The Ties That Blind

How the U.S.-Saudi Alliance Damages Liberty and Security

Ted Galen Carpenter

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781948647397
• eBook ISBN:
  9781948647403
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Diplomatie et traités

The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has cast a deep shadow over Washington's relationship with Saudi Arabia. The ever-changing story about how Khashoggi died undermines the Saudi government's already weak credibility and is illustrative of its extensive record of humans-rights abuses and outright war crimes.

Washington's solicitous, even enabling, posture toward Saudi Arabia cannot disguise the fact that the Kingdom has never been a reliable U.S. ally. Unfortunately, U.S. leaders are far too willing to make moral compromises when security threats are modest. Abandoning essential moral standards and values for the defense of lesser interests is never justified. Yet that is precisely what the U.S. has done with Saudi Arabia for decades.

The chapters contained in The Ties That Blind were first published in Perilous Partners (2015). Combined with a new introduction, this book documents the many instances in which U.S. and Saudi interests diverged, and shows that the case for terminating the toxic U.S.–Saudi alliance—indefensible on both strategic and moral grounds—is more clear and urgent than ever before.

1. Cold War to Holy War:
The U.S.-Saudi Alliance

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s possession of the largest oil reserves in the world made it a highly valued U.S. Cold War ally. Senior policy planners, diplomatic officials, and defense and intelligence specialists deemed the industrial world’s access to Saudi crude a vital national interest. That determination led to calls for establishing U.S. military predominance in the Persian Gulf. The means to secure U.S. ascendance involved acts of aggression, intervention, and subversion against prospective regional foes. Additionally, above the Arab kingdom’s oil-rich sands lay the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina. That powerful spiritual position in the Muslim world inspired top U.S. officials to forge a Christian-Islamic moral alliance with the Saudi royal family against pan-Arab socialists, secular nationalists, and godless Soviet communists.

For pragmatic reasons, Washington reluctantly accepted Riyadh’s austere social dictates, many at odds with America’s core foundational principles and basic standards of human rights. Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy banned free speech, competitive elections, and political parties. It propagated a ferocious intolerance of Jews, prohibited the public mixing of unmarried women and men, and in a disturbing throwback to the Middle Ages, beheaded apostates, adulterers, drug traffickers, and homosexuals in public. The Saudi government enforced the public’s observance not just to Islam, but to an ultra-conservative derivation called Wahhabism (Salafism by its adherents). Throughout the Islamic world, the kingdom exported its literalist interpretation of Islam, pouring its oil wealth into a network of religious schools, Islamic missionaries, and charitable organizations of global reach. Successive American administrations proved enthusiastic backers of Riyadh’s influence, even as a viciously intolerant religious ideology rivaled oil as Saudi Arabia’s chief export.

The U.S.-Saudi alliance’s anti-nationalist, anti-communist crusade produced a decidedly mixed record. Reasonably encouraging short-term gains gave way to disastrously terrifying results in the long run. Few officials could have predicted the partnership’s most grim and far-reaching consequences: the birth of al Qaeda, the spread of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, and the growth of a fanatical ideology that justified indiscriminate killing and mass murder. The U.S.-Saudi alliance, one of the world’s most enduring, complex, and less publicized partnerships, not only extended U.S. security and political cover to an oppressive, reactionary theocracy, but also nurtured that theocracy’s diffusion of malignant ideas and movements that continue to infect the world today.

