Saudi Arabia: Big, Bothered and Bedeviled

By Richard Curtiss

On the evening of my arrival in Saudi Arabia, President Bill Clinton also was arriving for the last of his pre-election visits to six Middle East countries in four days. The Saudi capital, however, was completely normal because King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud was receiving the U.S. president far to the north in Hafr al Batin. After their evening meeting, Clinton would return to the U.S. and King Fahd would stay for another day or two with the armed forces headquartered in that military city from which the Saudis defend their northern frontiers.

Whether you approach Riyadh from Jordan to its northwest, Iraq to its northeast, Oman to its southeast or Yemen to its southwest, the impression is always the same. It's big. Saudi Arabia does not encompass the entire Arabian peninsula, but its area is approximately equal to that of all the named countries plus that of all of its other immediate neighbors—Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

However, even including guest workers, its population does not match its area. The Saudis claim 18 million inhabitants. If the figure is exaggerated, it will in any case be realized by the end of the decade, since the Saudi 3.2 percent rate of annual population increase is among the highest in the world. Among the 21-member League of Arab States, Saudi population is exceeded only by Egypt (59 million), Algeria, Morocco and Sudan (approximately 28 million each) and Iraq (20 million), and approached by Syria (14 million) and Yemen, which has a population of 12 million.

With 25 percent of the entire world's proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia has more political influence, both inside and outside the Middle East, than any other Arab country. In addition, the other five Gulf Cooperation Council member states generally follow its political lead, though some would be reluctant to admit it. Further, other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) recognize that Saudi ability to raise or lower its own oil production by an optional 2 to 4 million barrels a day is the key to world petroleum prices.

When Saudi Petroleum Minister Hisham Nazer arrived at this fall's OPEC meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, he announced that his country would favor retaining current national petroleum production quotas for an additional 12-month period, despite rising world demand, as a means of increasing world prices. Although other delegates had arrived with differing positions, it took only two days for delegates to adopt the Saudi position and adjourn.

Fortunately for world economic stability, Saudi Arabia has been a moderating influence in OPEC, defying the price hawks led by Iran by seeking to protect current world markets from the severe price and production fluctuations that, beginning in 1973, raised havoc with the economies of industrialized and developing countries alike.

Equally fortunate for international political stability, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East's richest country, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, are on the same political wavelength, which was not the case during the earlier presidency of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The current good relations with Egypt and most other Arab League members are important to the Saudis because they are deeply concerned about their far larger non-Arab neighbor, Iran, with its 60 million population and an economically foundering government. In the absence of bread, Iran's radical Islamist government is providing circuses for its people. Clearly in the center ring is an attempt to subvert the Saudi monarchy through programs as diverse as organizing anti-government riots led by Iranian "pilgrims" to Mecca and setting up in Western capitals bogus "human rights" organizations with little more than a letterhead and a fax machine to transmit press releases berating the Saudis.

In other rings of the Iranian circus are the establishment of a radical Islamist government in Sudan, support for the Shi'i Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, assassinations of Iranian opposition figures using both Khartoum and Beirut as bases, and, recently, attempts to arm and strengthen newly united Yemen as a potential future base.

Because the Saudis perceive all of these Iranian actions as attempts to tighten an Islamist noose around their country while its attention perforce remains focused upon an unpredictable Saddam Hussain in Iraq, the Saudis are particularly frustrated at the inability of the U.S. to "finish the job" the two countries started together in ejecting the Iraqis from Kuwait.

"Saddam must go," exclaims the first Saudi government official with whom I meet. "He is bankrupting the entire Middle East." The official is referring to reports from Washington that the just-frozen buildup of U.S. forces in Kuwait will cost the Gulf Cooperation Council's six members between one-half and one billion dollars, and perhaps more if U.S. ground forces stay beyond the end of the year. The precedent was set when the Saudi government paid the expenses of all of the countries that participated in Desert Storm. By official accounting, that bill was $55 billion dollars. Some Saudis believe it was more.

Another frustration expressed by virtually all Saudis concerns American unwillingness to pressure Israel to withdraw from all the Arab lands it occupied during the 1967 war and afterward to "finish the job" of permanently settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Individual peace agreements such as the Jordan-Israel treaty, most Saudis believe, only increase Israeli temptation not to make the East Jerusalem and West Bank concessions called for by the land-for-peace formula in U.N. Security Resolution 242 of Nov. 22, 1967.

"Yasser Arafat has given up everything, and as yet the Israelis have given him nothing in return except Gaza and Jericho," complained the second Saudi official I visited. "As for Hafez Al-Assad, how many times does he have to say 'full peace for full withdrawal' before the Israelis stop asking him for definitions of 'full peace' and start withdrawing?"

