The Saudi Paradox

Michael Scott Doran

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004

Summary:  Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its elite is bitterly divided on how to escape it. Crown Prince Abdullah leads a camp of liberal reformers seeking rapprochement with the West, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, sides with an anti-American Wahhabi religious establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda. Abdullah cuts a higher profile abroad -- but at home Nayef casts a longer and darker shadow.

Michael Scott Doran is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Al Qaeda's nightmare scenario is that the Americans and the Iraqi Shi`ites will force Riyadh to enact broad reforms and bring the Saudi Shi`ites into the political community. There is no question that many hard-line Saudi clerics share precisely the same fears. Even before the United States attacked Afghanistan, Saudi clerics preached the doctrine of a Jewish-American conspiracy to destroy Islam. Now that American forces have unshackled the Iraqi Shi`ites, it would be naive to expect those clerics to take a more benign view of U.S. intentions.

The Saudi religious establishment's views regarding the American-Shi`ite conspiracy are not simply an internal Saudi matter. They legitimize the daily attacks on American soldiers in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle," as well as attacks such as the anti-Shi`ite suicide bombing in Najaf last August. The dazed onlookers who crowded around the rubble in Najaf immediately asked themselves one question: Who did it? "Wahhabis," cried one group. "Baathists," cried another. If Washington maintains business as usual with Riyadh, it will not be long before the Iraqi Shi`ites will conclude that the United States covertly supports the Wahhabi bombers who blow up their mosques -- just as they concluded, after the events of 1991, that the United States supported Saddam Hussein against them.

Nonetheless, changing the situation will be difficult, because the United States has limited means of muting the anti-Shi`ism and anti-Americanism that the clerics espouse. Getting Riyadh to divorce itself from radical Wahhabism will be as great a task as getting the Soviet Union to renounce communism. Clearly, there are forces in the kingdom who would be willing to support the efforts of a Saudi Gorbachev, but it is not clear when or whether one will appear.

Wahhabism is the foundation of an entire political system, and everyone with a stake in the status quo can be expected to rally around it when push comes to shove. In Iraq, as odious as the regime of Saddam Hussein was, it still enjoyed a social base of support in the center of the country, and the opponents of the old system were -- and remain -- fragmented and leaderless. In Saudi Arabia, Washington faces a similar problem. The United States has no choice but to press hard for democratic reforms. But the very attempt to create a more liberal political order will set off new disputes, which will inevitably generate anti-American feelings. Saudi Arabia is in turmoil, and -- like it or not -- the United States is deeply involved. As Washington struggles to rebuild Iraq it will thus find, once again, that its closest Arab ally is also one of its most bitter enemies.

*Al-Khudayr's sympathies with al Qaeda are apparently reciprocated. Following the cleric's arrest in May 2003, the London-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih reported that Osama bin Laden had warned the Saudi authorities not to hurt him. Bin Laden, the report claimed, labeled al-Khudayr "our most prominent supporter." Should any harm come to him, al Qaeda's response would be "commensurate with the sheikh's high standing with us, ... We will not issue a statement on the matter other than one dripping with blood."