Prepared Testimony of
Thomas W. Lippman
Adjunct Scholar, The Middle East Institute
June 14, 2007
Submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight
The question before the subcommittee is whether there is a double standard on
human rights in American policy toward
The origins of the unlikely partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia predate the establishment of the unified Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, but only after Americans discovered commercial quantities of oil there in 1938 did the two countries begin to forge the economic and strategic alliance that endures to this day.
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, who created the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia by force of arms in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, was a devout Muslim who saw all of life as a manifestation of his faith and labored to restrain the influence of non-Muslims on his realm, but he did not share the ferocious xenophobia of the desert warriors who were the instruments of his conquests.
On the contrary, he sent clear early signals that he would welcome external
assistance for his impoverished realm, even from infidels if need be, provided
that the outsiders refrain from interference with his rule or with Arabian
traditions. Beginning in about 1913, Abdul Aziz invited American doctors from
the Protestant medical mission in
The Ikhwan, who opposed any infidel presence in Arabia and disdained all forms of innovation as un-Islamic, denounced Abdul Aziz’s early embrace of outsiders and of the automoble and the telegraph; but Abdul Aziz found technology interesting as well as useful in consolidating his power. The Ikhwan’s backward views could not be allowed to obstruct his vision. He turned on them, and crushed them at the battle of Sibila in 1929, freeing himself to run his new country as he saw fit. By bringing the Ikhwan to heel – with the assistance of the British, who had been offended by Ikhwan raids into Iraq -- Abdul Aziz established that he and only he would rule in the new Kingdom of Nejd and the Hijaz; and while he would rule in the name and under the banner of Islam, he would do so in harmony with his neighbors and would use external sources to develop the country he had unified. The Prophet Muhammad had sought the help of infidels when it was needed, Abdul Aziz declared, and so would he.
Indeed Abdul Aziz established a pattern that has prevailed, with minor variations, during the reigns of all his successors, in which the king and senior princes of the House of Saud have propelled their country along the path of physical modernization with outside help while striving to preserve the rigorous religious orthodoxy and conservative social values prevalent among the population.
“The battle of Sibila marked the end of an epoch,” wrote Abdul Aziz’s British adviser and confident, H. St. John Philby. “Saudi Arabia had virtually assumed its final shape as the result of constant war upon the infidel; and henceforth the infidel would be a valued ally in the common cause of progress...The sting had been taken out of the Ikhwan movement which had played so prominent a part in the creation of the new regime, and could now serve no further useful purpose.”
More than seven decades later, it can be seen that Philby’s assessment was
essentially correct, even if his account oversimplified a complicated tale and
was less than candid about his own role in bringing about the 1933 concession
agreement between
The fact was that Abdul Aziz, having overpowered all challengers to his authority over Arabia, ruled a prize of dubious value; other than the levies imposed on pilgrims to the Islamic holy sites at Mecca and Medina and the limited taxes the king was able to extract from Hijazi merchants, Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s when Abdul Aziz was consolidating his power had no income. As the worldwide Great Depression choked off pilgrimage traffic, even the meager revenue stream from pilgrims’ taxes dried up. The king needed money to purchase loyalty among the tribes he had defeated or neutralized, and he needed money to import the food required by his subjects. If that need mandated that he turn to outsiders and even non-Muslims for the cash and technology that would sustain his rule and lift up his people, so be it, provided only that the outsiders honor the terms he would set down to regulate their work on the Kingdom’s holy soil.
Those terms were recorded by
William A. Eddy, who as chief of the
“The King’s position,” Eddy recalled, “was that the Koran regulated all matters of faith, family, and property, which were not for unbelievers to get involved with. ‘Our patriarchal authority and the veiling of women are none of your business. On the other hand, you have much that we need and will accept: radio, airplanes, pumps, oil-drilling rigs and technical know-how.’ This acceptance of technology was far in advance of his people, and the King had to fight many battles with bigots to win support for his suspected friendship with Christian governments and his cordial relationship with the Arabian-American Oil Company.”
That was the basis upon which one
of the modern world’s most improbable bilateral alliances has long operated. No
two countries and no two societies could have been more dissimilar; the social
environment and governmental system of each was alien and distasteful to the
other. And yet
If the Saudi world view sees all
humanity as belonging either to the Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, or
the Dar al-Harb, the house or land of war, the Saudis were also
sufficiently pragmatic to persuade themselves that Americans, as monotheists,
need not be consigned to the latter. As the diplomat-scholar David Long put it,
the Saudi world view “is a perception, not a blueprint for policy action.
