Weak realpolitik: The vicissitudes of Saudi bashing.

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam
• Position: Quarterly

ABOUT SIXTY years ago, R.G. Collingwood wrote, "Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way." (1) Inasmuch as his thinking was suspended somewhere between hope for a science of history and an awareness of its practical limits, philosophers of history have been arguing ever since about what he really meant. But one thing he must have meant is that what interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present. As Collingwood said, "As far as we can see history as a whole ... we see it as a continuous development in which every phase consists of the solution of human problems set by the preceding phase." (2)

Human affairs generally move so ponderously, or in such complicated ways, that contemporaries have trouble seeing "history as a whole", or detecting the phases to which Collingwood pointed. But as a glacier or a tectonic plate may slip to dramatic effect, so sometimes major events rattle us into historical awareness. When they do, it is uncanny how we find ourselves reassessing the significance of dates as symbols of the touching points of historical phases. On September 1, 1939, 1918-19 suddenly shrunk in significance for Britons and Frenchmen and 1870-71 suddenly grew. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, 1917 suddenly became a less important date, and 1914 a more important one. September 11, 2001, was such an event, so it is worth asking how our historical perceptions may change as a result of it.

To be sure, some movement in our historical awareness may be detected already. In the past six months many Americans have grown intensely interested in the Middle East and Islam in general--and in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Islam, and the U.S.-Saudi relationship in particular. So far, however, relatively recent matters have monopolized our attention, and an abundance of detailed newspaper feature series has contributed to that focus. The seriousness of our historical thinking is also affected by emotion. We Americans are more than just curious, and more than merely bothered, about these Saudi subjects. Some are better described as very, very angry.

For starters, it soon dawned on us that while the targets of initial U.S.-led military operations would be the Al-Qaeda organization nestled in the bosom of the Taliban regime, the real source of the problem lay in our two most tactically significant allies: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. As to the former, we knew that Pakistan's military and intelligence services had created and supported the Taliban, thus providing sanctuary and foot soldiers for mass-casualty terrorism. As to the latter, not only were 15 of the 19 terrorists Saudi nationals, but the open secret that the Saudi regime deflects popular frustration and opposition away from itself and onto the United States and Israel became more widely confessed in public. As Sandy Berger put it once out of office, "the veil has been lifted and the American people see a double game that they're not terribly pleased with." Though silent on whether he had been displeased with it while in office, he continued: "They see a regime that is repressive with respect to the extremists that threaten them, but more than tolerant- indeed, the more we find out, beneficent--to the general movement of extreme Islamists in the region." (3)

It soon occurred to others that even this deflection game--what George Shultz has termed "a grotesque protection racket"-- was not the deepest root of the matter. (4) The clerically-run Saudi educational system inculcates an intense religious and cultural chauvinism into its youth--and youth under the age of 16 are today about half the Kingdom's population. (5) Saudi ulema have tutored generation after generation in what amounts to jihadist incitement against non-Muslims. The late Hamud al-Shuaibi, a Saudi cleric who followed Wahhabi Islam to its logical conclusion, put it exactly right: "The Saudi people follow the sheiks that relay the truth and the ones who follow Quran and Sunna, not the ones who follow the political side. Jihad is the highest form of worship. This is a very high station. So all look for this station. If the government allowed people, all the Arab Muslims would go to war." (6) This explains why, in a recent poll conducted by Saudi intelligence and shared with the U.S. government, more tha n 95 percent of Saudis between the ages of 25 and 41 expressed sympathy with Osama bin Laden. (7)

Saudi Arabia's political culture, then, is caught in a double-bind owed to the Kingdom's very origins: the alliance between the power of the Al Saud and the theology of Abdel ibn al-Wahhab. Saudi society naturally generates resentment against its own political leadership, for that leadership's power is far too scant to implement the jihadist teachings of its own schools. Moreover, the Kingdom relies on outside physical protection and a welter of sheltering financial and institutional arrangements with the United States while at the same time exporting its excess religious zeal in the form of opposition to that protector. This double bind has been managed with only modest...