Treatment of Saudi Arabia After 9/11

A working US-Saudi alliance was formed in 1944, and persisted thereafter for decades. For the American public, Saudi Arabia was an unfamiliar and exotic land, but in some vague way a friendly one, like something out of the recent movie "Hidalgo."

American public perception changed sharply as a result of a single day: September 11, 2001. Within days after the terrorist hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was learned that they had been carried out by al-Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, is a Saudi national. It was soon learned that 15 of the 19 hijackers were also Saudis (Calabreze 1). While al-Qaeda and bin Laden had become increasingly notorious for several years previously, the unprecedented enormity of the 9/11 raised American public consciousness to an entirely new level. Saudi Arabia came to be viewed by most Americans in a new and sinister light. Had the US government chosen to respond to the attacks by invading Saudi Arabia instead of Afghanistan, the measure would surely have drawn wide public support.

However, the official response with respect to Saudi Arabia has been strikingly unlike the response to the Taliban in Afghanistan, or later to Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which had no significant connection to al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attack. Within days of the terrorist strikes, while civil air traffic across the United States will still grounded, the government arranged a special airlift to return a number of Saudis to their

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udi civil war," on the level of ideology if not of military confrontation (Muqtedar 2). Indeed, the 9/11 terrorist attack, though directed at the United States, can be seen as an action in that civil war, since Bin Laden's primary objective is to cause the overthrow of the Saudi government. Over the years Islamists in Egypt, such as Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's right-hand man and mentor, had concluded that Egypt could not be transformed as long as it enjoyed US support. Bin Laden soon reached the same conclusion about Saudi Arabia (Muqtedar 2). In a real sense, therefore, the US finds itself in the crossfire of an internal Saudi conflict. Why has that come about, and what implications does it have for the future of Saudi-American relations? The Central Role of Oil: At the heart of the US-Saudi relationship lies oil. Even those observers and commentators who are most sympathetic to the Saudis, and most concerned with both the deterioration of the relationship and the shift in American public perceptions of Saudi Arabia, make no effort to conceal the central importance of oil. According to estimates made by the US Department of Energy, in order for the world economy to grow at a steady rate over the next two decade

Category: Government - T