Inside the Kingdom (42 page)

Bandar was unapologetic.

“There’s nothing more bonding than going to war together,” he said nostalgically of his Desert Storm days with Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and Cheney. “I did have a very special relationship with President Bush.”

Bandar had medical problems. Two of his vertebrae had been crushed in a crash landing in his fighter days, resulting in nerve damage that nearly lost him the use of his right leg. He had to walk with a stick for a time. And in contrast to his ebullient exterior, the prince also suffered, Churchill style, from bouts of “black dog” depression that kept him away from Washington for months at a time. In the late 1990s the ambassador became known as “the invisible dean” for his failure to attend the functions that went with his diplomatic duties. He even failed to appear at his own embassy for Saudi National Day.

So through the crucial, final years of the twentieth century, when, we now know, Saudi Arabia’s terrorist mastermind was building up the infrastructure to launch his spectacular twenty-first-century attacks on America, the principal channel in U.S.-Saudi communications was out of action—or, to say the least, operating only intermittently.

This tale of failed potential should have ended with the success of George H. W. Bush’s son George W. in the election of November 2000. “Talk about a replay!” declared the delighted Bandar as he sat down again with David Ottaway to tick off the names of old friends returning from previous administrations—as vice president, Dick Cheney; secretary of state, Colin Powell; national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and even Paul Wolfowitz, whose Defense Department efforts in the Gulf War had made him, in the prince’s opinion, “more pro-Saudi than us.” After eight blank and largely wasted years, it was back to business as usual for “Bandar Bush.” Yet even as he celebrated, the ambassador had a nagging sense that it was all “too good to be true.”

In the autumn of 1945, a few months after he came into office, President Harry Truman held a meeting in Washington with William Eddy, the U.S. chief of mission in Saudi Arabia, and with other U.S. diplomats to the major Arab countries. There had been widespread anger in the Arab world at the favor that America was showing toward the Zionist effort to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the diplomats had been assembled to explain the reasons for Arab opposition.

But nothing he heard appeared to change Truman’s mind.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” said the president, summing up his position with the utmost candor, “but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Truman was not quite correct. The U.S. Census of 1940 showed 107,420 individuals classified “white” who gave their “mother tongue” as Arabic, and census analysts reckon the real count of Arab-Americans at three times that. But the president’s political point remained. By the 1940s the Jews were organized politically in America in a way that the Arabs never were, and, to date, have never chosen to be. Today there are some 3.5 million Arab-Americans (a good number of them Christian), and their political clout does not begin to match that of the 6.4 million U.S. Jews. Following the hard-fought creation of Israel in 1948, every successive crisis in the Middle East would increase pro-Israeli feeling inside America—and then came the emergence of so-called Christian Zionism in the 1980s. Popular evangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preached that the return of Jews to the Holy Land had happened in accordance with biblical prophecy—“to stand against Israel is to stand against God,” proclaimed Falwell in 1981.

These Christian Zionist teachings were the foreign policy equivalent of “right to life”—a litmus-test issue by which American evangelicals made their decisions in the voting booth—and the support of Falwell and other Christian fundamentalists proved crucial to George W. Bush’s disputed election as president in 2000. Bush the Younger never endorsed Christian Zionism in so many words, but, as he came into office in 2001, the born-again Christian acted as if he believed it. One of his earliest and most warmly welcomed guests in the White House was Ariel Sharon, the hard-line Israeli prime minister notorious for turning a blind eye to the massacre of Palestinians when he was a general during the 1982 war in Lebanon. It was Sharon’s aggressive visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in September 2000 that had largely provoked the new, bitterly violent Palestinian intifada, and the Bush administration appeared to endorse Sharon’s shoot-from-the-hip style. Asked about Israeli attempts to assassinate Palestinian leaders, Vice President Cheney said he saw “some justification in their trying to protect themselves by preempting.”

Such unconcealed favoritism was not what the Saudis expected of any U.S. administration—and certainly not from the son of the man who had come to their rescue in the Gulf War. In London, the Kingdom’s acerbic ambassador Ghazi Algosaibi wrote a column in the newspaper
Al-Hayat
speculating on the psychological complexes that “Little George” was evidently feeling toward “Big George.” These hang-ups had made the new president a menace to the whole world in record time, wrote the ambassador in comments that made it to the top of Fox News: “Little George” deserved a special medal—“the Prize for Turning Friends into Enemies Without Effort.”

The blunt speaking of Algosaibi had been disavowed in the past by his more diplomatic superiors, but not on this occasion.

“I did not make him a writer, I found him a writer,” Abdullah responded to the White House when it lodged a formal, high-level protest at the ambassador’s comments.

