Inside the Kingdom (55 page)

“No,” Abdullah had said. “The answer is no. I said ‘no’ in Saudi Arabia. I say ‘no’ now, and I will say ‘no’ tomorrow.”

The trouble was that Cheney had solid grounds for his suspicions, since the allegation that most of the leaders of the Arab world—including Abdullah—secretly wanted the United States to bring Saddam crashing down came from no other source than Abdullah’s own ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

It seemed to be a case of the flamboyant Bandar “flying solo.” According to many, the Saudi ambassador had a long-standing personal grudge against Saddam Hussein. In the summer of 1990, only hours before Iraq’s troops started rolling, the dictator had tricked Bandar into conveying solid personal assurances to both Margaret Thatcher and President George H. W. Bush that there would be no Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Since then, Bandar believed, Saddam had also put out a contract to have him assassinated. The Saudi prince had strengthened his already substantial security squad.

A professional colleague of the prince’s dismisses this idea as “utter nonsense.”

“Prince Bandar” he says, “does not take things personally. And it is quite untrue to suggest that he would ever depart from officially determined Saudi policy.”

But that was not how many observers saw the prince operating in Washington in the autumn of 2002. While Crown Prince Abdullah was doing his best from Riyadh to oppose and prevent a U.S. attack on Iraq, his nephew and ambassador seemed to be doing quite the opposite—effectively serving, as David Ottaway of the
Washington Post
put it, as “a de facto member of the U.S. neoconservatives’ ‘war party.’ ” In a replay of the previous Gulf conflict of 1990-91, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were once again Bandar’s best chums—indeed, on January 11, 2003, according to the investigative journalist Bob Woodward, the two men briefed Bandar on Bush’s decision to go to war before they told Secretary Powell. Reinvigorated by the coming conflict, the Saudi envoy bustled to and fro between Riyadh and Washington. When finally questioned at home, he presented his rationale without apology—the United States was going to attack Iraq whatever anyone said, so why not make the best of it?

Abdullah’s conclusion from the same grim reality was that Saudi interests were now best served by visibly distancing the Kingdom from Bush’s America. The crown prince regarded the prospect of a U.S. presence in Iraq as bad for Iraq, bad for America, and bad for Saudi Arabia—an “illegitimate occupation,” as he would subsequently put it publicly in a speech to the Arab League. Abdullah was appalled that Bush and his advisers did not even pretend to listen to the firsthand experience offered by those who knew the region. In Abdullah’s own case, he could offer the perspective of his mother’s tribe, the Shammar, to whose powerful chiefs he remained close and whose writ ran deep into the deserts of Iraq. Two of the crown prince’s wives were (and are) Shammar.

“History teaches us the American track record in adventures like this,” says a veteran Saudi diplomat. “They dive in without thinking, then they cut and run, leaving the mess to others.”

But there were existing commitments to consider. Since the mid-1990s the U.S. Air Force had built up the Prince Sultan Air Base at Al-Kharj, south of Riyadh, to become the linchpin of its Middle East air command. Enforcement of the no-fly zone over Iraq had been coordinated from here, as had the 2001 attacks on Afghanistan. In 2003 the U.S. military was counting on Al-Kharj as the command center for its attack on Iraq.

Abdullah did a deal through his chameleon ambassador. The United States could go on using Al-Kharj and some other bases for the duration of the war, it was agreed, on a basis of strict military secrecy—after which the Americans must pack up their belongings and be gone. The U.S. campaign of “shock and awe” that overwhelmed Iraq in a few short weeks after March 20, 2003, relied heavily on Al-Kharj and also on the northern Saudi airports of Ar’Ar and Tabuk—U.S. Special Forces teams took off from these two bases near the Iraqi border for their undercover operations inside Baghdad and other cities.

But once the invasion was completed, American transporters flew in to start dismantling and shuttling U.S. Air Force assets eastward piece by piece, to the French-built Al-Udeid Air Base, in the Gulf state of Qatar. By the end of September 2003 there was not a single U.S. soldier, tank, or plane left on the soil of Saudi Arabia, apart from a few long-term military trainers. Abdullah had finally distanced the Kingdom from Bush’s America as he had long wished—and, in the process, one of the principal demands that Osama Bin Laden had made in attacking the twin towers two years earlier had also been met. Saudi Arabia had helped brew the poison that was 9 /11. Now Iraq would have to drink it.

CHAPTER 31

End of the Affair

P
rince Bandar bin Sultan liked to compare the long-standing U.S.-Saudi relationship to a Catholic marriage. There might be rows and dalliances, he would say with a twinkle—he had known his share of both—but the marriage would go on forever. Then in the spring of 2004 his nominal boss, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the long-serving and normally somber foreign minister, out-twinkled his cousin with a new definition.

“It’s not a Catholic marriage,” Prince Saud told David Ottaway of the
Washington Post
. “It’s a
Muslim
marriage.” The Muslim husband is allowed up to four wives, providing that he treats them all with fairness—so that would be Saudi Arabia’s new course in the difficult days that followed 9/11. The Kingdom was not seeking a divorce from America, just looking for some extra partners.

