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ANALYSIS
The bewilderment of Prince
Bandar
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Poor Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador of Saudi
Arabia to the United States.
In the 1980s, he
was treated as a comrade-in-arms in the war against
communism at the home of Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) director William Casey, as an honored guest at
banquets of neo-conservatives celebrating the "Reagan
Doctrine", and as the toast of former president Ronald
Reagan himself in the White House dining room.
Now, just over a decade later, his wife is
accused by powerful senators and media of supporting
terrorism; his country is charged with duplicity in the
war against al-Qaeda; and his family's rule is
threatened by increasingly loud calls for its overthrow.
Worst of all, many of the same people who
treated him as a hero under Reagan and who still extol
those years as a glorious epoch in US foreign policy,
now say that his kingdom should be treated as a sworn
enemy of the US, and even become a target of a revived
Reagan Doctrine to oust unfriendly regimes.
It
all seems so unfair. Thank heaven for loyal friends like
the former president George H W Bush and Secretary of
State Colin Powell, who still defend the kingdom, and
even call when times are tough.
Take this week's
big news - a spate of stories based initially on leaks
from Congressional committees that Bandar's wife,
Princess Haifa al-Faisal, authorized regular payments
over four years to two Saudi families in California, one
of whom reportedly helped find lodgings for two of the
15 Saudi hijackers who took part in the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
While no evidence has surfaced that either
Bandar, his wife or the families who received the funds
ever knew that the men were part of al-Qaeda, the
stories have nonetheless set off a new wave of
denunciations about the alleged perfidy of the Saudi
royal family in the war on terrorism.
Frank
Gaffney, president of the right-wing Center for Security
Policy and a senior Pentagon official under Reagan, said
that the incident was just one more indication of what
he called a "Saudi double-game - declaring its support
for us in fighting terrorism while providing
indispensable financing and other assistance needed for
al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks to operate
globally".
While Gaffney's attack was
particularly incendiary, other Iraq hawks, including
Republican Senator John McCain and neo-conservative
Democrat and former vice-presidential candidate Joseph
Lieberman, have seized on the alleged failure of the CIA
and Federal Bureau of Investigation to thoroughly
investigate such links as "very serious". Warned
Lieberman: "Either [the Saudis] have to change or the
relationship we have with Saudi Arabia is going to
change dramatically."
By mid-week, even the
White House, which publicly has insisted that Riyadh
remains a staunch US ally, was leaking word that it,
too, was dissatisfied with the kingdom's performance in
the war on terrorism, and was even considering issuing
some kind of formal ultimatum about cracking down on
al-Qaeda supporters and sponsors there.
This
week's brouhaha over Princess Haifa marks the latest in
a series of episodes since September 11 in which
prominent right-wing voices in Congress and the media -
most of them closely associated with the
neo-conservative political appointees in the offices of
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick
Cheney - have depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy in the
war on terrorism.
The strongest attacks have
been carried out by lawmakers and media, including the
editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, as well as in
the columns of prominent neo-conservative commentators
such as Gaffney and Charles Krauthammer of the
Washington Post, with close ties to Israel's Likud
Party, which has long seen Riyadh's alliance with
Washington as a strategic threat.
As in
Gaffney's column, Riyadh has been depicted as either in
league with al-Qaeda - a notion that is dismissed out of
hand by Middle East specialists who point out that
al-Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, is a sworn enemy of
the royal family - or unwilling to crack down against
bin Laden's followers and sponsors.
A third
theme - that the regime's authoritarian and reactionary
nature created a fanatical opposition and should be
overthrown for that reason - has also figured
prominently in the attacks. Leading neo-conservatives
and Weekly Standard editors William Kristol and Robert
Kagan called for the administration to apply the Reagan
Doctrine - used in the 1980s to oust pro-Soviet regimes
in the Third World - "not only in Iraq, Iran and North
Korea, but also in, for example, China and Saudi
Arabia".
