By John R. MacArthur, April 17, 2007.
Given my dissident politics, I should be up in arms about the Israel lobby. Not
only have I supported the civil rights of the Palestinians over the years, but two
of my principal intellectual mentors were George W. Ball and Edward Said, both
severe critics of Israel and its extra-special relationship with the United States.
Nowadays I ought to be even bolder in my critique, since the silent agreement
suppressing candid discussions about Israeli-U.S. relations has recently been
shaken by some decidedly mainstream figures. These critics of Israel and its
American agents include John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of the University
of Chicago, and Harvard’s Kennedy School, respectively; Tony Judt, a historian
at New York University; and former President Jimmy Carter.
Somehow, though, I can’t shake the idea that the Israel lobby, no matter how
powerful, isn’t all it is cracked up to be, particularly where it concerns the Bush
administrations past and present. Indeed, when I think of pernicious foreign
lobbies with disproportionate sway over American politics, I can’t see past
Saudi Arabia and its royal house, led by King Abdullah.
The long and corrupt history of American-Saudi relations centers around the
kingdom’s vast reserves of easily extractable oil, of course. Ever since President
Franklin D. Roosevelt met aboard ship in 1945 with King Ibn Saud, the special
relationship with the desert kingdom has only grown stronger. The House of
Saud is usually happy to sell us oil at a consistent and reasonable price and
then increase production if unseemly market forces drive the world price of a
barrel too high for U.S. consumers.
In exchange we arm the Saudis to the teeth and turn a blind eye to their
medieval approach to crime and punishment.
Even during the Saudi-led oil embargo of 1973-74, an exceedingly hostile action
against the United States supposedly justified by Washington’s support of Israel
in the Yom Kippur War, the Nixon administration treaded very softly. Despite
the illegality of the embargo it arguably violated international law as well as a
bilateral commercial agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia the
White House and the State Department could hardly have been more diplomatic
toward their Bedouin friends.
As the historian J.B. Kelly recounts, the U.S. ambassador to Riyahd, James
Akins, did his best to placate King Faisal by urging the Saudi’s American-owned
oil concessionaire ARAMCO to, in Akin’s words, “hammer home” to the White
House that the embargo wouldn’t be lifted unless “the political struggle
is settled in manner satisfactory to
Arabs.”
In all, as Kelly wrote, “a most peculiar recourse for an ambassador to employ to
influence the policy of his own government.”
But this was a blip on the screen of harmonious petrol politics. After Iran’s
Islamic revolution overthrew the trusted shah, in 1979, the thoroughly
anti-democratic Saudi oligarchy appeared an island of stability and thus of
greater strategic value to Washington.
Indeed, in a head-to-head match-up with the Israel lobby in 1981 over
the proposed American sale of AWACS planes to the Saudis, the Saudi lobby
won a close vote in the Senate. Leading the Arab charge on Capitol Hill was the
debonair Prince Bandar, who demonstrated that charm mixed with a lot of
money could beat the Israelis, even during the pro-Israel administration of
Ronald Reagan.
Bandar was quickly promoted to Saudi ambassador to Washington, where, in
1990, he was assigned the task by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney of, in
effect, doling out press passes to the U.S. media before the Gulf War this in
spite of the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. troops were swarming into the
kingdom to defend it against a perceived invasion threat from Saddam Hussein.
When he wasn’t entertaining congressmen and spreading good cheer through
his highly paid lobbyist, Fred Dutton, Bandar was busy making friends with, at
first vice president, and then president, George H.W. Bush, and by extension
with Bush’s son, the future president. This personal relationship with the Bush
family has served Bandar and his family very well, as documented in Craig
Unger’s book, House of Bush, House of Saud.
But the prince and his royal relatives evidently also impressed the Clinton
administration. Before he died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, the former
FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill complained to French investigator
Jean-Charles Brisard that Saudi pressure on the State Department had
prevented him from fully investigating possible al-Qaida involvement in the
Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen, and of the
destroyer Cole in 2000.
As with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, there’s always talk of
the Saudis playing a double game with al-Qaida publicly denouncing it and
privately paying it off but you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to
understand that the Saudis don’t have America’s best interests at heart.
So it gets worse. Now, according to Seymour Hersh, Bandar has virtually joined
the Bush administration as a shadow cabinet member. Hersh’s New Yorker
article last month described “the redirection” of U.S. foreign policy against Iran
and Arab Shi’ite terrorists in collaboration with such Sunni-dominated countries
as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt (this in spite of the fact that Sunni rebels,
funded in part by Saudi “private citizens,” have killed the bulk of American
solidiers who have died in Iraq).
The wise men in this new policy council reportedly include Vice President
Cheney, deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams (an Iran-Contra convict
who is very pro-Israel), the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,
Zalmay Khalilzad, and none other than Bandar, now the Saudi national-security
adviser.
Such is the cynicism of Bushian, Israeli and Saudi foreign policy that
Abrams collaborates with Bandar, whose country does not recognize Israel and
whose “charities” give money to the families of suicide bombers who blow
themselves up inside the Jewish state.
Lately, King Abdullah has been making anti-American noises, calling the U.S.
presence in Iraq an “illegitimate foreign occupation.” But like the Saudis’
paper-thin devotion to the Palestinian cause, this is just so much realpolitik.
In March 1974, the oil embargo was lifted without any conditions
concerning Palestinian rights. Today, as the Shi’ism scholar Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb told Mohamad Bazzi, of Newsday, “the Saudis are being more
autonomous, but it’s a very contrived sense of autonomy” designed “to give
more political cover so they can rally Arab support against Iran.”
If you’re naive enough to believe that the Saudi king’s rhetoric signifies a
genuine break with the United States over Iraq, or anything else, then you
might also believe that the Israel lobby is more powerful than the Saudi lobby.
And if you think that Israeli security means more to George Bush than Saudi oil,
then you might even believe that Bush saw 9/11 coming.
