Time to End the
Ruinous U.S. Alliance with Saudi Arabia
commondreams.org
Friday,
October 26, 2018
The
Khashoggi murder and the likelihood of a Democratically-controlled House of
Representatives offer an opportunity for distance
Trump
holds a chart of weapon sales as he welcomes Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval
Office, 20 March, 2018. (Photo: Reuters)
The
murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi now seems very likely to
prompt Congress to impose some sanctions on the Saudi government,
and it may finally act to end the active US role in the Saudi-UAE war on
Yemen.
Perhaps
more significantly, some senior Democratic Party figures in Congress have called for the first serious
reconsideration of the whole US-Saudi "special relationship", citing
the need for fundamental changes in the relationship.
A
political cover
Such a
critical reappraisal is long overdue. For decades the United States has been
providing political-diplomatic cover for Saudi policies that have caused far
more disastrous consequences for the United States and for the entire Middle
East than any of the countries that Washington has designated as
"adversaries".
More
than any other American ally, the way Saudi Arabia operates is completely at
odds with the values the US professes to champion and embody. The Saudi ruling
elite is not only proudly anti-democratic but upholds an extreme interpretation
of Islam that has made it the primary source of violence and instability in the
Middle East over the past decade.
The US alliance with Saudi Arabia must
be understood not in terms of normal geopolitical interest but in terms of the
bureaucratic interests of the CIA and the Pentagon
The
main rationale for maintaining a "special relationship” with such an
unsavoury regime has long been that the Saudis have assured “access” to oil at
affordable prices. Many in the US political and national security elites have
continued to embrace that argument, but fundamental changes in the global
economics of oil – and especially the rise of the shale oil industry in the
United States - have ended that former Saudi role in regulating the global oil
market.
The
world's demand for oil has receded dramatically since 2014, creating
a severe budget deficit problem for Saudi
Arabia. As a result, the Saudis are afraid that any cut in production would
cause the Kingdom to lose market share and benefit their
competitors.
The
new case for the US-Saudi alliance is that Saudi Arabia is the regional
counterweight to Iranian expansion. But the recklessly aggressive Saudi behaviour in Syria and Yemen has
done far more to benefit al-Qaeda,
destabilise the region and harm US interests than to counter Iranian influence
– real or imagined.
Heavy
costs
The
glaring contradiction between the supposed benefits of an alliance with the
House of Saud and the actual heavy costs associated with it goes back to the US-Saudi collaboration between 1979
and 1988, supporting Afghan fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
In 1979, a Saudi national, Osama bin Laden, moved to Afghanistan to join the
fighters and support them logistically and financially. In 1988, he founded
al-Qaeda.
The
Saudi regime’s fear of bin Laden's popularity among its citizenry prompted it
to cover up the reality of al-Qaeda terrorism, even after it struck
inside Saudi Arabia itself. But more importantly, the US government tolerated
that Saudi cover-up of terrorism.
In
November 1995, four veterans of the Saudi jihadist force in
Afghanistan with ties to bin Laden bombed the office of the
program manager of the Saudi National Guard, which the US military was
training, killing six American servicemen and wounding 42. That should have
signaled a crisis in the alliance, but nothing happened.
Then
came the bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996, which killed 19 Americans and
wounded 372. FBI Director Louis Freeh, the man in charge of the US
investigation of the bombing, quickly accepted then Saudi Ambassador
Prince Bandar’s position that Iran was behind the bombing and ruled out any
investigation of the bin Laden organisation. CIA Director George Tenet
supported that decision.
The recklessly aggressive Saudi
behaviour in Syria and Yemen has done far more to benefit al-Qaeda, destabilise
the region and harm US interests than to counter Iranian influence – real or
imagined
A
former FBI official involved in the investigation revealed to this writer that when the FBI
arrived at the scene to investigate the bombing in Saudi Arabia, they found the
Saudi government was bulldozing the crime scene. And US intelligence intercepted secret orders from the Saudi
interior ministry to provincial officials to obstruct the investigation.
Bin
Laden actually confirmed his network’s responsibility
for the bombing in two interviews he gave to the London-based newspaper Al Quds
al Arabi in October and November 1996. The leadership of the FBI and CIA
nevertheless supported the Saudi regime’s claim that
it was an Iranian operation, thus effectively protecting the al-Qaeda network
in the Kingdom. Two terror bombings that should have ended the “special
relationship” thus gave al-Qaeda the opportunity to strike successfully on
9/11.
Covert
operations
Even
after the 9/11 attacks, Saudi Arabia remained the leading source of funding for
al-Qaeda, as Hillary Clinton noted in a classified 2009 paper. And as the
US treasury department concluded in 2008, the Saudi government
was still not taking steps to halt such funding, despite the Americans urging
them to.
The
Obama administration gave the alliance with the Kingdom new importance by
responding to pressure from its Saudi allies - as well as Turkey and Qatar -
with a CIA programme to support the supply of arms to
opposition forces in Syria. It was a covert US operation managed by the CIA but
funded by the Saudi government – an arrangement that revived a familiar pattern of past Saudi-CIA
collaboration.
For
the CIA, the payoff was the freedom to carry out an operation that was “off the
books” in terms of funding.
But
the cost to the interest of US in halting terrorism and to the stability of the
Middle East as a whole were enormous. Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and its closest
allies got a large share of the weapons, because the
supposedly "moderate" forces were militarily dependent on Nusra.
And
the new threat to the regime of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad eventually
provoked both Iranian and Russian military intervention, which the Obama
administration should have anticipated from the start but didn’t.
The end result of the US-Saudi operation was to wreck Syrian society for the foreseeable
future and to give an al-Qaeda affiliate a political-military foothold in
Syria.
A
rare opportunity
Then
in March 2015, the Obama administration signed on to another Saudi scheme – a
Saudi-UAE air war to destroy the Iran-aligned Houthi forces in Yemen and
restore a Saudi-backed government. The Obama administration not only gave its
approval to the war in advance but then provided diplomatic cover for Saudi
policies of preventing food and other humanitarian goods from reaching the
civilian population.
The
result has been a humanitarian catastrophe. Yemen’s ability to function as a
society will be compromised as long as the war continues.
The US
alliance with Saudi Arabia must be understood not in terms of normal
geopolitical interest but in terms of the bureaucratic interests of the CIA and
the Pentagon, which have dovetailed well with those of the House of Saud.
Although
US officials would not disclose the amount of the Saudi contribution to the
CIA’s covert programme to arm and train Syrian opposition forces, the total
effort cost “several billion dollars”, according to New York Times sources.
For
its part, the Pentagon and its arms contractor allies have already gotten contracts worth $14.5bn with the promise
of $110 bn to come - depending on US compliance with Saudi interests. Equally
important, it has gotten access to a naval facility in Bahrain (officially
designated as "a major non-NATO ally" in 2002) over
which the Saudis hold sway and which the Saudi regime will now certainly
threaten to terminate if the US puts too much pressure on it.
Those
interests have been sufficient to keep the two powerful national security
institutions committed to the alliance. In the wake of the grisly Khashoggi
murder and the likelihood of a Democratically-controlled House of
Representatives, however, a rare opportunity has arisen for Congress to act
independently of those institutions and impose restrictions on ties with the
Saudis that have wrought primarily terrorism and ruin in the Middle East.
© 2018
Middle East Eye
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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on
U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of
university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of five books, the
latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear
Scare,” was published in February 2014. He has written regularly for
Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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