Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia
by Thomas W. Lippman
Westview. 390 pp. $27.50
For Americans, one of the most jarring revelations about the attacks of 9/11 was the fact that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis—citizens, that is, of a supposed ally. Polls now show that over 70 percent of the public view Saudi Arabia as untrustworthy, with no small number considering the country an outright adversary. In Washington, politicians once eager for invitations to the Saudi embassy now dodge Prince Bandar, the kingdom’s envoy, while energy experts contemplate alternatives to Saudi oil.
In Inside the Mirage, Thomas Lippman tries to put this increasingly tense relationship in historical perspective. A longtime Middle East bureau chief for the Washington Post, Lippman traces American involvement in Saudi Arabia back to its roots almost a century go. Though the war on terror is not his subject—and barely registers in his account—he makes clear that, long before the unhappy events of 9/11, all was far from well in our dealings with the House of Saud.
As Lippman explains, U.S.-Saudi relations emerged largely by chance. In 1911, ten soldiers loyal to Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the ruling dynasty, were wounded in battle and ended up being treated by American missionary doctors. Ibn Saud never forgot the “infidel” foreigners who gave their help and “asked nothing in return.” A decade later, impressed by American technology, he gave the kingdom’s oil concession to Standard Oil of California; it began operating before World War II, joining with other oil companies after the war to form Aramco.
Over the next twenty years, thousands of American oil workers and their families arrived in Saudi Arabia. For the pioneers among them, life in the brutally hot desert was tough. Vehicles broke down in the sand, potable water had to be hauled in on donkey carts. As for cultural interaction, Americans were prohibited from dealing with Saudi women and also, to an extent, with Saudi men, out of fear on Ibn Saud’s part that the sharing of technical information might lead to the spread of subversive political ideas.
By the 1960’s, U.S. know-how had helped the Saudis turn Bedouin villages into Western-style towns. Aramco employees themselves lived in Levittown-like enclaves, in houses equipped with all the modern conveniences. As the wife of an American geologist told Lippman, she and her family enjoyed dinners of “wonderful filet mignon, butter beans, [and] Irish potatoes”—and “the king pick[ed] up the grocery bill.” But Americans chafed at the restrictions placed on them by the ultraconservative religious establishment. For women confined to Western compounds and for Christians forced to conduct their religious services in secret, the material comforts of Saudi life were small compensation.
The American companies, foundations, and government officials active in the kingdom hoped that, with time and assistance, Saudi society could be transformed, brought into the modern world. Drawing on Aramco archives, Lippman describes the efforts of executives to find a core of young Saudis who might be trained in American work habits, “stuffed at breakneck speed with information, technology.” At the same time, the State Department and the Ford Foundation were busy instructing the royal family on how to set up formal government ministries—a radical break for a regime whose early kings kept the national treasury in trunks under their beds (a habit the Taliban would share with them).
This idealism faded quickly, however, during the oil boom of the 1970’s and the subsequent collapse of the Saudi economy in the 1980’s and 90’s. Most American companies, Lippman shows, were unable to replace foreign workers with Saudis because few Saudis took the initiative to improve their own skills. As for the royal family, it refused to create a modern educational system, and skewed the nation’s economy to hinder entrepreneurs. Religious leaders even resisted American efforts to rid Saudi cities of malarial mosquitoes because the spraying would challenge “the inscrutable ways of Allah [as] manifested through the lowly fly.”
American officials soon resigned themselves to the kingdom’s backwardness and brutality. Lippman describes the case of Scott J. Nelson, a safety engineer at Bechtel, who in 1984 discovered fire hazards in a Saudi hospital. For this embarrassing revelation, the Saudi government locked Nelson up without a trial; in jail, he was beaten with bamboo canes and forced to live in his own filth—outrages greeted with silence by the U.S. embassy (though Congress pressed for his release). Nor did American diplomats protest when Saudi officials handed them copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or demanded that the U.S. not station Jews at its air base in Dhahran. Most fatefully in hind-sight, Washington said little as the royal family tried to pacify its Islamist critics by funding “charities” meant to spread Wahhabism and terror to the far corners of the Muslim world.
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Lippman is a skilled writer and reporter, and deftly captures the stark lives of the Americans who first ventured into this forbidding kingdom. His account is packed with details—stories culled from extensive interviews, records unearthed from obscure archives. Unfortunately, he too often fails to organize these reams of material to good effect, leaving readers to search on their own for larger themes.
What Inside the Mirage makes abundantly clear is that, from the start, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has been conducted on terms dictated by the Saudis. No matter how “liberal” its leader, the House of Saud, linked inextricably to the Wahhabist religious establishment, has never given serious consideration to reform. Behind the rhetoric of mutual friendship—and the dependence of the West on imported oil—the Saudis have felt free to cultivate a deep cultural and religious antipathy to their American patron.
Even cooperation during the first Gulf war, held up by many Saudi experts in the U.S. as a shining example of the “special relationship” between Riyadh and Washington, was in large part an illusion: Lippman shows how many members of the royal family resisted the use of Saudi territory by U.S. troops. After the war, moreover, when many American Arabists predicted we would see an opening in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh went back to business as usual, accommodating Islamic radicalism at home and promoting it abroad.
Though Lippman plainly knows and likes the people of Saudi Arabia, he offers no thoughts about why they have tolerated tyranny for so long. After all, other backward societies have remade themselves over the past half-century. In the 1950’s, Singapore was a malarial swamp with high infant-mortality rates and a tiny educated elite. Even some of the Saudi kingdom’s oil-rich Arab neighbors, like Dubai, have embraced economic modernization.
Still less explicably, Lippman gives scant attention to the rise of al Qaeda and the growth of the Saudi underclass—developments that have made plain the danger of our longstanding indifference to the trajectory of Saudi society. Lippman simply does not seem to recognize how profoundly the U.S.-Saudi relationship has changed in the wake of 9/11. Indeed, at this critical moment in America’s Middle East enterprise—a moment when the House of Saud is $200 billion in debt, when young Saudis are streaming into Iraq to fight coalition forces, and when Wahhabi clerics accuse the U.S. of conspiring with the Shia to destroy the Sunni world—he would seem to be guilty of believing in the mirage that his own book so ably dispels.
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