The notion that Saudi Arabia should be
the target of a new Reagan Doctrine must be particularly
hurtful to Bandar and the Saudis. After all, they served
as the "great milk cow", as one former official called
it, for Reagan's illicit efforts to overthrow unfriendly
governments. As ambassador here, Bandar became the
"go-to" man with the cash.
The Saudis not only
provided billions of dollars to the mujahideen in their
efforts to oust Soviet troops in Afghanistan, they also
helped sustain South Africa-backed Unita rebels in
Angola with tens of millions of dollars at a time when
Congress banned all US support.
They kept the
Nicaraguan Contras alive with some $30 million after
Congress cut them off. "The Saudis financed the Reagan
Doctrine on three continents," according to Peter
Kornbluh, an expert on the period at the National
Security Archive.
While all of these operations
- and many more - were necessarily kept secret at the
time, when they became public during the Iran-Contra
affair, the Saudis received accolades from those who now
want them out, beginning with the Wall Street Journal.
Do the Journal's editorial writers forget that
Bandar provided $3 million so that Casey could finance
the "off-the-books" assassination of a Hezbollah leader
in Lebanon? And that when the car bomb that had been
rigged for the intended target exploded prematurely,
killing 80 innocent people in a Beirut suburb, it was
also Bandar who arranged to pay the same Hezbollah
leader $2 million in food, university scholarships and
other goods in exchange for an agreement not to attack
US targets in Lebanon?
"It was easier to bribe
him than to kill him," Bandar later told the Washington
Post's Bill Woodward.
Those happy days are long
gone and, looking back, the divide started with the US
suggesting in January that it may pull its military
forces out of Saudi Arabia. In June, a Financial Times
report suggested that Saudi businessmen had pulled out
at least $200 billion (of some $600 billion total) in
US-invested funds in protest of rising anti-Saudi
sentiment.
But most Saudi newspapers believe the
present crisis is not rooted in economics. "The campaign
is a political one which clearly aims to blackmail Saudi
Arabia, distort its reputation and try to influence its
positions and turn others against it," said an editorial
in the Saudi daily Al Watan this week.
"From the
developments thus far, it is clear that the charges are
being leveled to extract an assurance from Riyadh that
it will support an attack on Iraq," Kuwaiti political
analyst Ali Jaber Al Sabah said. "In Islam, it is
customary to give donations. To accuse an ambassador's
wife of financing terrorists in the guise of charity is
a new approach in the world of diplomacy, which is bound
to fall flat."
Still, a US National Security
Council task force has reportedly urged President George
W Bush to issue a 90-day ultimatum to Riyadh to crack
down on terrorism financing or face unilateral action by
Washington, according to the Washington Post on Tuesday.
Senior officials also told the Post that US intelligence
agencies had compiled a list of nine wealthy
individuals, seven of them Saudis, who were suspected to
be the main financiers of radical groups, including
al-Qaeda.
"All these accusations are nothing but
lies," said Mohammed Al Jadani, a Saudi businessman in
Dubai. "This campaign will continue, but they have to
realize that Saudi Arabia will not bow down. It will
take necessary action to clarify its position and come
clean."
"No doubt, it is the worst phase, but it
will stop short of getting severed," said Abdulkhaliq
Abdullah, a professor of political science at Emirates
University. "While the United States has ensured the
political survival of the Saudi regime through military
support, the kingdom has been a long-time US ally and a
major oil supplier that is likely to remain a constant
despite the frequent shocks.
"Saudi Arabia would
play a key role in any war on Iraq and a suggestion by
Riyadh that it would not back force against a fellow
Arab country worried Washington," Abdullah said. "Though
the kingdom later said it would accept all measures
endorsed by the United Nations, it has yet to convince
the United States."
In an editorial Tuesday, the
Al Riyadh newspaper in Saudi Arabia said, "Under the
current strategy to hit Iraq, suspicions and accusations
[against the kingdom] are being used by American foxes
to pressure the kingdom to directly enter the war
against Iraq."
(Inter Press Service)
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