The first of these was China, a country with whom the Kingdom had not even maintained diplomatic relations when Bandar went to Beijing shopping for CSS-2 missiles in 1985. A few years later the first Communist Chinese ambassador arrived in Riyadh—part of the international alliance amassed against Saddam in 1990-91—and the relationship grew closer through the 1990s as Saudi Arabia increased its oil exports to Japan, South Korea, and other countries in Asia. By the early 2000s the Kingdom had become China’s principal supplier of crude oil. It was a coincidence that Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, happened to be in Shanghai in September 2001, just eight days after the Al-Qaeda attack on America, but what he chose to say there was not. Saudi Arabia, he declared, wished to build a “strategic relationship and partnership” with China “at all levels.”

In 1998 Abdullah had made China one of his earliest destinations after he assumed more power as crown prince, and when he became king he pointedly made Beijing, not Washington, the object of his very first foreign visit. The king landed in January 2006 with a mixed delegation of Saudi men
and
women—another first—and promptly got down to business, laying plans for a massive $3.5 billion refinery to process high sulfur Saudi crude and discussing the provision of Saudi oil for a new Chinese hundred-million-barrel strategic reserve.

A few weeks later, China’s president, Hu Jintao, returned the visit. Hu was on his way back from Washington, where the White House greeter had addressed him using the wrong title, welcoming him in Chinese as President of Nationalist China (Taiwan), and where he had also suffered the indignity of being heckled at his press conference. In Riyadh there were no protocol mishaps—and certainly no risk of hecklers. There was, furthermore, a curiously genuine warmth as two inscrutable and proudly non-Western cultures took their mutual measure. Both were on the rise. Both were seeking to modernize. Both were authoritarian and secretive—and both had had to endure patronizing lectures on that account from the know-it-all West. Speaking to the Majlis Al-Shura, Hu pointed out how China’s relationship with Arabia went back a lot further than that of the United States. Two thousand years earlier, even before the time of the Prophet, the ancient Silk Road had linked China with the Middle East.

“Regarding history as a mirror,” said the president, quoting an old Chinese proverb, “we can understand what will be rising and what will be falling.”

This oblique reference to the world’s shifting balance of power was echoed in the rest of Hu’s speech. Rather than invading one another, he declared, nations should pursue dialogue, opposing “the use of force, or threatening each other with force at random.” Sovereign states had the right to choose their own social and political systems, and each should respect the choice of the other. Without once uttering the word
America,
Hu laid out a worldview refreshingly different from that of George Bush, who had recently expressed his ambition to end what he described as his country’s “addiction” to oil imports, especially from the Arab Middle East. China had no hang-ups: it was unashamedly eager for Saudi oil.

Oil for security had always been the basis for the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship.” Now this was echoed in the new Sino-Saudi marriage—with the possibility of a sinister twist. Official reports described the signing of a “contract on defense systems,” which analysts presumed to refer to the Kingdom’s stock of fifty to sixty aging Chinese CSS-2 missiles purchased two decades earlier by Bandar and Khaled bin Sultan. These medium-range weapons had been designed to deliver nuclear warheads, and the years since 1985 had seen Saudi Arabia’s closest Muslim ally, Pakistan, become a nuclear power—operating secretly, it was widely presumed, with China, since Pakistan and China were both worried about India’s long-standing nuclear capability. Saudi Arabia, for its part, was worried about Iran and its development of nuclear technology. So it seemed obvious that the three nations should find ways of collaborating, preferably in some arm’s-length fashion.

When the nuclear suggestion was put to Saud Al-Faisal he mustered all his authority as the world’s longest-serving foreign minister to reject the suggestion that the Kingdom had any access to the bomb.

“We think it is stupidity incarnate because these weapons will not give security,” he said in March 2004. There was “absolutely no truth” to reports that Saudi Arabia was pursuing the nuclear option.

But the Kingdom deliberately deceived the world and its closest ally to acquire and install China’s missiles—and defense, after all, is the gravest matter of life and death. It would be foolish not to keep the country’s stock of CSS-2 East Wind missiles in updated working order, and it would not be difficult for Pakistan to hold a matching stock of nuclear warheads on behalf of its wealthy Muslim ally, thus providing the Kingdom—and indeed Pakistan and China—with some element of deniability. The state of Israel continues to deny that it is a nuclear power. So why should the Saudis tell the truth?

Wife number three was also recruited from the very top of America’s list of foes. The Soviet Union had been the first country in the world to recognize Abdul Aziz’s conquest of the peninsula in 1926 and was the only foreign government that could claim the distinction of having given oil to Saudi Arabia: in the days of the Great Depression a Russian tanker delivered to Jeddah some £30,000 worth of petrol for which the poverty-stricken Saudis never managed to scramble up the cash. Through the Cold War the godless Soviets became one of the ritual devils that Saudi foreign policy statements loved to stone, and relations did not thaw greatly with the collapse of Communism. The two countries had been energy competitors for years, vying alternately for the position of the world’s largest oil producer. The Saudis resented the way Russia declined to join or cooperate with OPEC, but happily enjoyed the enhanced oil prices produced by OPEC’s production restraints.