat during and after the summer 2000
Camp David summit, for example, from accepting compromises over
Jerusalem that are a sine qua non for a settlement.

More pointedly with regard to Al-Qaeda and company, the Saudis
refused to take Osama bin Laden into custody in 1996 when the
Sudanese government offered, with American encouragement and support,
to deliver him there. As egregious, in April 1995 the FBI learned
that Imad Mughniyah was on a flight from Khartoum to Beirut that was
scheduled to stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. FBI agents rushed to
Jeddah to apprehend Mughniyah, who was responsible for the 1985
hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which a U.S. Navy diver was
murdered in cold blood, and for the October 1983 bombing of the U.S.
Marine complex in Lebanon. But the Saudis refused to let the plane
land. (Mughniyah went on to become an important liaison between
Hizballah and Al-Qaeda, and is even now helping to host escaped
Al-Qaeda terrorists in Lebanon.)

As all of this history was being revived, reviewed and discussed,
together with post-September 11 developments themselves, the Saudis
shouted foul. They claimed, most pointedly, that a conspiracy was
being mounted against them by the American media, averring sotto voce
that this was because so many Jews occupy high positions in that
media. Very much related, the Saudis sought to excuse their own
reticence to help the United States by alleging, in the person of
Crown Prince Abdallah himself on January 28, that Saudi reluctance
flowed from justifiable anger throughout the Arab world over
America's "absolute" support for Israel.

Now, Saudi attitudes toward Palestine and Israel, and toward Jews in
the American media, may seem like side points considering all the
other things that have impinged on U.S. and Saudi interests since
September 11. But they are not. The Saudi leadership's approach to
Palestine helps define its predicament, stuck as it is between the
demands of its own society and its need for friendship and protection
from the United States. Moreover, this predicament has been, and will
remain, a central and uncomfortable fact in the American war on
terrorism.

U.S.-Saudi disagreement over Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy had passed
through a dramatic stage in the weeks just before September 11, and
Saudi complaints after September 11 make little sense without an
awareness of that drama. To understand either, however, some
background is necessary.

While Saudi Arabia has for decades been ritually referred to by
Americans and Europeans as "moderate", there has never been anything
the least bit moderate about its basic view of Israel. Saudi
religious figures and most Saudi citizens see Israel and Zionism in
ways indistinguishable from Al-Qaeda or the Iranian mullahs at their
worst (which they frequently are). They accept unquestioningly a
passion-play version of the conflict that is entirely one-sided and,
given the closed nature of Saudi society, few Saudis have ever even
heard any other account. Israel stands irredeemably guilty of
"original sin", Palestinians are ever and always mere innocent
victims, and no wild Arab press exaggeration--or pure invention--of
dark Israeli deeds is too bizarre to be believed. Partly on account
of their educational indoctrination, too, many Saudis are avid
consumers of anti-semitism, both vintage imported versions from
Europe and fresh creations from the pens of contemporary Arabs. It
may make at least back-page news in the United States when an
official of the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs refers to
American Jews as "brothers of apes and pigs" and calls on America to
"get rid of its Jews", but it is occasion for nods and yawning inside
the Kingdom.

In light of this, it seems odd upon a moment's reflection that the
Saudi political establishment has always supported Yasir Arafat, the
leader and symbol of secular Palestinian nationalism, rather than
Islamist alternatives, like Hamas, whose religious-based views are
closer to those of Saudi clergy and society. That it has done so
illustrates how the Saudi internal dilemma projects itself onto Saudi
diplomacy. To be saddled with the political leadership of a weak
state means to be simultaneously pragmatic in private and
ideologically spotless in public. While the royal family would
probably accept any settlement over Palestine that would satisfy
Arafat and the nationalists, the Kingdom has been very reluctant to
take an active public part in any diplomacy that might in the end
legitimate Israel's existence, within any borders whatsoever, for
fear of the internal reaction it might provoke. (Crown Prince
Abdallah's "speech in the desk" comment to Thomas Friedman about
possible Saudi normalization with Israel might signal a lightening of
that reluctance, but as of this writing, in late February, it is too
soon to say.) For the Saudi leadership, in any event, Arafat is as
moderate a figure as it dares to support.

