The Real "Kingdom of Heaven"

The Kingdom may have been a dud, but its introductory credits hosted one of the most cogent and engaging summations of Saudi-American relations every presented. So, put aside two minutes of your life, and discover what the War on Terror, $3/gallon gasoline, and young women being sentenced to six months jail and 200 lashes for the crime of being raped all mean.

So, just what does the future of Saudi-American relations hold? Recently, veteran petrochemical expert and Georgetown University scholar Dr. Jean-François Seznec maintained to me that Saudi Arabia would supplant Germany as the world's largest chemical exporter by 2015. It's well-known that the Kingdom has the world's largest known reserves of crude oil by far. As the above short points out, the United States will be the world's largest oil consumer for some time. Though Saudi Arabia is not the largest exporter to the United States (contrary to popular belief, that honor falls to Canada), it's 14 percent share is significant. Even so, as Rachel Bronson argued last year in The Washington Post, the relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia more closely resemble that which it maintains with Jordan. Forged and strengthened during the Cold War for the common cause against Communism, the diplomatic ties are more strategic than economic. But, whether for trade or for common cause, the Saudi-American alliance has proven durable.

Clouds loom on the horizon, however. Osama bin Laden, born in Yemen, but reared in Saudi Arabia, is only the most visible manifestation of the discontent with the House of Saud. Long before the September 11th attacks, bin Laden had declared war on the decadent royal family for chummy relations with the West. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11th hijackers were Saudi nationals. Saudis flocked to the jihad being waged against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, forming the brunt of bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs." They comprise a large percentage of the foreign insurgent fighters in Iraq today.

Ironically, the anti-Communist stance of the royal family and the Cold War United States may have midwifed the current breed of Muslim extremism rife in the Kingdom today. At the time, the best way to deflect atheistic anti-Communism seemed to be to encourage the nascent religious movements then metathesizing in Saudi Arabia and Nasser's Egypt. It was only with the arresting surprise of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that Muslim activists were re-labeled as the enemy. And remember, during the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA actively armed and financed the Mujahideen "freedom fighters," including Bin Laden's "Afghan Arabs." They (now known as the Taliban) would later use the very same RPGs delivered to them by the U.S. Government against NATO forces a decade later.

Reagan dedicates the Shuttle Columbia to Mujahideen freedom fighters:


Both the Saudis and their American allies must face the bitter harvest of these past choices today. A third of Saudi Arabia's young men (aged 20-24) are unemployed. Saudi Arabia has one of the world's fastest growing population rates, ballooning six-fold since 1960. This is the so-called "oil baby boom" who is now emerging into adulthood. A glut of young, and often-unemployed Saudis is restless about the inordinate level of wealth concentrated among the thousands of members of the royal line, bitter at the ubiquity of foreign expatriate labor which dominates the economy (foreigners make up a third of the Saudi population), inflamed by their leadership's tacit complicity in the American invasion of Iraq, and restless under the weight of a corrupt and moribund regime. As the Saudis with box cutters on September 11th demonstrated, these disaffected young can be dangerously fertile ground for terrorist recruitment.

Will the Saudi regime stand? What kind of economic and geopolitical fallout would result from the regime's collapse? Short of that, can the alliance be maintained in the wake of popular outcry both in the United States and Saudi Arabia?

See the newest World Economic Forum scenario on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates here. Also, read Dr. Seznec's intelligent interview on his love-hate relationship with Saudi Arabia, and his recent article in Foreign Policy concerning Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz's surprising reforms.