As for the Americans, they
harvested the bounty of
However abhorrent the Saudi Arabian system may have been, the Americans who
lived and worked in the kingdom and negotiated with Saudi officials generally
accepted it as a fact of life, and worked around it. Those Americans who might
have been inclined to challenge the system loosely labeled Wahhabism were
generally excluded from employment in
In return, the Saudi monarchs allowed their American guests to create communities where they could replicate the more comfortable life back home, communities to which ordinary Saudis had little access. In Dhahran, the American oil town in al-Hasa, and later in other compounds all around the country, Americans and other foreigners conducted Christian religious services, showed movies, drank alcohol, and educated boys and girls in mixed classrooms; men and women socialized together and swam in the same pools. American women drove automobiles and rode bicycles. Such activities were prohibited to Saudi Arabs and indeed to all residents of the Kingdom, but they were tolerated in the closed communities because Abdul Aziz and his successors wished the foreigners there to remain in the country. .
As the foreign presence grew over time, there were naturally exceptions and variations to this fundamental arrangement. Some Americans preferred to live among the Arabs, embracing the local culture rather than isolating themselves from it. A few defied the rules, violating pork and alcohol restrictions or committing petty crimes; some of these went to jail, others were quickly deported. Occasionally the non-Muslim religious services became too elaborate or too visible, prompting a crackdown. Quite a few Americans, upon seeing a public display of Wahhabi justice such as a severed hand hanging from a pole, expressed private revulsion, but neither they nor their employers engaged in public criticism because at all times in this relationship the Saudis held the decisive lever of power, the ability to revoke the oil concession.
The American policy of deference to Saudi customs and tradition was manifest from the earliest days when the first geologists arrived to look for oil in the autumn of 1933. The Americans wore Arab garb, out of respect for local custom. The amir of the region, as the king’s representative, dispatched a squad of soldiers to ensure the safety of the oil team. The easternmost regions of Saudi Arabia were less hostile to outsiders than the Americans might have expected because a substantial part of the population was not Wahhabi at all but Shiite; nevertheless, the further they ventured inland away from the coast, the more hostility the Americans encountered, and only the strong commitment of the king and the amir ensured their safety.
From those early days at least through the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the archives of the State Department, the U.S. military and the Arabian American Oil Company are replete with policy statements and exhortations to the effect that Saudi beliefs and practices were to be respected, rather than challenged or ridiculed. However alien the Saudi system might be to Americans steeped in the values of individual liberty and impartial justice, outsiders were instructed not to concern themselves with it. If the education that the Saudi Arabs acquired under American patronage moderated their views, well and good; but the Americans were constantly reminded that they were in the country for economic and strategic reasons, not to alter Saudi Arabian society.
President Kennedy was an exception in that he put direct pressure on the House of Saud to abolish slavery, which it did in the 1960s. Otherwise, aside from modest efforts by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and especially Kennedy to persuade the Saudis to abandon their policy of refusing to admit Jews into the country, the U.S. policy of accommodation remained largely in place until the age of terrorism beginning in the mid-1990s. Not until Henry Kissinger broke the taboo on Jews in the 1970s were American Jews regularly admitted to Saudi Arabia.
This is not to say that the United States and Saudi Arabia always agreed on matters of policy. The Saudis were and to some extain remain bitter over American acceptance of the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel. Deep differences emerged over Saudi participation in the Arab oil embargo of 1973-1974 and over Saudi Arabia’s refusal to accept the decision of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to make peace with Israel. The United States reacted with open fury upon discovering in 1988 that Saudi Arabia had secretly acquired nuclear-capable ballistic missiles from China. But these arguments were never about internal conditions in Saudi Arabia, and it can be argued that one reason the bilateral strategic and economic relationship survived these confrontations was that the Saudis appreciated the American policy of non-interference-a policy that gave them incalculable benefits at little political cost. Washington not only accepted Saudi Arabia’s domestic system but sometimes even endorsed it, to the point of obsequiousness.
For example, the terms under which the Saudis agreed to let the United States build and operate a military airfield at Dhahran specified that the American team dispatched there to train Saudi personnel “may not include anyone whose presence is considered undesirable by the Saudi Arabia government and the United States Government will submit a list of the names and identity of the staff and employees.” In practice, that meant no Jews and no women were to be deployed, and that anyone who offended the Saudis in any way was promptly sent home.
