Our Saudi 'Friends'
By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, May 6, 2002; 10:26 AM
One of the most disturbing incidents of Desert Storm I (I guess we can call it that now) occurred on January 18, 1991 when Iraq launched its first Scud missiles against Israel. American officers watched in shock as virtually all of their Saudi military counterparts in the Gulf War coalition command center in Riyadh leapt to their feet applauding the Iraqi attack on America's ally.
To say the least, Saudi Arabia has always been a strange friend of the United States and a prickly ally. U.S. tolerance is often explained as the price that is paid for access to oil. With oilmen in the White House, the notion that America is a supplicant to the Saudis has only grown stronger.
Yet so many years of accommodation have created a far more complicated actual relationship. As Desert Storm II looms, Saudi-American habits are not only influencing the Bush administration's military strategy for driving Saddam Hussein from power. They are also threatening the larger goals of the war on terrorism.
Bin Laden's Home
From the very moment Osama bin Laden was fingered as the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, the one ally who presented the greatest difficulties for the United States has been Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden is a native of Saudi Arabia. He and his al Qaeda organization were financed and supported by Saudis. And there appears to have been a pre-September 11 agreement between the Saudi regime and al Qaeda that Saudi targets would not be hit.
The Bush administration proceeded gingerly. On a trip to Riyadh to kiss the Saudi ring less than a month after September 11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the United States was "not going to be making requests of the Saudi Arabian government."
"We are respectful of the circumstances of the countries in the region," he went on. In other words, that we are just so pleased that Saudi Arabia supports the United States in secret, and not whole-heartedly, and with enormous constraints, because that is considered a diplomatic "victory" in the war against terrorism.
This is not the way it was supposed to be. In the summer of 1990 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney sojourned to Saudi Arabia in the days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. His mission: to kowtow to the Saudi king sufficiently that the monarchy would allow the United States to deploy U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Somewhere in those discussions of Operation Desert Shield was an assumption, if not an explicit agreement, that U.S. forces would leave the Saudi kingdom after the war. Because America's victory left Saddam Hussein in power, those troops never left.
Nothing fueled bin Laden's rage more. His greatest public complaint -- and one the U.S. government has chosen to not take seriously over the years -- is that infidel troops, meaning Americans, are permanently stationed on Saudi soil, defiling the holiest Islamic places. Are we capable of admitting to ourselves that bin Laden partly exists because the Iraq war was not concluded decisively in 1991?
The Bases of the Problem
The flip side, of course, is that the U.S. now has a magnificent command center in Saudi Arabia at Prince Sultan Air Base (PSAB) in the Combined Air Operations Center. There are large, modern facilities that provide the infrastructure for aerial refueling, reconnaissance and surveillance, and airlift.
Rumsfeld was successful in his October visit. The Saudi agreed that the U.S. could run it air campaign in Afghanistan from PSAB, (known in military lingo as "pee-sab"). This was such an important concession, that an accompanying web of Saudi constraints was overlooked. In keeping the general secretiveness of U.S.-Saudi relations, the exact nature of these conditions is not always known. But many effects can be seen.
Something in the deal that Rumseld struck prevented Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander in chief of the entire operation, from moving to Riyadh as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had done 11 years earlier. This wound up creating much tension between the Florida and Saudi-based commands. The number of U.S. personnel who could be stationed in the Combined Air Operations Center was restricted, significantly affecting planning. When the U.S. first sought to drop food parcels in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia denied permission for the "humanitarian" planes to over fly their airspace. Important command equipment, such as the ground station for an American surveillance plane, got hung up in Saudi customs.
'Mother May I?'
After meeting with Saudi King Fahd and other senior officials last October, Rumsfeld said President Bush was very sensitive to the Saudi royal family's role as protectors of Islam's holiest sites.
"We had a very substantive and thoughtful and interesting discussion about the nature of the problem and the complexities of the problem and the importance of dealing with it in a way that recognizes . . . secondary effects that could occur," Rumsfeld said.
The most important secondary effect, say senior military officers, is the growth of a "mother may I" culture at PSAB. As proof they cite the very different procedures governing allied air operations to police the southern and northern "no-fly" zones of Iraq.
Enforcement of the southern "no-fly" zone has been run out of Saudi Arabia for the last 11 years. No operation can be mounted, no bomb can be dropped, no commander can command without prior approval from Washington. This is done to keep the Saudis happy. In contrast, the U.S. commander in charge of controlling the northern no-fly zone, based in Turkey, is actually allowed to make day-to-day decisions to protect his aircraft without the kinds of constraints imposed by Saudi Arabia.
The degree to which the "mother may I" culture at PSAB influenced the very assumptions and design of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan is one of the most important untold stories of the war. Senior U.S. officers worry that this culture will continue into the campaign against Iraq, where hundreds of daily targets can not conceivably undergo the same Saudi-inspired micro-management.
Saudi Arabia has proven such hindrance that the United States is building an alternate Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar. It has also finished a giant airbase in that Persian Gulf country. Other military facilities in the Gulf, in Turkey, and in Uzbekistan and the other "stan" countries of Central Asia have been created, upgraded, and readied--all for the purpose of mounting a campaign against Iraq without Saudi help.
"Viscerally, we'd like to say [expletive] you guys, we'll do this on our own," a senior officer says, referring to the coming Iraq war. Of course, the military is not going to make the decision. Bush and Co. will undoubtedly implore the Saudis to once again give their approval. Although it is likely that the Saudis will restrict U.S. military action from their soil, the government of Saudi Arabia will have an important say in the outcome in Desert Storm II, just as they shaped the outcome of Desert Storm I.
If that means replacing Saddam Hussein with a Saudi-friendly regime in Baghdad, and not a true secular democracy that modern Iraq is uniquely capable of, then the United States will surely come out the loser in this battle in the war against global terrorism.
_____About the Author_____
• William M. Arkin, the author of ten books and numerous studies on military affairs, is a consultant to numerous organizations, and a frequent television and radio commentator. He was an Army intelligence analyst during the 1970's, a nuclear weapons expert during the Cold War, and pioneered on-the-ground study of the effects of military operations in Iraq and Yugoslavia. In 1994, his "The U.S. Military Online: A Directory for Internet Access to the Department of Defense" was published. His Dot.Mil column, launched in November 1998, appears every other Monday on washingtonpost.com. E-mail Arkin at william.arkin@wpni.com. |
