Bush vs. Abdullah
By Rich Lowry
The National Review
April 25, 2002
The Saudi should leave Crawford a little scared.
Summit meetings matter.
In his classic On the Origins of War, Donald Kagan describes how John F. Kennedy was out-argued, insulted, and intimidated by Nikita Khrushchev at their 1961 Vienna summit meeting, creating the predicate for all sorts of Cold War nastiness, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Khrushchev concluded — with the recent U.S. failure at the Bay of Pigs providing crucial background — that Kennedy was a callow and inexperienced leader who could be pushed around, a disastrous perception that tipped Khrushchev toward more and more aggressive behavior.
Kagan calls the meeting "catastrophic." Kennedy's own assessment wasn't far off, as he told James Reston at the time that Khrushchev "just beat the hell out of me."
At the Crawford ranch tomorrow and Friday, there may not be missile crisis in the offing, but Bush's meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah will be crucial in determining the course of the war on terrorism, or even whether there will continue to be a war on terrorism worthy of the name.
The question is, who will be Kennedy, and who will be Khrushchev?
No matter how polite the exchanges — and the upright and pious Abdullah surely won't engage in any of Khrushchev's bullying antics — the Crawford meeting should be fundamentally about an argument: Is the problem in the Middle East Israel, or the Arab regimes that are defined, to varying extents, by their repression, corruption, and radicalism.
Abdullah will want to talk mostly about his "peace plan," and how to, as his foreign-policy adviser put it Sunday, "restrain Sharon." Essentially, Abdullah wants to bend U.S. power to his own ends, deflecting it from an attack on "brother" Saddam in Iraq and instead using it to weaken and isolate Israel.
If he succeeds in this, it would represent a major blow to the war on terrorism.
All that said, the Saudi "peace plan" does show that Abdullah recognizes some need to show flexibility, and it did create potential trouble for him at home where the Saudis have been trained to consider Jews the sons of pigs and monkeys, so any peace offer — no matter how bogus — must come as a shock.
Bush should express a continuing willingness to shower the plan with praise in public ("progress," blah, blah, blah), but make it clear to Abdullah in private that it is only a nice sideshow to what we consider the main event: toppling the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq.
Abdullah has to decide whether he is truly serious about trying to obstruct U.S. action against Iraq. If he is, the U.S.-Saudi relationship should be heading for a rupture sooner rather than later.
As NR argued in an editorial in the last issue, the U.S. is, broadly speaking, at war with three forms of radicalism in the Middle East represented by three different countries: Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a complicated case, since it represents the Sunni radicalism from which bin Ladenism emanates, but it is ruled by a conservative monarchy traditionally allied to the United States.
Abdullah is in some sense caught in the middle. All his pragmatic, survivalist instincts should tilt him toward the U.S. (as the "peace plan" seemed to demonstrate), but there have been disturbing signs that he may still tilt the other way, toward the Iranian-Iraqi-Palestinian radical axis.
Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia have traditionally waged a kind of Cold War for leadership in the Islamic world, but in a typically acute analysis for UPI, Martin Sieff argues that there is a brewing Iranian-Saudi rapprochement. "The converging policies of Saudi Arabia and Iran on oil pricing and the Israel Palestinian conflict do not bode well for hopes of any rapid resolution or even easing of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict," Sieff writes.
If Abdullah is up for grabs, his perception of Bush's toughness and resolve will be crucial.
If Bush makes clear his unbending determination on Iraq, and firmly beats back Abdullah's argument that a crackdown on Sharon has to come before anything else, there is at least a chance that Abdullah's opposition on Iraq will soften (which would be helpful for many, many reasons).
The Saudis sit atop a society built on fanaticism, but they have always known how to cut a deal to protect their own interests. Robert Lacey writes of the founder of the modern Saudi state in his book The Kingdom, "Abdul Aziz was Britain's friend, in the last analysis, because he reckoned he could not survive as Britain's enemy, and he knew where his bottom-line interests lay."
Abdullah should come away from Crawford with a renewed awareness that he can't survive as America's enemy; in other words: He should come away a little scared.
Let's hope Bush is more Khrushchev and less Kennedy.
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