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A New Rift?
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has blamed ‘Zionists’ for a weekend terror attack. While his comments seemed designed for a domestic audience, they could damage relations with Washington
WEB EXCLUSIVE
May 4 - Only days after the State Department praised Saudi Arabia for its “aggressive” and “unprecedented” campaign to hunt down terrorists, Crown Prince Abdullah—the country’s de facto ruler—has startled Bush administration officials by blaming “Zionists” and “followers of Satan” for recent terrorist acts in the kingdom. “We can be certain that Zionism is behind everything,” Abdullah told a gathering of leading government officials and academics in Jeddah as he talked about the weekend attack on oil workers, which killed six people, including two Americans. “I don’t say 100 percent, but 95 percent.”
The comments were cited by stunned Bush administration officials and other Mideast watchers today as an ominous sign of possible new tensions in the U.S.-Saudi alliance. Although some top Saudi officials, notably Interior Minister Prince Nayef, have in the past made similar remarks, Crown Prince Abdullah has never before appeared to blame his country’s internal troubles on the Israelis—a position that is anathema to Washington.
The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James C. Oberwetter, plans to meet Wednesday with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal to seek “clarification” of Abdullah’s comments, a State Department official told NEWSWEEK late Tuesday. “We’ve seen these remarks and, if the crown prince in fact made them, we would strongly disagree with such an assertion and consider it unhelpful,” the official said, adding that the State Department planned to withhold further comment until after the meeting.
Yet the normally smooth and pro-Western Saud may not prove the most receptive audience for Oberwetter’s visit. The Saudi foreign minister seemed to echo his brother’s remarks in his comments today, telling reporters in Jeddah that last Saturday’s attack on oil workers in the industrial city of Yanbu—which have jolted the oil industry—had fed into “a Zionist campaign” to shake the Saudi monarchy, according to a Reuters report.
In an apparent attempt to provide some evidence for his comments, Saud claimed that one of two Saudis who had been linked to the attack were believed to be followers of two well-known London-based Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Fagih and Mohammed al-Masari, who, according to the Saudi foreign minister, are being financed by Israel. No evidence of such links has ever been made public. "This shows how desperate and hopeless they are," Fagih told NEWSWEEK in a telephone interview from London. "This is like saying George Bush is sponsoring bin Laden."
Some former Mideast diplomats today seemed flabbergasted by the remarks by the two Saudi leaders and at a loss to explain them. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Bush administration. “I just can’t understand it.”
But others suggested the remarks may be part of a calculated effort to placate a domestic Saudi constituency up in arms over recent developments in the region, including President George W. Bush’s endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s announced, unilateral withdrawal from some Palestinian territories and even the new disclosures over the humiliating treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. interrogators—a story that is dominating news coverage throughout the Mideast.
“It’s terribly disappointing that they [the Saudi rulers] resort to this kind of stuff,” says Edward Walker, a former veteran U.S. diplomat and now president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based group that has received funding from Saudi Arabia. “They know damn well what’s happening.”
But Walker added that the Saudi rulers “don’t feel they owe this country or this administration much of anything these days. They were terribly disappointed in the 100 percent support of Sharon … Maybe this is their way of making their disappointment clear. It’s also a way to blunt the edge of public opinion which is very much opposed to what we are doing … We have a horrible situation in the region.”
This is hardly the first time that Saudi leaders have upset U.S. officials with controversial remarks in the war on terrorism. It took Saudi officials months to publicly acknowledge that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11 terror attacks in the United States were Saudi citizens and, when they finally did so, in February 2002, they still appeared to blame others. Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, who is in charge of internal security, insisted that the hijackers were a small minority who had been “taken advantage of” and that there was no Al Qaeda presence in the kingdom. As recently as December 2002, Nayef claimed that "Jews" were behind the September 11 attacks—a comment that drew strong protests from the U.S. State Department.
For Crown Prince Abdullah to now engage in the same rhetoric creates awkward new dilemmas. The U.S.-Saudi relationship has been under persistent political attack in the United States, especially from leading members of Congress who blame the Saudis for failing to crack down on terrorist financing in their country and promoting religious extremism. One such member, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, today suggested that Abdullah’s comments were evidence that the Saudi regime may be disconnected from reality. “If the Saudis are going to continue to deny reality and live in a dream world, then their regime will be short-lived,” Schumer told NEWSWEEK.
Ironically, the Bush administration attempted to quell such criticism by issuing a new report last week that lavishly praised the Saudis for a renewed effort to crackdown on terrorism in the wake of last May’s deadly bombing at a housing compound in Riyadh. “I would cite Saudi Arabia as an excellent example of a nation increasingly focusing its political will to fight terrorism,” U.S. Amb. Cofer Black, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, said in a statement accompanying the department’s release of its annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.
Stating that Riyadh bombings and other attacks had “served to strengthen Saudi resolve,” Black praised the Saudis for a number of initiatives that included arresting more than 600 suspects and working more closely with U.S. officials on antiterror financing and money-laundering initiatives. Black also complimented the Saudis for initiating an ideological campaign against Islamic terrorist organizations that included statements by senior Saudi officials espousing “a consistent message of moderation and toleration.”
