[Nasional-e] The Saudi-bashers play into bin Laden's hands

[Ambon]

The Saudi-bashers play into bin Laden's hands

Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times  Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Common sense on terrorism

RIYADH Osama bin Laden succeeded magnificently, it seems, in at least one of
his goals: creating a rift between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
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Odds are that bin Laden shrewdly sought to create discord by deliberately
choosing Saudis to be the grunts of Sept. 11, picking them to fill 15 of the
19 hijacker positions, even though the teams were led by an Egyptian,
Mohamed Atta, and other key players were from Lebanon and the United Arab
Emirates. Al Qaeda had plenty of Yemenis, Kuwaitis and North Africans whom
it could have tapped, but it apparently went out of its way to choose Saudis
to be the foot soldiers.
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The plan, if that's what it was, worked perfectly. The 60-year friendship
between Saudi Arabia and the United States is now in tatters, and it will
probably get even more poisonous in the coming months if the United States
invades Iraq. It turns out that Saudis have as much animosity for Americans
as Americans have for them.
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"Our people very much hate the U.S.," said Soliman Buthy, a Saudi engineer
with flowing white robes and even more flowing black beard. "The No. 1
reason is that it supports Israel with no limits. Then there's homeland
security measures, and now we hear that all Saudis in America will be
fingerprinted."
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Buthy has plenty of company: A poll released this month by Zogby
International found that 87 percent of Saudis have an unfavorable view of
the United States.
.
Even among the many Saudis who lived for years in America, there is a deep
sense of betrayal that matches Americans'. Everywhere I go in Saudi Arabia,
I run into American-educated Saudis whose eyes light up as they recall how
they lived in Kansas City or Chicago or Portland, how their children were
born there, how their neighbors were the nicest people in the world. Then,
bitterly, they complain that Americans now slander them as terrorists, deny
them visas and vilify their country.
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"Now all Saudis are guilty, are unwelcome," complained Fahad Aslimy of the
Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce and Industry. "Most Saudis were
educated in the United States, and it is our second home. So this is very
frustrating."
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Indeed, it has become fashionable in America to see Saudi Arabia as "the
most dangerous, the most fanatic regime on the entire planet," as a reader
e-mailed me recently. Richard Perle's influential Defense Policy Board
convened a hatchet-job hearing in July in which Saudi Arabia was described
as America's "most dangerous opponent."
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There's plenty to criticize about Saudi Arabia, but this vision of it as a
dangerous enemy is way over the top.
.
Sure, the Saudi monarchy bears some responsibility for fundamentalist
Islamic terrorists. King Faisal, together with the United States,
deliberately nurtured fundamentalist Islam in the 1960s as a counterweight
to Nasserists and leftists. It was Saudi Arabia that, at America's request,
backed the jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, thus forming the
basis for Al Qaeda.
.
Later, prestige-seeking Saudi businessmen wrote checks to radical Islamic
charities, financing the spread of radical Islam in much of the Islamic
world - in the same way that zealous but misguided Americans helped
underwrite IRA terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, as the U.S. government
pretended not to notice. Read Margaret Thatcher's memoirs and you find the
same kind of outrage at American financing of Irish terrorism that Americans
now feel at Saudi complicity in Islamic terrorism.
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Saudi Arabia's responsibility, in other words, arises more from stupidity
than venality. It's absurd to imagine the Saudi government intentionally
promoting people like Osama bin Laden when bin Laden's first target was the
Saudi royal family itself.
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The Saudi royals can fairly be criticized for fecklessly looking the other
way as clerics commandeered schools and preached poisonous nonsense about
foreigners. More broadly, America and the kingdom have almost no values in
common; Saudi Arabia is a corrupt monarchy that stands for religious
intolerance and the repression of women.
.
But we also need a bit of common sense in the discussion. To my ear the
harsh denunciations of Saudi Arabia as a terrorist state sound as unbalanced
as the conspiratorial ravings of Saudi fundamentalists themselves.


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