SAUDI SHAM: W'S DILEMMA
by Ali Al-Ahmed and ALI AL-AHMED
New York Post
April 26, 2005

April 26, 2005 -- THE visit yesterday of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to President Bush's Crawford Ranch highlights a problem for Bush's signature Mideast policy.

In his State of the Union Address, the president reiterated his goal of fighting global terrorism by spreading democracy in the Middle East. Coming fresh on the heels of the Iraqi election, the speech received the ringing endorsement of ordinary Iraqis.

By risking death in order to cast their votes, Arabs as well as Kurds, Sunnis as well as Shiites, demonstrated to a skeptical world that a Middle East democratization project will in fact enjoy widespread support — on the condition, that is, that the project is actually credible in the eyes of the common people.

Washington must pay close attention to the conditional nature of this support. The Iraqi elections and President Bush's speech were inspiring events, but the fact is that the vast majority of Arabs remain skeptical of Washington's intentions.

For half a century, Washington has spouted the rhetoric of democracy — even as, in the name of regional stability, it supported some of the most heinous dictators on the planet. (To his credit, Bush has admitted as much in other speeches.)

So, across the Arab world, many people do not really believe that the United States will follow through consistently on its lofty rhetoric. Iraq is inspiring, they say, but the Americans are hypocrites — promoting democracy only when it serves their economic interests.

U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia is the greatest argument in the arsenal of those Middle Easterners who claim that George Bush is not sincere.

The president said in his State of the Union speech that he intends to address the conditions in the Middle East that foster terrorism. He need look no further than Saudi society, which is the single greatest supplier of global terrorists. While its religious classes produce the fatwas that justify hatred of Christians, Jews and Shiites, its arm-chair jihadis channel rivers of petrodollars into the global holy war.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a Jordanian by birth, but his love of beheading is a taste he acquired from his Saudi teachers who had started the practice in the streets of Saudi Arabia after every Friday prayer for decades. And the bombs that he places outside Shiite mosques, killing women and children, are the direct result of the official Saudi school curriculum, which fills impressionable children with hatred and fear of Shiites.

This week the Saudis completed partial elections for municipal councils, with half the seats allocated according to a direct ballot. I'm sure the Saudis' American friends (thanks to their largesse, they have many such friends) will hail the elections as a great stride forward.

As someone exiled from Saudi Arabia because I support democracy, I know with certainty that these elections are a shabby exercise in smoke and mirrors.

You see, the Interior Ministry will say who fills the other half (actually, just over 50 percent) of the new council seats. And every Saudi knows that the Interior Ministry also controls the secret police. You can rest assured, therefore, that the politicians holding the remaining half of the seats will be scared to death every time they hear a bump in the night.

In a democracy, Winston Churchill once quipped, when people hear a knock on the door at five in the morning, they know it is the milkman and not the police.

Women, who make up 51 percent of the population, are excluded completely from the Saudi elections. And though the U.N. Electoral Assistance Office gave the Saudis high marks for technical proficiency, the Saudis claim they lacked the ability to include women in the electoral process — because women don't possess ID cards. Yet in Afghanistan — a poor nation, conspicuously lacking billions in oil revenues — 40 percent of the voters were women. So Riyadh is claiming to be less technically proficient than Kabul?

We Middle Easterners understand political realities. We understand that at times naked interests and difficult circumstances force people to compromise on their principles. But Western silence on the status of women in Saudi Arabia is, frankly, inexcusable. It flies in the face of the most basic of democratic principles. This silence leads me and many other Middle Easterners to question the validity of democratic nations' true commitment to their own values.

The Saudi government plays on a misplaced spirit of multiculturalism in the West. We have our indigenous cultural traditions, which you must respect, the Saudis say. Despite these traditions, nine Saudi women, from different parts of the country, showed extraordinary courage by publicly expressing their desire to run for these elections. The government barred them. The nine, I suppose, didn't have ID cards.

Thousands of intellectuals and professional men and women have signed numerous reform petitions calling for full participation of women. The main organizers of these petitions, however, have been languishing in prison since March of last year. The kangaroo court, I suppose, is one of Saudi Arabia's most treasured indigenous traditions.

The Saudi partial elections provide a historical opportunity for the United States and Europe to prove that core Western values trump economic expediency. The Saudi government and Kuwait are the only two governments in the world that bar women from voting and participating in political life. Instead of hailing the Saudi electoral sham as a great stride forward, Westerners must stand up and say they are no longer going to allow medieval Wahhabi clerics to dictate the political agenda in Saudi Arabia.

Every Middle Easterner knows that the United States has vital economic interests in Saudi Arabia. None of us expect Washington to completely turn its back on Riyadh. We do expect, however, to hear something other than a deafening silence when the greatest supporters of Islamic radicalism try to sell the West a bill of goods.

President Bush's democratization strategy will find few partners in the region as long as American credibility is in doubt.

Ali Al-Ahmed is the director of the Saudi Institute, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes democracy (and fights terrorism) in Saudi Arabia and is a member of Benador Associates.

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