Madawi Al-Rasheed talking:
the history of this relationship goes back to after the Second World War and the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia. The United States did not have any interest in Arabia at the time, as it was called, until oil was discovered by an American company. And it is the oil company that brought the U.S. government into Saudi Arabia rather than the other way around. So, we have the oil. We have the money, that needed to be protected after the signing of a contract for further exploration of the possibility of oil on the soil of Arabia. So the United States government was brought in to protect the interest of the corporation, the oil company that discovered the oil and started pumping it.
And the United States found in Saudi Arabia a strategic ally. It had initially a military base in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where oil was found, and that military base was used by the United States as a place to stop on the way to the Far East during the 1940s and late 1950s. So the oil was extremely important. And at that time, Saudi oil was important for the United States and the rest of the world, because—at the moment, we find that the U.S. is less dependent on Saudi oil.
And the justification for this close partnership between Saudi Arabia and the United States, from the U.S. perspective, had always been that we need Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is a force of stability in the Middle East. They used Saudi Arabia in the Cold War to launch the jihad in Afghanistan with the U.S. approval and support, and Saudi Arabia was actually conveying that and actively participating in that jihad in the 1980s.
But also, there is the—in addition to the economic importance of Saudi Arabia, the strategic location of Saudi Arabia, the importance of Saudi Arabia to the rest of the Muslim world in the Cold War, Saudi Arabia, and specifically its religious tradition, that is known to everybody as the Wahhabi tradition, was a very convenient ideology to counter, for example, anti-imperialist ideologies in the 1960s, Arab nationalism and also socialism. So, Islamic fundamentalism was promoted by Saudi Arabia in cooperation with the United States as a counterstrategy to all those threatening forces in the world at the time, from the perspective of both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
However, when we come to the present and we come to the election of Mr. Donald Trump—Saudi Arabia, as you said, of course, it did receive President Obama in Saudi Arabia, and, frankly, President Obama sold more weapons to Saudi Arabia than any other president. But there was one issue that they did not agree on, and that is the Iran nuclear agreement, which allowed Iran to be rehabilitated into the international community and accept the conditions of the agreement to stop its nuclear program. And Saudi Arabia felt threatened by that, because it felt that President Obama went behind it, and behind closed door, and did not involve them in the agreement or the negotiation. In fact, Saudi Arabia at the time wanted the United States to bomb Iran, together with Israel, and wanted to keep the momentum of the rivalry and the antagonism between the U.S. and Iran to make sure that it is the only regional power that the U.S. could rely on in its relation with the rest of the Arab world.
But this agreement went ahead, and the relationship went into some kind of tension at the time, until the election of Mr. Trump, who wanted to turn the page and reverse all these agreements. And he felt that there is an opportunity—money—in Saudi Arabia, and Mohammed bin Salman was the right person to negotiate, because I think they both share some common characteristics, in the sense that they are both eclectic, after money, use a lot of media and PR, and also do not actually look at the facts.
So, what happened is that there is a project at the moment that Mohammed bin Salman is critical for it to happen, and that is, first of all, opening the Saudi economy to international capital and also involving American corporations even more in the development of a kind of neoliberal economy in Saudi Arabia. But at the same time, there are the political issues. Saudi Arabia is enlisted in a new project, in a new project to actually reach some kind of agreement between the Palestinians and Israel. And from the perspective of Mr. Trump, the Saudi role is extremely important. So, for example, when the U.S. Embassy moved to Jerusalem, that was an agreement that Saudi Arabia would not make a big fuss. And, in fact, it didn’t make a big fuss.
So there are economic issues in this relationship, strategic, and also the political aspects of that relation should not be ignored. However, I think, at the moment, Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi regime are increasingly becoming an embarrassment and a burden on their partners, especially the U.S., because the world and the civil society, human rights organizations are very vocal in condemning the abuses that take place inside Saudi Arabia, and therefore, public opinion is shifting.
And Americans should ask themselves this question: Is America just an arms dealer, a manufacturer of heavy armament to be sold to dictatorships around the world, or is there something else that America stands for? Does it stand for democracy? Does it stand for human rights? Does it stand for a global order where individuals are respected and are secure?
If there are journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, are the Saudis going to get away with this murder if it’s proven that they are responsible for it? So, in fact, the Khashoggi affair is not only about Saudi Arabia. And it is unfortunate if the man has disappeared and would never come back, but it is also about the so-called free world, and it’s a test of its ability to actually stand to its name as a free world. So the undermining of the values of human rights and people shrugging them off—they are not even on the agenda. It is a very worrying world, I think.
_____
Madawi Al-Rasheed
Saudi dissident and visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. She was stripped of her Saudi citizenship in 2005 for criticizing Saudi authorities.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 19, 2018