When members of Congress protested this policy, the State Department took the position that “It is fundamental that sovereign states have the right to control the internal order of their affairs in such a manner as they deem to be in their best interests.”
The behavioral guidance given to new American employees by U.S. government agencies, the U.S. military and private American corporations was unequivocal and consistent. This is the Saudis’ country and they can run it as they wish, Americans were told. If you respect their ways and behave appropriately in public, you can prosper here; if you insult the Arabs or violate their rules, you will be in trouble.
“Never ridicule the appearance, customs or religious practices of the people. Theirs is an old culture and U.S. military personnel are guests of their government,” airmen assigned to Dhahran were advised. “The Arab is not about to discard age-old habit and custom without reason, and is in no hurry.”
In its extreme form, the willingness of American corporations to comply with Saudi customs obliged workers hired for jobs in the Kingdom to convert to Islam. This practice was even upheld by the U.S. federal court system in the case of a helicopter pilot named Wade Kern.
Kern was hired in 1978 by Dynalectron Corportion, a defense contractor that was engaged to provide security services in Saudi Arabia, including helicopter flights over Mecca and Medina during pilgrimage season to watch for possible trouble among the hajjis and to spot fires that might break out. Because non-Muslims are not permitted in the holy cities, Dynalectron required pilots assigned to this duty to convert to Islam. Kern, a Baptist, did so, but then changed his mind, whereupon the company cancelled his assignment. Dynalectron offered him another job, but he sued in federal court in Texas, alleging religious discrimination. The court found that because of the unique circumstances of the holy cities, the conversion rule was a “bona fide occupational requirement,” not discriminatory in intent, and thus permissible under U.S. law.
For the first decade after Standard Oil geologists began to look for oil, the United States government and the State Department paid scant attention to Saudi Arabia. What bilateral business needed to be done was in effect conducted through the oil company, which of course was in Saudi Arabia to make money, not to promote individual liberty among the Arabs. Washington recognized Abdul Aziz’s government and maintained nominal diplomatic relations with the kingdom, but no U.S. officials lived in the Kingdom and there was no U.S. diplomatic presence in Jeddah until the later years of World War II, when President Roosevelt and his advisers began to recognize the strategic potential of Saudi Arabia and its oil.
All that had changed by 1951, when the United States was fully engaged in the Cold War. Radical pro-Moscow Arab nationalism was not yet the threat Washington later perceived it to be, but Saudi Arabia was already regarded as a redoubt of pro-American stability in a volatile and sometimes hostile region.
In February of that year, the State Department distributed to its posts throughout the Middle East an extensive, secret document titled “Comprenhensive Statement of US Policy Toward the Kingdom,” which recognized the importance of Saudi Arabia and set out a detailed plan for maintaining stability and ensuring that the country remained friendly to the United States. With that document, deference to the social and religious customs of Saudi Arabia was enshrined as official U.S. policy--a policy that was essentially unchallenged for the next forty years.
Noting that the United States had been the target of extensive criticism from the Arabs because of its support for the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel, the document said that “Saudi Arabia has remained firm in its friendship to the United States. It has served as our spokesman and interpreter to less friendly Arab states and has, through the prestige and conservative nature of its King, exerted a stabilizing influence on the Near East generally.” In fact, Abdul Aziz had bitterly opposed US policy in Palestine, but he refrained from an open rupture with Washington because he had economic and security interests that overrode his sentiments about Zionism.
In addition to supporting the king and providing military and technological assistance, the policy statement said, the United States should “observe the utmost respect for Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty, sanctity of the holy places, and local customs....In all our efforts to carry out our policies in Saudi Arabia, we should take care to serve as guide or partner and avoid giving the impression of wishing to dominate the country.”
Rather than criticizing Saudi Arabia’s harsh laws and retributive justice, the State Department advised, Americans should recognize that the kingdom “is trying very hard to improve itself and it has done well, considering that its sustained efforts have been only a post-war development. It has also had a serious internal obstacle in the fanatical opposition to change and the growth of western influences. It behooves us, therefore, to applaud what Saudi Arabia has done and is doing, and not criticize it for what it has not yet been able to do.”
At least that document acknowledged that there was a “fanatical” element in Saudi Arabia. Most of the time, in negotiations and policy discussions, American officials and business executives avoided the topic; how the rulers of Saudi Arabia dealt with this problem was up to them, not up to anybody from the United States.