Oil Diplomacy, Corporate Diplomacy

Before the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia evolved into the commercially sophisticated and oil-rich monarchy of today, its rickety fiefdom soared, collapsed, and reemerged through religious proselytizing and military conquest. That struggle for survival, rather than the desert kingdom’s seeming intolerance for modernity, drove its alliance with the West. In mid-18th-century Najd, the Arabian Peninsula’s central region, Islamic theologian Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab spearheaded a movement to expunge his religion of practices and innovations arising after Allah’s revelations to the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century.¹

Abd al-Wahhab made defiance to authority punishable by death, while preaching the virtues of social harmony. He denounced usury, saint worship, and inattention to prayer, while instructing how to properly shake hands, embrace, and laugh, among other social and personal behaviors. After a local village chieftain expelled Abd al-Wahhab for his radical teachings, he fled to al-Diriya, a town on the outskirts of modern Riyadh, where he came under the protection of local emir Muhammad Ibn Al-Saud, the forefather of the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud.² In 1744, with Abd al-Wahhab’s desire to spread his puritanical teachings and Al-Saud’s need to subdue Bedouin tribes, they formed a religious-political alliance and expanded their geographic dominion by the sword of jihad (struggle for the faith of Islam). Their spiritual-warrior followers called themselves Unitarians (muwahiddun), but outsiders called them Wahhabists.

Over the centuries, that alliance seized, lost, and recaptured vast stretches of the Arabian Peninsula under the Turkicized Islam of Ottoman rule. By the early 1920s, in a conquest that totaled 40,000 executions and 350,000 amputations, King Ibn Saud³ and his estimated 50,000-strong religious army (Ikhwan) took al-Hejaz, the Red Sea emirate holding Islam’s holiest cities of Mecca, toward which pious Muslims turn to pray, and Medina, burial site of the Prophet Muhammad. On September 23, 1932, after putting down revolts from his elite but unruly Ikhwan and consulting the region’s tribal sheikhs and theologians, King Ibn Saud unified the state, with Wahhabism as its legal and constitutional basis.

The newly formed kingdom’s messianic zeal failed to preclude its orientation toward the West. A key reason was that the West provided the capital-intensive tools and open markets necessary for Saudi Arabia to tap its oil wealth effectively. In May 1933, King Ibn Saud granted Standard Oil Company of California (Socal, later Chevron) an exclusive, 60-year concession to explore and extract his country’s petroleum in return for a percentage of profits.⁴ By 1938, the oil consortium later known as the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco)—comprised of Socal, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Standard Oil, later Exxon), Mobil, and Texaco—discovered vast petroleum deposits.

After 1941, when Saudi oil fields began pumping commercial quantities for export, the revenue eventually allowed Al Saud kings and crown princes, serving as top officials, provincial governors, and heads of ministerial agencies, to build their country into a centralized, administrative-bureaucratic state. The Saudis were zealous about protecting their national culture, even as they accepted foreign technology. For instance, the contract with Socal contained an “anti-imperial” clause, which prohibited company influence on Saudi policies.⁵ Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas W. Freeman Jr. clarifies how the Saudis barred Euro-American intrusions:

When Westerners finally gained access to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it was under contract as ‘hired help,’ not as conquerors. Americans and Europeans were able to enter the Kingdom only so long as they evinced respect for Saudi religious and social tradition and accepted that any attempt to propagate Western religious, ideological, or secular values would result in summary punishment and/or deportation.⁶

To appease those in society who resisted an oil industry run by infidel expatriates, and modern innovations like planes, automobiles, telegraphs, and radios, the king consulted a body of religious scholars (ulema), who adjudicated disputes, issued official religious-legal rulings (fatwas), and ensured the observance of Wahhabism.⁷

To contest rival sheikhs and emirs in the Gulf, King Ibn Saud needed foreign assistance. The British Empire, which had colonies in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the Indian subcontinent and protectorates over Iran, Iraq, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, helped Saudi Arabia seize al-Hejaz from the Hashemites, the future rulers of Iraq and Transjordan. But British imperial planners encroached on Ibn Saud’s sphere of influence in the southern Arabian Peninsula and catapulted the Hashemites to the forefront of Arab leadership. The king began to consider America as the foreign power with which to align for his country’s security.⁸ Recalls former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Parker T. Hart, one reason Ibn Saud gave for turning to America, “you are very far away!”⁹