This is why, despite longstanding and obvious differences between
U.S. and Israeli views of a settlement, despite Arafat's having
visited the Clinton White House more often than any other foreign
dignitary, and despite the fact that the U.S. government has provided
more financial support to the Palestinian Authority than has the
Saudi government, Saudi leaders still say publicly that U.S. policy
has been "absolutely, 100 percent" biased toward Israel during the
second so-called intifada. Such a view sounds self-evident to most
Saudis because it is accompanied by a parallel belief that any
support for Israel is unjustified because Israel's very existence is
illegitimate. Over the past 17 months of Palestinian-instigated
violence, most Saudis see the Israeli state as terrorist and the
Palestinians as blameless targets and martyrs.

Whether Crown Prince Abdallah and his court privately hold the same
attitude is not clear. But it is clear that, both before September 11
and since, the Saudi government has acted as it has because it is far
more afraid of its own domestic shadow than of Washington's glare. It
knows that its own internal peril paradoxically gives it enormous
strength in its dealings with the United States because as difficult
as the Saudi status quo is, serious people in Washington realize that
all the available alternatives are worse.

It is from this mix of motives and assessments that the Saudis
brought considerable pressure on the Bush Administration last spring
and summer to change its standoffish public diplomacy with regard to
Palestinian-Israeli troubles. An August 24 press conference in which
the President laid the major share of blame for the
Israeli-Palestinian impasse on Arafat touched off a particularly
intense Saudi effort. By early September, that effort resulted in two
promises: one very deferrential one from the United States to put its
views of a settlement into the public realm, and one from Chairman
Arafat to do what needed doing to resume negotiations toward a
ceasefire if not a settlement.

September 11 intervened before either of those promises could be
kept. But the promised speech from the United States was nevertheless
made, by Secretary of State Colin Powell on November 19, with
significant foreshadowing from the President on October 2 and
November 10. With these pronouncements, a Republican administration
went on record supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian
state. Arafat, however, did not keep his promises to Abdallah.
Instead, he connived to bring Iranian arms and influence into the
Levant, right up to the shores of the Red Sea. In secret league with
Hizballah through Iran, Arafat seemed to be planning a kind of re-run
of the 1973 Middle East War, with Iran playing the Soviet role,
Hizballah in place of Syria on the northern front and the PLO tanzim
in place of Egypt on the southern front. The aim was basically the
same: to cause such danger and fear as to trigger outside
intervention on the Arabs' behalf.

As evidenced by the President's January 29 State of the Union
address, the administration has drawn the proper conclusions from all
of this: that President Bush, at his August 24 press conference, was
right the first time; that Arafat and the PLO are on the wrong side
of the war against terrorism; and that trusting Saudi (and Egyptian)
advice on how to handle other Arab leaders brings embarrassment and
failure. One wonders how the President now reads his hurried,
placating response to Crown Prince Abdallah in late August. After all
of Arafat's special industry since the summer, one may also wonder
how the Crown Prince reads it.

However they read it, it is evident that a combination of new
indignities and old resentments has coalesced into a crescendo of
American criticism of Saudi Arabia. Senator Carl Levin was the first,
on January 15, to raise the possibility of withdrawing U.S. forces
from Saudisoil, but by the time he went public, an attentive audience
in Congress, the Pentagon and elsewhere stood ready to applaud his
view. Privately, some senior former U.S. officials began saying
things only slightly off the record that would have been hard to
imagine six months earlier. At the core of these remarks has been
advice to speak frankly, at long last, and at the highest level to
the Saudis about key matters that divide us. As Brent Scowcroft put
it (for the record), "We probably avoid talking about the things that
are the real problems between us because it's a very polite
relationship. We don't get all that much below the surface." The
developing sense is that we should finally give the Saudi leadership
to understand that they need us more than we need them.

But is that really true, and is there any sense to such a calculation
in the first place? Despite all that has happened since September 11,
there has been a limit to Saudi bashing, and for good reason. While
some experts believe that the United States does not need Saudi
facilities to make war against the Iraqi Ba'ath regime, for example,
most Pentagon officials would rather do with than without those
facilities. Saudi oil still matters greatly to the limping world
economy, too, inasmuch as we have neither a serious energy policy in
this country nor yet a ready substitute for Saudi swing production
abroad (though the Russians are trying and hinting). More important,
if the United States lets loose of the Saudis to sink or swim as they
might, they might actually sink--only to be replaced by a regime that
more resembles the Taliban than, say, the Hashemites in Amman. What
benefit, then--aside from the idle pleasures of rhetorical release,
or the scoring of petty political points--is there in bashing them?