After King Faisal visited the United States in December 1964, for example, President Johnson wrote him a letter expressing satisfaction with their discussions. “It is with great interest that we in this country have been following the progress in your program of economic development and social reform for Saudi Arabia. The efforts to broaden educational opportunities for your people and better enable women to contribute to the general productiveness of the country are ones of which I am especially aware. These problems also occupy much of my time in America. Your success in preserving the fundamental guiding religious principles, while at the same time modernizing social relationships, draws our respect and admiration.” To judge from official records, Johnson—like his predecessors and successors—refrained from raising such subjects as religious intolerance, plural marriage, amputation of body parts, sequestration of women, the absence of democratic institutions or any of the other Saudi Arabian practices so unpalatable to Americans.
In 1976, Congress overrode a veto by President Ford to add a human rights policy to the International Security and Arms Export Control Act. In the annual country reports on human rights that the State Department has issued in compliance with that legislation, State has routinely criticized Saudi Arabia for its religious intolerance, disenfranchisement of women, and arbitrary justice. Yet those reports from a stepchild unit of the State Department, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, had hardly any policy impact on the bilateral relationship with Riyadh.
Even Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, who made human rights a cornerstone of his foreign policy, praised the Saudi rulers effusively and refrained from pressing them about internal affairs. Arriving in Riyadh in January 1978, Carter said at an airport ceremony, "Seeing the generosity of this welcome, I feel that I am among my own people and know that my steps will not be hindered, because I walk the same path as Your Majesty, King Khalid, toward a common goal of even greater friendship among our people, between our two countries, and of peace for all the people of the world."
Later that year, when King Khaled visited Washington, he was Carter’s guest at a White House luncheon. A White House statement afterward listed the topics that were discussed – mostly relating to the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt--and noted that "these discussions were carried out in an atmosphere of longstanding friendship, deep mutuality of interest, and well-tested sprit of cooperation". Never mind that the Saudis opposed that agreement and eventually cut off aid to Egypt because of it. Nothing in the public record about Khalid’s visit indicates that Carter even raised the subject of Saudi domestic policies.
This bilateral “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” arrangement began to unravel with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Convinced by the Americans that Saudi Arabia was next on the target list of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, King Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz took the fateful decision to allow half a million American and other foreign troops into his country, first to protect the Kingdom from possible invasion, then to wage the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait known as Operation Desert Storm.
In his memoir the U.S. Commander of that campaign, General Norman Schwarzkopf, recalled that he and U.S. diplomats spent many hours trying to minimize the impact of this mammoth inflow of foreigners upon the social, cultural and religious life of the host country. “To my consternation,” Schwarzkopf wrote of the Saudi leadership, “their most pressing concern was neither the threat from Saddam nor the enormous joint military enterprise on which we were embarked. What loomed largest for them was the cultural crisis triggered by this sudden flood of Americans into their kingdom.”
The Saudis’ apprehension was well founded. Schwarzkopf and other American commanders went to considerable lengths to ensure that the troops’ behavior did not clash with Saudi sensibilities—no alcohol, no female entertainers, no bare heads on female soldiers—but the sheer magnitude and ubiquity of the foreign presence nonetheless created a backlash. In retrospect, it can be seen that the Desert Storm deployment was the catalyst for the difficulties that have beset the bilateral relationship ever since.
It overpowered the consensus among Saudis that foreigners could be tolerated in the kingdom if they were there to improve conditions for the populace; these foreigners in uniform were in the country for reasons that had little to do with developing the infrastructure or educating the people. The deployment incited anti-government sentiment among critics who questioned why the country could not defend itself despite its massive expenditures on military equipment and training. It angered the devout, who asked why Saudi Arabia would ally itself with infidels in a war against fellow Muslims. And it inflamed Osama bin Laden, who—having participated in the successful jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—offered himself as the sword of Islam who would defend the holy soil of Arabia, only to be rebuffed by a king who joined forces with the Americans.
These passions, coupled with the Wahhabi extremism that had been permitted, even encouraged, in the country’s schools and mosques for the previous decade as a counterweight to the Shiite revolution spreading from Iran, led to the age of terror in which the Washington-Riyadh alliance has been so sorely tested. And given these pressures on the Saudi monarchy, it was clearly not a propitious time for the United States to press the Saudis on human rights issues.
Almost simultaneously with Desert Storm, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ended the threat of global communism, resistance to which had been a strong common interest of Saudi Arabia and the United States for decades.