Every Saudi with whom I spoke, whatever his views on other aspects of Saudi foreign policy, seemed concerned about the continuing menace of the unpredictable Saddam. "Did you know that when Saddam was a student he raped a girl in a university dormitory and, when she started to scream, threw her naked out of a third-story window to her death?" asked an editor. "I was studying at the same university at the time."

Before I could ask whether the incident happened at Baghdad or Cairo university, since Saddam studied at both, the editor continued: "I remember he used to force Iraqi students to lend him money and then, if they asked him to pay them back, he and his thugs would beat them up in the student cafeteria. He was a murdering gangster then, and he is a murdering gangster now."

Much as they may hate Saddam, however, few Saudis want to see Iraq break up into a Kurdish, a Sunni and a Shi'i state. "It's Iran we fear the most," says a highly placed government official. "A stable and united Iraq would be the best counterweight to keep Iran from seizing more lands or islands in the Gulf without sending for American forces every time Iran makes a threatening move."

Then comes the throwback to earlier times when Middle Easterners attributed most political developments in the region to the machinations of the CIA and "the British." "Surely you Americans don't need to prop up this man just to keep Iraq from flying apart," the government official says. "There are other Sunni officers in Iraq who are not monsters." The underlying premise in virtually every political discussion in the Middle East today is that, consciously or unconsciously, Saddam is doing what is expected of him by the U.S. and by Israel, which increasingly is perceived as pulling all the strings in Clinton administration Middle East policy.

Said a Saudi clerk in a non-governmental institution whose family roots straddle the tribes and oases of the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi borderlands, "My family is not wealthy, but every month we send the equivalent of $250 to a relative in Iraq. He in turn divides it among 100 related families. Without it, they say, they would all go hungry. Imagine a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world where $2.50 a month is the difference between surviving or starving."

This relatively humble Saudi did not feign "political correctness" in assessing the military situation. "Saddam has become the instrument for bringing Western forces back to control the world's oil supply," he insisted. "Saddam had no intention of invading Kuwait this time. It was a game to bring American and British forces back to the Gulf. And who's going to pay for them? We Saudis will end up paying Oman's share as well as our own, and Kuwait will have to pay Bahrain's share along with its own. We can't afford these foreign forces and we don't need them. Our armies can defend our own land. I'm not a soldier but I'm willing to become one to defend my country. If America wants to help, let it destroy Saddam, not build bases which we fear may be used to control this whole area."

A highly placed Saudi government official had reached exactly opposite conclusions. "The Kuwaitis did the right thing in asking for your help. Bill Clinton did the right thing in providing it. What does it matter whether it costs us half a billion or two or three billion? It proves once and for all that, with your backing, we have stability in this region. That knowledge alone by businessmen and potential investors will repay all of our costs for this American buildup, and for Desert Storm, as well."

Saudi investors have been reluctant to keep all of their money in Saudi Arabia, he said, because they fear Iran, Iraq and the instability that both have created in the area. Now such Saudis know it is safe to bring their money home and put it to work. The same, he argued, is true of foreign institutions and investors. Now they no longer will fear entering into expensive joint enterprises because of regional instability.

High-level Saudi uncertainty about the peace process, as it is unfolding, was clearly revealed by the government's ambivalence about the Casablanca conference, organized largely by the United States and attended by some 2,000 government and business leaders, including the three recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

At a luncheon with Saudi graduates of my alma mater, the University of Southern California, a banker who had been invited by the U.S. Embassy to attend the Casablanca meeting asked me why I was in Riyadh instead of covering the Morocco meeting. I expressed the view that the conference seemed to be a U.S.-Israeli artifice to leapfrog unsolved political problems by proceeding to the economic arrangements that could be successful only after the area enjoys the true stability that will follow a just settlement.

"And why didn't you go?" I asked.

"Because I agree completely with what you just said," the banker answered.

However, not all Saudis are so reluctant to wait for the results of the difficult peace negotiations still to come. "At Oslo the Palestinians made their separate agreement," said an old friend in the bureaucracy who writes for the Saudi political press as well. "Now it's up to them to get the best deal they can on their own."

A wealthy businessman in Jeddah disagreed. "If the Israelis shut the Palestinians out of Jerusalem, or end up stealing the waters of Lebanon—just as I think they are planning to continue stealing the waters of Jordan—then we will all have to pay," he predicted. "The Islamists working to undermine this and every stable Arab government will be immensely strengthened,"

His final prediction, however, summarized the conclusions from my entire, confusing visit to his country. "If Israel doesn't make at least some concessions in negotiations, and instead denies the Palestinians the sovereignty and full withdrawal they seek, the Israelis will suffer even more than the rest of us," he said. "Their goal in entering into this peace process is to gain access to the petrodollar markets of the Gulf. But unless they make it a just peace, they'll never get there."

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.