The crown prince was losing his patience with America.

The image on the TV screen was painful. An Israeli soldier was placing his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman, pinning her down to the ground. When he saw it on the night of August 23, 2001, Crown Prince Abdullah went ballistic.

“A woman being beaten by a man?” recalls one senior Saudi official. “He just felt this was the ultimate insult.”

Abdullah was sitting in the elegant, dark-paneled study of his home beside the Red Sea in Jeddah. On the walls were pictures of his father, some Koranic inscriptions, and a selection of the Orientalist paintings that he loved. Unusually for a Saudi palace, there was not a trace of gold, nor a chandelier in sight.

The crown prince’s rage boiled over.

“Is the blood of an Israeli child more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian child?” he asked.

Like his subjects, Abdullah had been watching the cable news channels’ coverage of the Palestinian intifada, and he was dismayed at the round-the-clock images of tanks, tears, and suffering. Some people called it the “Al-Jazeera” or “CNN” effect, but it could also have been called the CPA (Crown Prince Abdullah) effect. The new American president had expressed the hope that the Saudi leader would come to visit him soon, but Abdullah refused to consider the idea. He was personally indignant, and he had little doubt what ordinary Saudis would think of him if he went.

Bush invited the crown prince to the White House, to Camp David, to the Kentucky Derby, and, the ultimate honor, to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, but Abdullah rebuffed every offer. In desperation, Washington suggested the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York—a flattering reference to the 1945 meeting between FDR and Abdullah’s father that had established the famed “special” relationship. Abdullah was unimpressed. He even declined to be shifted when George W.’s father put in a personal phone call to reassure him that his son’s “heart was in the right place.”

The crown prince had been stoking his anger since the spring.

“Don’t they see,” he had asked in a visit to Morocco that June, “what is happening to Palestinian children, women, and the elderly?”

Now his message was complete, and the time had come to deliver it. “I reject people who say that when you kill a Palestinian, it is defense; when a Palestinian kills an Israeli, it’s a terrorist act.”

The crown prince picked up the phone and asked to be put through to his ambassador in the United States.

As it happened, Bandar bin Sultan had been away from the phone that warm August night—he was taking a break at his home in Aspen—and by the time he got the message it was too late for him to call Riyadh. When uncle and nephew spoke the next day, George W. was on television, handling questions on the Middle East at a news conference. The two Saudi princes, one in Riyadh, one in Colorado, watched the president speaking in Texas—and Abdullah grew angrier than ever at the American’s total acceptance of the Israeli point of view.

“If the Palestinians are interested in a dialogue,” said the president in the apparently reasonable tone he reserved for his most provocative statements, “then I strongly urge Mr. Arafat to put 100 percent effort into solving the terrorist activity, stopping the terrorist activity. And I believe he can do a better job of doing that.”

The disdainful use of “terrorist activity” to describe the battle that Arabs saw as a fight for justice caused Abdullah to explode for the second time in twenty-four hours. He characterized this phrase in the same way as he did “Israel’s right to defend itself ”—as a disingenuous simplification.

Bandar must get to see Bush at once, instructed the crown prince, and within hours the ambassador had managed to get a message to Colin Powell, the secretary of state, and to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

“We believe,” went the message, “there has been a strategic decision by the United States that its national interest in the Middle East is 100 percent based on [Israeli prime minister] Sharon.”

If this was America’s decision, it was her sovereign right to make it. But it was Saudi Arabia’s sovereign right, declared the crown prince, to pursue her own course in response to that.

“Starting from today, you’re Uruguay, as they say.” This particular phrase was contributed by Bandar, deriving from his version of a knock-knock joke that ended with the punchline, “You go Uruguay, and I’ll go mine.” He had taken notes while Abdullah spoke to him on the phone, then amplified his uncle’s thoughts, as he used to do with Fahd’s, to craft a message that would, in his opinion, press the particular buttons of his listeners.

“A government that doesn’t keep its finger on the pulse of what its people are feeling will not survive,” continued the message, which ran, in the end, to twenty-five pages of Bandar’s notes. “Look at what happened to the Shah. Sometimes we come to a crossroads; we have to make choices, and we are not afraid to make the strategic shift that our own interests dictate.”

It was a firm and extensive warning, and to emphasize the point, Abdullah picked up the phone again. He ordered General Salih bin Ali Al-Muhayya, the Saudi chief of staff, who had arrived in Washington the previous day for the annual review of Saudi-U.S. military collaboration, to return to Riyadh immediately. The general was instructed not to meet with any Americans. A delegation of some forty senior Saudi officers who were flying to join Muhayya were ordered off their plane. The annual review was canceled.