There is none. The point of foreign policymaking is not to feel good
but to do well. A useful step in that direction would be to take up
Collingwood's advice in earnest to rewrite our history.

When we recall our lessons as to what was significant between the end
of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, we have been
used to naming such items as the Washington Naval Conference,
Locarno, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. From the vantage point of
September 11, however, new historical coordinates arise. In the
wizened, windswept autumn of 1924, the Al Saud wrested ownership of
the Hejaz from the Hashemites, who had lorded over the holiest places
of Islam since the 10th century. With that conquest--which could have
been prevented by a few gunboats and some strong language had British
policy not been otherwise bent--the basic territorial configuration
of what became known in 1932 as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was
established. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the Kingdom oil was
being found in abundance, and by the 1970s money began rolling into
Saudi coffers in amounts that neither traditional conceptions nor
vaults could hold.

The combination--oil riches and the religious legitimacy conferred by
control of Mecca and Medina (and of the hajj along with it)--has
allowed the Saudi partnership of the Al Saud and the Al Wahhab to
overturn the equilibrium of Islamic civilization that had existed for
nigh on a thousand years. The Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam is
neither traditional nor orthodox. It is a slightly attenuated
fundamentalism that dates only from the end of the 18th century.
Though linked to the Islamic past through Ibn Taymiyah, a 13th
century exegete, and to the minoritarian salafiyah strand of
interpretation before him, as recently as fifty years ago the large
majority of Muslims considered Saudi Wahhabism to be exotic, marginal
and austere to the point of neurotic. But an aggressive and very
well-funded campaign of intra-Islamic evangelism has established it
as the paragon of Sunni piety today. This is, in a word, bad; bad for
Arabs, for Muslims, and for everyone else. More than anything, the
ascendancy of Wahhabism within the Islamic world, to a point that is
now beyond the control of the Saudi state, is the core source of the
terrorist attacks of September 11--and of the way that those attacks
have been variously received and understood by Muslims everywhere.

Once we understand "1924" properly, we are instantly sobered by the
new perspective it provides. We see that Saudi society, caught as it
is between its origins and the inexorable press of modernity, is an
inherent threat to the United States and to its allies, Arab and
non-Arab alike; that by its very nature it cannot help but be such a
threat. While we can and should try to persuade the Saudi government
to help us "follow the money" and to do other things manifestly in
its own self-interest as well as ours, we will get nowhere trying to
persuade Saudis to be what they are not. We may not like the way
Saudis think about the non-Islamic world, or what they teach in their
schools, or how they define concepts like charity and terrorism. But
for American Christians or Jews to demand that they educate their
children to become "better" or "more tolerant" Muslims is utterly
futile. Next to the apparently unlimited hubris of those who think it
so easy to change the political culture of the Muslim world with
so-called Middle East Marshall Plans, this presumption--that we have
the right to insist on the reform of other peoples' religions--has to
rank as the most outrageous American foolishness of the
post-September 11 period.

Too many Americans, then, have simultaneously underestimated the
Saudi problem and overestimated the potential near-term efficacy of
American influence in regard to it. On the one hand, as a matter of
first principle, the United States should not "learn to live" with a
Saudi Arabia in perpetuity. A Wahhabi-inspired country controlling
the Hejaz and that much oil wealth will never be desirable from the
perspective of either American interests or values. Arabia has not
always been Saudi or Wahhabi, and some day it will probably stop
being both; should it become prudent for the United States to advance
that day, it would be worth considering. On the other hand, we must
recognize that this time is not at hand. The Saudi version of weak
realpolitik is becoming an increasingly tense management problem, but
it is not just a Saudi problem; it's our problem, too.

As we wait for such a time, there is a lesser but not trivial benefit
to seeing the Saudi problem for what it really is. If we stop kidding
ourselves about the fit and affection of the two societies for one
another, we may grasp the enormous distortion that Saudi money has
wreaked on our common sense about the Middle East. Yes, tens of
billions of dollars passed around hither and yon over a few decades
can do that. But there is hope. Rudy Giuliani provided an object
lesson in how to handle Saudi lucre with strings attached. And if
even oilmen like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney show signs of getting
right about Saudi Arabia, then so can the rest of us.

Essay Types: Essay