Saudis and Americans: Friends in Need (Page 3)

The Saudis also discreetly work Washington with the help of a few trusted "gatekeeper" organizations, a term used by Gwenn Okruhlik of the University of Arkansas in a 1997 article in Middle East Report. Among the key gatekeepers--DC think tanks, consultants and nonprofit foundations that the Saudis rely on as intermediaries--is the National Council on US-Arab Relations. NCUSAR puts out a variety of publications and sends Congressional delegations, military officials and academics to Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East. The council did not respond to requests for information about its funding, but its website describes NCUSAR's supporters as "primarily individuals and institutions in the United States and the Arab world." The council also sponsors a Corporate Cooperation Committee, which seeks to "inform American leaders and the public...about the shared interests and common concerns" of the United States and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The group is chaired by Boeing, and the vice chairs are Lockheed Martin and Parsons Corporation, the latter a construction and engineering firm for the oil and gas industries.

When the Saudis need help on a particular matter in Washington, the kingdom's US allies normally man the frontlines. Following the Gulf War, arms makers established an ad hoc organization called the Middle East Working Group to lobby for weapons deals to the Saudis. It retained as consultants a number of national security veterans including Dov Zakheim, a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense under Reagan and the new Pentagon comptroller; Sandra Charles, who served on the National Security Council as director of Middle East affairs during the Bush Sr. years; and retired Lieut. Gen. Howard Fish, who once headed the Pentagon agency that handles foreign weapons sales.

Business support for the Saudis has extended into other areas as well. In 1998 corporations, mustered in a vehicle called USA*ENGAGE, mobilized to gut a bill that would have imposed sanctions on countries that persecute religious minorities. The bill was ultimately passed, but only after a preamble was struck that had called for an immediate investigation of Saudi Arabia and several other countries that were deemed guilty of widespread religious persecution. The bill also gave the President the right to waive sanctions if he determined that it was in the national interest. "Earlier versions of the bill were more extreme and lacked the loopholes that were included in the new version to minimize diplomatic tensions," said a relieved account in The Oil Daily.

Another impressive display of Saudi influence came in 1996, after Congress acted to assist two US citizens, Scott Nelson and James Smrkovski, who had been unable to recover damages from the kingdom after being tortured there. Despite strong opposition from the White House and weapons makers, both the House and the Senate passed measures that would have allowed an exemption to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which prohibits most lawsuits in US courts against foreign governments in cases where those governments commit acts of state violence against US citizens. Leonard Garment, a former aide to Richard Nixon and the chief lawyer for Nelson and Smrkovski, says that with the bill headed for a House-Senate conference, the legal team "drank a bottle of cheap champagne to celebrate." The commemoration turned out to be premature. "At 3 am, the measure was stripped from the bill," Garment recalls. "The State Department told [conference negotiators] that Clinton would veto the whole thing if it wasn't taken out." The White House did later sign a bill modifying the FSIA, but it only allows citizens to sue foreign states placed on the State Department's annual list of countries that support terrorism--a highly unlikely step in the case of Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh's PR problems in the wake of September 11 will probably mean at least a temporary intensification of Saudi-bashing in Washington. A few critics even say that Saudi Arabia's strategic importance is highly overblown. Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, estimates that the United States imports $11 billion a year in oil from the Persian Gulf but spends at least $40 billion annually to defend the region. "It's nice to have a friendly regime in Saudi Arabia, but it's not essential to our security and well-being," he says. "They have only one product, so they're not going to pull it off the market. And if they do, there are other places to buy it."

Still, that's unlikely to become a majority view in Washington anytime soon. The kingdom has too many American friends to allow any sustained political attack on the Washington-Riyadh alliance.

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