Palestine, Iraq, and American Strategy

Michael Scott Doran

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003

Summary:  Many critics argue that the Bush administration should put off a showdown with Saddam Hussein and focus instead on achieving a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they fail to understand that although Palestine is central to the symbolism of Arab politics, it is actually marginal to its substance. Now, as in 1991, if a road to a calmer situation in Palestine does in fact exist, it runs through Baghdad.

Michael Scott Doran is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question.

The demonstrations were organized by a group called the Popular Committee of the Jawf Region for the Support of the Palestinian People. Although on the surface there might seem to be little seditious about such an organization, in context it represented a direct challenge to the Saudi government, which had already established a number of its own official committees for supporting the Palestinians -- the most notable of these being the Saudi Committee for the Support of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, chaired by the interior minister, Prince Nayif bin Abdulaziz, who among other duties runs the police and the secret police.

In a limp attempt to undermine the protestors, Nayif stated that "those wanting to show support to their Palestinian brothers must do it with money, not words." And sure enough, three days later the Saudi government ran a telethon to raise money for the Palestinian cause. (This latter event was widely reported in the United States but rarely presented in its proper domestic, as opposed to international, context.)

But the fund raiser did not satisfy the aspirations of protesters in Al Jawf, nor would more criticism of Israel and more diplomatic engagement in the Middle East by the United States. The wedge that separates Washington from Al Jawf and its sister regions throughout the Arab world does not depend primarily on whether Israel is prepared to yield 85 percent or 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, or even on whether Palestinians are fighting or living in peace. It stems more from the poverty, repression, and frustration that fuel the region's symbolic politics, and will remain until those larger issues are somehow addressed.

TRUMPING WASHINGTON

Using Palestine as a trump card is not a new gambit. Since the foundation of the Arab League in 1945, the states of the region have been split into two camps: one supportive of the status quo and aligned with Western powers, and one hostile to it and them. The anti-status quo states have inevitably played the Palestine card in order to deny the Western powers loyal allies in the region. In the Middle East today, three major actors (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) and two minor ones (Hizbollah and al Qaeda) are all doing something similar. Their primary goal is to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. They fear the imposition of a Pax Americana in the region and regard Israeli-Palestinian violence as a tool for keeping the United States at bay. For them, in fact, the revolt in Palestine is, among other things, a proxy war against the United States.

Recent developments in the Saudi-Iraqi relationship show how the game is played. Saddam Hussein first resorted to the tactic against Saudi Arabia in 1990. In preparation for the invasion of Kuwait, Baghdad expressed its casus belli in terms of Kuwait's alleged participation in a Zionist-imperialist conspiracy to destroy Iraq. Saddam accompanied this rhetoric with bellicose anti-Israel statements, such as his famous threat to burn half of the Jewish state with chemical weapons. When the American counterattack began, Saddam backed up his threats by targeting Israel with Scud missiles, trying to foster such unrest inside Saudi Arabia that it could not host the American troops required to oust the Iraqi forces from Kuwait. At the time, Saddam's gambit failed. Over the last dozen years, however, he has continued to pursue the same strategy, and finally it is starting to pay dividends.

Social changes inside Saudi Arabia since the Persian Gulf War have created a constituency that responds more readily to Saddam's lures. Today, two in five Saudis are under 15 years old. The country's population has exploded while its economy has stagnated, with the result that its per capita income has dropped. Under these conditions, a new generation of disaffected Saudi youth has come of age. Fifteen young Saudis attacked New York and Washington on September 11, approximately 80 more are in captivity in Guantanamo, and untold others are moldering in shallow graves in Afghanistan or filtering back home after the fall of the Taliban. These numbers alone suggest that more is going on inside Saudi Arabia than just the fact that, as official spokesmen would have it, a few suggestible young men fell in with the wrong crowd.

Many from this generation hold the United States responsible for their plight and for the sad state of affairs in the Arab and Islamic worlds more generally. For its part, Riyadh has no ideological resources or public vocabulary with which to counter them and justify its dependence on the United States. Saddam plays the Palestinian card to exploit this gap between ruler and ruled. For the ploy to succeed, the disgruntled young need not admire Saddam personally, nor find the Iraqi model attractive, nor care one iota about the suffering of the Palestinians. Baghdad wins simply if a significant number of Saudis, for whatever motive, reject cooperation between Riyadh and Washington and hitch a ride on the Palestine issue as a means of expressing that rejection.

Saddam's campaign enjoyed its greatest success at the Arab League summit in Beirut last March. The official symbolism of the meeting had Riyadh and Baghdad putting aside their differences in order to demonstrate unity at a moment when Israel, their putative common enemy, was at war with the Palestinians. The assembled leadership of the Arab world even raised a cheer when Iraqi Vice President Izzat Ibrahim received a kiss from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

If Palestine provided the symbolism for this Iraqi-Saudi rapprochement, however, it had little to do with the substance. The real story at Beirut was neither the Israeli incursion nor the peace plan that the Saudis floated as a response. It was the battle over Arab authenticity and regional order in the Persian Gulf. Riyadh and Baghdad were negotiating the fate of the Iraqi government, which stood uncomfortably under Washington's sword. Wrapping themselves in the Palestinian flag, Saudi Arabia and Iraq arrived at a quid pro quo: Iraq pledged to "respect the independence, sovereignty, and security of the state of Kuwait and safeguard its territorial integrity," and the other Arab states called for "lifting the sanctions on Iraq and ending the tribulation of the fraternal Iraqi people" while expressing their "categorical rejection of attacking Iraq." Saddam, meanwhile, granted Crown Prince Abdullah the pan-Arab legitimacy that he needed to prove to his own people that he was not a puppet of foreigners, in return for a Saudi pledge to reject any American plan to topple the Iraqi regime.