After Saudi Arabia followed other Middle Eastern countries in nationalizing its oil indstry in the late 1970s, the threat the King might revoke the Aramco oil concession no long hung over U.S. policy; there was no more oil concession. But by that time the imperatives of the Cold War, and of Saudi support for U.S. initiatives in diplomacy and covert action, reinforced Washington’s reluctance to alienat the kingdom’s rulers. Saudi financing was crucial, for example, to the successful campaign of the Afghan muhaheddin against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and to the Reagan administration’s covert support for the “contras” of Nicaragua.
Once communism imploded, the Saudis, no longer threatened by this atheistic ideology, were liberated to expand their economic and political interests into previously closed corners of the world, notably China. Thus within a year or so of the Desert Storm campaign, relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia were entering a whole new era, in which the basic oil-for-security bargain forged in the 1940s would have to be renegotiated, a process that is still going on.
Before the onset of domestic terrorism in Saudi Arabia with the 1995 bomb attack against the National Guard Training Center in Riyadh, in which five Americans died, Americans and other Westerners in the Kingdom generally lived privileged lifes of safety and prosperty. Ordinary street crime was unknown, and terrorism was a phenomenon of other places, not Saudi Arabia. The tranquillity of the kingdom was part of its attraction for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who lived and worked there in the fifty years after World War II.
Other than the relative few who actually went there, however, Americans knew little about Saudi Arabia beyond the broadest generalities absorbed from the news media. Most Americans, after all, were of European stock. Their religion, literature, cuisine, music and ideas about the organization of society were traceable to Europe, not the Arabian Peninsula, and Americans had no emotional ties to the Saudi kingdom. In general, so long as the oil flowed, Saudi Arabia was not a country of great interest. The curriculum of Saudi schools was of no concern to people in Cleveland or Albuquerque.
The age of terror has changed that over the past decade. As the attacks on the
USS Cole and the embassies in
This atmospheric shift left the State Department little choice but to declare
In designating
That text dates from 1992, but the dominance of Islam as the raison d’être of the Saudi state has been a fact of life since Americans first started going there many decades ago, and Americans have in the past chosen to accept Saudi Arabia as it is, not as they would like it to be.
It might seem that in the changed environment since 9/11,
The administration has mostly accepted the declarations by King Abdullah and
other senior princes that the Saudi regime, itself the target of a domestic
terror campaign inspired by followers of Bin Laden, is an ally in the “war on
terrorism” and is committed to expunging extremism from its mosques and
classrooms. This policy has been reflected in the repeated congressional
testimony by administration officials that
When Rice went to Saudi Arabia in November 2005, it was not to scold or criticize the Saudis but to advance the bilateral “strategic dialogue” initiated by President Bush and by Abdullah, then still crown prince, when they met at the president’s ranch in April of that year. Rice and her Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal, announced in Jeddah the creation of six “working groups” on subjects of mutual interest:
Counterterrorism; Military Affairs; Energy; Economic and
Financial Affairs; Consular Affairs and Partnership; and Education Exchange and
Human Development in the
That choice was stated explicitly in the joint declaration issued by Bush and Abdullah after their April 2005 meeting in Texas. “Today we renewed our personal friendship and that between our nations,” the two leaders said.
The word “Wahhabism” does not appear in their text. It says that “the United States respects Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of Islam, one of the world’s great religions, and as the symbolic center of the Islamic faith as custodian of Islam’s two holy places in Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia reiterates its call on all those who teach and propagate the Islamic faith to adhere strictly to the Islamic message of peace, moderation, and tolerance and reject that which deviates from these principles.”
As for democratization, “While the United States considers that nations will create institutions that reflect the history, culture, and traditions of their societies, it does not seek to impose its own style of government on the government and people of Saudi arabia. The United States applauds the recently held elections in the Kingdom for representatives for municipal councils”—in which women were banned from voting, let alone running—“and looks for even wider participation in the accordance with the Kingdom’s reform program.”
In the language of diplomacy, that amounted to a promise by the United States to let the Saudis manage their internal affairs without interference, even if it is no longer possible for Americans to turn a blind eye to what the Saudis do. After all, Saudi Arabia is the United States’ largest trading partner in the Middle East, a multi-billion dollar market for U.S. business and a crucial supplier of oil. Those economic considerations trump human rights and religious freedom, as they have for more than half a century. And because Saudi Arabia under Abdullah has been willing to stick its neck out on the question of making peace with Israel, even while Iranian leaders are calling for Israel’s extinction, the kingdom’s political value clearly outweighs the odious nature of its domestic political system. As in the past, Saudi Arabia is perceived as too valuable to alienate.