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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
There is no need to focus on the factual contradiction between Jordan's statements and what Treasury investigators actually faced from uncooperative Saudis, which Barone recounted with exactitude. Rather, knowing that Bush and Jordan labored twice as hard after 9/11 to warm the Saudis to a private deal, it's instructive to look at what was on the deal-making table and what got resolved at the time.
Some may wonder what caused the Bush White House to express such delight in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," an account that in many respects gives a highly disturbing picture of the administration. One thing is that the book presents the White House's line geared for American consumption (presumably originating from Bandar) about the sincerity of Saudi support for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Bush White House has always wanted us to believe that Arab leaders in general (and in private) and the Saudis (the single most important regional leaders) in particular were positively thrilled that we would rid them of Saddam Hussein. Such leaders, the Bush line goes, needed no more than the reassuring strength of Bush's firm resolve to give tangible and earnest support for the Iraq occupation. Why, at home, did these leaders loudly disavow support? Oh well, there they were held back by the Arab street's misguided distaste -- which, according to the specious Bush logic, the leaders did not share -- for the global superpower's unilaterally and preemptively flexing its enormous military muscle to occupy an Arab country with huge oil reserves (which would then be rebuilt by a tight and exclusive net of American-chosen contractors).
How absurd to think that this venture had traction at any political level in Arab nations, when Turkey, our staunchest ally in the Muslim world and a NATO partner, peeled away hard from the venture. Whatever Bandar, as an expert in the care and feeding of the Bush family, politely told Bush then, carefully declaimed to selected reporters later, and laid out ingenuously to Woodward, Riyadh itself was not led by neoconservative groupies. In the first Gulf War, when the Saudis really did fear the Saddam who had marched into Kuwait, they kicked in $50 billion. This time, they offered as support not a cent. Instead, Riyadh publicly embraced Saddam, prewar, as an Arab brother. Riyadh had no particular stock in getting rid of an enfeebled regime in Baghdad that, from its perspective, performed a desirable service in keeping down an Iraqi Shiite majority otherwise subject to pro-Iranian influence. Quite the opposite: An armed U.S. occupation would stir up virulent animosity among the Saudi population, and no matter how hard Riyadh tried to distance itself, some of that would rub off on Riyadh itself.
So what could Bush and Jordan trade for a little Saudi support? Atop both Osama bin Laden's list of stated grievances (with both America and Riyadh) and Crown Prince Abdullah's list of vital issues with the United States lay one and the same item: ending the intrusive presence of 4,500 massively armed Americans -- potent infidels -- at the U.S. military's central regional installation, the giant Prince Sultan Air Base 50 miles south of Riyadh. America built this air base after the Gulf War, and the base sustained the enormous operation of containing Saddam with a no-fly zone in southern Iraq. But as Saddam weakened, Saudis saw the base more as an irritant, something occupying, not defending, their nation. It was too near Islam's holiest sites at Mecca and Medina. Much of the Saudi public viewed bin Laden's suicidal terrorists and the 200 or so Saudis captured fighting alongside the Taliban as heroes for fighting (they said) to get that base, and what it stood for, out of the holy Saudi land.
By January 2002, in light of these internal Saudi tensions, Abdullah could no longer delay. Riyadh quietly summoned Jordan and two assistant secretaries of state for meetings. Jordan was quoted in a British newspaper as saying these were "consultations with the Saudi government to review our presence here and to discuss what we need and what we don't need." Translation: Abdullah told them, it seems, that the air base just had to go. And Abdullah was correct -- notwithstanding the awful humiliation (especially for "standing tall" President Bush) of yielding after 9/11 to bin Laden's No. 1 demand. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, basically agreed: We had to remove the base if it was not wanted.
While Bush could not keep the base in Saudi Arabia indefinitely against Abdullah's will, the timing and context of its closing, which he could control, mattered greatly. Abdullah planned a whole set of moves, including vitally needed (if tame) political reforms and some (very limited) curbing of jihadist extremism, to be executed when he got some breathing room (that is, protection against extremists' charges that he was an American lackey) from the popular step of the base closure. In return for greatly pleasing Abdullah with an agreement to close the base, Bush had the opportunity to get something very substantial. A different U.S. government, attuned to America's real security needs after 9/11 and backed by an angry public, would have pushed the Saudis for the maximum in both democratic reforms to shore up the regime's legitimacy and the biggest possible crackdown on religious extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida -- and, perhaps, gotten it.
But those goals lacked primacy with Bush and Jordan. Rather, what they wanted, and so what the Saudis would offer, came via Bandar's clever line of "support" voiced in Washington for Bush's Iraq invasion. (As Bandar put it, "People are not going to shed tears over Saddam Hussein.") Abdullah did not even have to tell his people at home that, via Bandar, the unpopular Iraq invasion had received whispered Saudi support; that was solely for Bush's and the American public's consumption. In return, Riyadh got the base closure on an agreeable schedule, with a nice cover story about how the closure followed naturally from the base's no longer being needed with Iraq occupied (actually the base remained needed and was quietly moved at American expense to Qatar), but without having to address the American public's post-9/11 interest in full Saudi housecleaning reforms. Riyadh even got to take credit when, on April 30, 2003, one day after Bush announced the "mission accomplished" in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Prince Sultan formally announced the base closing.
Could this mutually satisfying exchange have been just an uncoordinated happenstance? It's doubtful. Bush and Jordan had labored mightily to please the Saudis. Bandar's skill lay in figuring out how to please Bush in return, which, considering Bush's desperation to prove he was not leaving America alone in invading Iraq, required the particular finesse for which Bandar is renowned. But this was a deal that had to be made and implemented both in Riyadh and in the U.S. bureaucracy. And this was not Jordan's only extraordinary Saudi-placating deal that had to be implemented that way, at that moment.
A simultaneous malodorous Saudi-Bush deal proposed by Jordan in August 2002 has recently come to fuller light. In July, after a preliminary New York Times exposé, Salon followed up with details of the amazing deal by which the Saudis imprisoned and tortured several Westerners, mostly Britons, into falsely confessing to being terrorists, basically positioning these luckless figures as either scapegoats or hostages and then trading them for the release of five Saudis -- including two trained in Afghanistan by al-Qaida -- being held in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