By World War II, when Saudi territory provided the allies an air route for sending troops and supplies to the India-Burma Theater, oil company representatives and top U.S. officials urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to expand that nascent cooperation to safeguard U.S. petroleum interests. James A. Moffett, a friend of Roosevelt’s, a petroleum adviser to the White House, and acting in the interest of California-Arabian Standard Oil Company, advocated U.S. aid to Ibn Saud by stressing the king’s dwindling resources and the specter of Britain monopolizing postwar oil concessions. W. S. S. Rodgers, the chairman of Texaco, circulated a memorandum to the U.S. Secretaries of War, Navy, and Interior, emphasizing Washington’s long-term need for an abundant supply of petroleum.¹⁰ Harold Ickes, petroleum administrator for war and secretary of the interior, insisted that oil was too vital a commodity to leave in private hands.¹¹

In 1943, Roosevelt instructed Lend-Lease administrator and U.S. steel mogul Edward R. Stettinius Jr. to make the Saudi government eligible for wartime aid. Under Executive Order No. 8926, which laid the groundwork for a broader alliance and decades of U.S.-Middle East policy, Roosevelt’s directive read succinctly: “I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”¹²

On February 14, 1945, in one of history’s most iconic moments, President Roosevelt met King Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal. The countries date their “special relationship” to this personal meeting, but aside from discussing the question of Palestine, nobody knows if they talked about oil.¹³ Afterward, the U.S. and Saudi foreign policy establishments entered a formal military alliance, and Washington pledged to protect Riyadh from prospective enemies in order to secure the industrial world’s uninterrupted access to Saudi crude. State Department Near Eastern Affairs Division Chief Gordon Merriam called Saudi oil “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”¹⁴ That tacit oil-for-security partnership underpinned over half a century of sustained global economic growth. It also made U.S. energy and national security policies inextricably entwined.

More expansive policies with the kingdom began under Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry S. Truman. His newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) determined in October 1947 that denying “a major, hostile, expansionist power” control of the Persian Gulf was as essential as maintaining, “access to the oil of the Persian Gulf area.”¹⁵ Equating access to oil with control of it, officials rationalized sheltering Saudi Arabia under the U.S. security umbrella. At U.S.-taxpayer expense the previous year, officials had helped the Saudis complete an enormous military and commercial airfield in Dhahran on the kingdom’s eastern coast. The undersecretary of the navy believed that “the mere existence of an American military airfield at Dhahran would contribute to the preservation of the political integrity of Saudi Arabia and to the maintenance of our interest in the oil fields.”¹⁶

Dhahran airbase not only placed Saudi Arabia’s oil “in American hands,” but also enabled the United States to deploy, base, and operate on Saudi soil for other international projects. Dhahran shortened America’s route to the Pacific, as the only base under U.S. Army control between Libya and Pakistan. It also allowed refueling on long-haul air operations for the nuclear-armed, long-range bomber force, the Strategic Air Command. Saudi territory became a springboard for the projection of U.S. military power in and beyond the Persian Gulf. The Saudi connection improved America’s “world-wide strategic position,” wrote Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.¹⁷

With Saudi Arabia incorporated into America’s globe-girdling series of military outposts, top U.S. decisionmakers and leading thinkers steered America’s Middle East policy in a direction favorable to oil interests. Many political leaders, academics, and federal and state judges believed America’s largest corporations could not act independent of social considerations. Corporations acted as “arms of the state” and constituted forms of “private government.”¹⁸

The Petroleum Reserves Corporation, a U.S.-government entity tasked with acquiring petroleum outside the continental United States, provided the California-based engineering company Bechtel nearly $135 million to construct an oil pipeline for oil consortium Aramco known as the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline). From the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Medite...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• 1. COLD WAR TO HOLY WAR: THE U.S.-SAUDI ALLIANCE
• 2. FROM “GOLDEN CHAIN” TO ARAB SPRING: THE SORDID TALE OF U.S.-SAUDI RELATIONS
• NOTES