Only Buffer Zones Can Protect Israel
nytimes.com
________
1 Country, 2 Futures
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
nytimes.com
RIYADH, Saudi
Arabia
An acquaintance here in Saudi
Arabia told me this story: He was touring the countryside
by car and got slightly lost. He saw a car down the road
and approached it to ask directions, but each time he drew
near, the car sped away. Eventually he caught up to it, the
car pulled over, and a terrified driver jumped out to flee:
it was a Saudi woman dressed like a man. In a country
where it is illegal for women to drive, that's the only way
for a lady to get behind the wheel.
This story is a good reminder that not everything here
operates in real life as it appears on paper — which is
what makes predicting Saudi Arabia's future a very
inexact science. As such, I've concluded that there are two
possible models for Saudi Arabia's future. I call them the
"Soviet school" and the "China school."
The Soviet school argues that Saudi Arabia is an Islamic
version of the Soviet Union: an absolute monarchy that is,
like the Soviet Union, ultimately unreformable. The core
of this regime is an alliance between a modernizing, but
corrupt, theocracy, led by the al-Saud family, and the
ultraconservative Wahhabi religious establishment, which
provides the al- Sauds with legitimacy, and the minute you
try to reform it, the whole system will come unglued.
This is how the Soviet school sees it: The ruling al-Saud
brothers are like the old Soviet Politburo; the 50,000
al-Saud princes and relatives are the equivalent of the
Communist Party. Wahhabism, the puritanical Saudi
Arabian brand of Islam, is used by the al-Sauds to unite
the 40 fractious tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, just as
Communism was used by Lenin to unite the 100 fractious
nationalities of Russia and its neighboring republics.
Osama bin Laden is just the evil version of Andrei
Sakharov — the insider who steps outside the system to
declare that the king has no clothes. Sakharov was exiled
to Gorky for that and bin Laden to Kabul. And ultimately,
both systems went into decline after unhappy encounters
where? In Afghanistan.
The intense Saudi competition with Iran for dominance
over the Muslim world — which involves financing
competing conservative Muslim schools and mosques
from Pakistan to Indonesia — is identical to the Soviet
competition with China for influence over the Communist
world.
The Soviet school concludes that Saudi Arabia has about
five more years before its population boom, declining per
capita income, need for education reform to create skilled
workers and attract foreign investors, excessive defense
spending, and influx of satellite TV and the Internet
combine to explode the Saudi system, just as they did the
Soviet one.
The China school, by contrast, begins with the assumption
that Saudi Arabia is a country that makes no sense on
paper but in real life has a lot more cushions and ballast,
which enable it, like China, to pursue two seemingly
contradictory policies at once. In China it's Communism
and capitalism, and in Saudi Arabia it's Wahhabism and
rapid modernization. Oil is to Saudi Arabia what huge
direct foreign investment is to China — a natural resource
that allows the system to buy off a lot of discontent and
enables people to cheat on the system, and thereby let off
steam, behind closed doors.
In the China school, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince
Abdullah is the equivalent of China's reformist prime
minister, Zhu Rongji. In particular, like Zhu, Abdullah is
trying to push Saudi Arabia into the World Trade
Organization to create external pressure for more rule of
law and transparency — but this move is resisted by more
corrupt elements of the elite who benefit from the status
quo.
Finally, like China's rulers, the Saudi ruling elite knows
how to stay in power and will do whatever it takes to do
so. In China's case that meant bringing capitalists into the
Communist Party and crushing students at Tiananmen, and
in Saudi Arabia's case it will mean confronting the radical
Islamists — just as the al-Sauds did before when they
wanted to introduce radio, television and women's
education. Like China's leaders, the Saudi monarchy can
garner support from members of the middle class — not
only by buying them off, but also by arguing that the
alternative to its rule would be chaos or extremists.
The China school dismisses the idea that Saudi Arabia
will collapse in five years. It notes, instead, that for 50
years, someone has come out with a study every five years
that says Saudi Arabia has only five more years.
Which school would I bet on? Ask me in five years. |
