What was the point of Saudi crown prince Abdullah's trip to Crawford, Texas? Nothing substantial emerged from the so-called summit. The Arabian oil autocrat said nothing at the end of his meeting with President Bush. No new guidelines for the Saudis' increasingly overdue investigation of their citizens' involvement in September 11 and al Qaeda were revealed. Nor did the American side unveil any new agreement for common action on Iraq.
In other words, the U.S.-Saudi summit seemed to be business as usual. And that meant a discreet encounter, with Washington continuing to downplay the abuses of the Saudi regime--namely, its central role in inspiring and funding (or, to be generous, its failure to crack down on Saudi citizens who inspire and fund) anti-Western Islamic extremist terror.
The summit was preceded by an amazing article in the New York Times that appeared the day of the meeting. Grounded in quotes attributed to a "person familiar with the Crown Prince's thinking," the article, headlined "Saudi to Warn Bush of Rupture Over Israel Policy," was a litany of demands and "blunt messages" and grievances.
The gist: Abdullah would call the tune in Texas. He would sternly admonish Bush to rein in Ariel Sharon or face a renewed oil boycott, an end to Saudi cooperation with the U.S. military, and the threat that the world's most reactionary regime would align itself with Saddam Hussein and other militarist radicals. Saudi Arabia, not the United States, would issue demands.
Why is it that our government must refrain from making demands on
our longtime petroleum partner? If we can make demands on Israel, why not on Saudi Arabia? What possible grievances can Riyadh have with us? On September 11, our cities, not theirs, were brutally attacked by 15 of their nationals, not ours. And the corrupt Saudi monarchy does not speak for the Palestinians, except in funding Yasser Arafat's parasitical bureaucracy and the Hamas terror network. Yet the arrival in Texas of Abdullah was preceded by aggressive rhetoric aimed at placing President Bush on the defensive.
And in response, President Bush publicly offered predictable assurances: that he was assured that oil will not be used as a weapon; that Abdullah condemns the murder of American citizens; and that Abdullah opposes bin Laden, wherever the Wahhabi warrior may be hiding. But Abdullah did not, it seems, condemn those on his own territory and in his state media who preach the murder of Americans, and who fund and acclaim the massacre of Jewish and Arab civilians by terror bombers in Israel.
Indeed, the Saudi regime continues to speak out of both sides of its mouth, and the United States continues to maintain a double standard when dealing with Arab states. Ghazi Algosaibi, the Saudi ambassador to London, chose two days before the Crawford chat to post on his embassy's website an insulting defense of his recent "poem" in support of suicide bombing. "While we are on the subject of terrorism," he wrote to a British Jewish group that had complained about his verse, "I am most curious to know your view of Samson of the Old Testament. Was he a suicide terrorist?" Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell affirmed in Senate testimony last week that money raised in a Saudi telethon for Palestinian "martyrs" goes to Hamas.
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