U.S.-Saudi Alliance Appears Strong

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 1, 2003; Page A20

When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, flew to Saudi Arabia in October, his hosts denied that the visit had anything to do with the looming war in Iraq. Use of Saudi territory to facilitate a U.S. attack on Iraq was out of the question, senior Saudi officials told reporters.

In retrospect, the Myers trip marked the start of five months of intensive military cooperation between Washington and Riyadh that played a crucial role in the U.S. victory over Saddam Hussein. According to sources close to the negotiations, Saudi Arabia ended up agreeing to virtually every request made by the Bush administration for military or logistical assistance.

In addition to allowing the United States to run the air war against Iraq out of a Saudi air base, the Saudi government provided U.S. Special Operations forces secret staging grounds into western Iraq and granted overflight rights to U.S. planes and missiles, officials said. Saudi Arabia also tapped into its vast oil reserves to help restore stability to the oil market at a time when prices had hit their highest levels in more than a decade, oil industry sources said.

Taking place against a background of enormous public unease in both countries over U.S.-Saudi relations, the cooperation over Iraq suggests that the controversial alliance between Washington and the Saudi royal family is stronger than often portrayed, and will survive the aftermath of the U.S. military ouster of the Iraqi government. While some adjustments are inevitable -- including a scaling-back of the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia -- the basic oil-for-security bargain struck between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdul Aziz in February 1945 remains intact.

On the public level, U.S.-Saudi relations have been seriously troubled since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. According to recent opinion polls, 97 percent of Saudis now view the United States in a negative light. Americans have been alarmed by the Saudi funding of extremist religious groups and the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers who took part in the 2001 attacks were Saudi citizens.

The evidence of the past few months, as well as conversations with U.S. and Saudi officials, suggests that both governments seek to cast the relationship in a light that fits their domestic needs and foreign policy goals. At the very time Saudi leaders were denouncing U.S. policies toward Iraq, for example, they made a strategic decision to facilitate a U.S. invasion. While U.S. officials talk about the virtues of democracy in the Middle East, they have shown little interest in free elections in Saudi Arabia, which would almost certainly be won by Islamic groups opposed to the United States.

The relationship could come crashing down if, as some commentators predict, Saudi Arabia is swept by political and economic turmoil. For the time being, however, official Washington is continuing to bet on the autocratic House of Saud as the best means of ensuring continued U.S. access to a quarter of the world's proven oil reserves.

With such exceptions as the governments of Britain and possibly Israel, few foreign governments enjoy the degree of diplomatic and personal access to the heart of the Bush administration as Saudi Arabia's.

During the run-up to the war, contacts between the two sides deepened, officials said. The generally smooth cooperation between Washington and Riyadh contrasted with the much more turbulent, and ultimately unsuccessful, negotiations with Turkey over the opening of a northern front against Iraq. The administration has pointed to Turkey as a democratic model for the rest of the Muslim world. In practice, however, the administration found it much easier to negotiate with an authoritarian government free of the constraints of public opinion.

Now that the war is over, both the U.S. and Saudi governments have signaled that they will soon begin talks about the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, and particularly the 4,500 U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at the Prince Sultan air base south of Riyadh. The aviators' principal mission -- enforcing the southern "no-fly" zone in Iraq -- ended with the toppling of the Hussein government.

The presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil has been one of the major grievances exploited by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in his diatribes against Washington. But even if the Air Force role is sharply reduced, officials say that other U.S. troops will remain.

The Saudi decision to cooperate with the United States over Iraq reflected a political calculation that the administration was determined to go ahead with the ouster of Hussein, no matter how much opposition it encountered.

The Saudis "bent over backwards not to get in the way of the U.S. military plans, while reassuring their own population that they weren't doing anything extra," said Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "From the point of view of political acrobatics, it was quite a skillful show."