Robert W. Jordan

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-ganji_23edi.178b093c.html

06:36 PM CDT on Monday, June 22, 2009

Despite attempts to shield the increasing brutality through an international media blackout, the world is witnessing the Iranian people heroically and courageously defying the authority and ruthlessness of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic system.

Iranians are expanding their nonviolent demonstrations and expressing legitimate demands for freedom and human rights, despite violent and indiscriminate suppression attempts by the mullah regime’s Basij militia and thugs.

The decision of Khamenei to personally address the protests at Friday’s prayer event and to violently attempt to quell the latest demonstrations speaks volumes about the seriousness of the threat of the civil disobedience.

The overwhelming majority of Iranians do not support the mullah regime, and they realize the government has retained power through the use of sheer brute force. Iranians have long been aware that their elections are a sham to serve a two-fold purpose of legitimatizing the Islamic Republic system and showcasing a make-believe democracy for the outside world.

As the world is witnessing, there is a tech-savvy, vibrant Iranian freedom movement challenging the mullahs that predates the recent presidential election. This is much more than a spontaneous uprising. Since the contested June 12 election, the mullah leadership is ever more divided and the foundation of the system is severely fractured. The continuation of the current state of affairs has broadened the internal rift within its various political elites.

The Iranian people are aware that Mir Hossein Mousavi has been part of the Islamic Republic power structure and thus is not a viable long-term leader of the reform movement. However, they also realize that Mousavi is a useful figure to temporarily rally around because the leadership initially was hesitant to try to crush the massive protests perceived to be organized by one of their own handpicked presidential candidates and former prime minister.

Going forward, the genuine leadership of Iran will emerge from the figurative brothers and sisters of Neda, the heroic young lady who appears to have been brutally murdered by the regime’s thugs Saturday.

Meanwhile, at the opportune time, the freedom movement will bring increasingly massive numbers of Iranians into the streets in a sustained fashion to overwhelm the security forces. Some of these forces may well refuse to suppress the demonstrators. The scale of the protests also will expand to include strikes in the bazaar, petroleum and mass transit sectors, and further challenge the theocratic system.

An obvious next objective could be the open call for regime change to create a free and secular government and perhaps a United Nations-monitored referendum on the Islamic Republic system.

Today Iran is at a historical juncture, the outcome of which will have significant long-term effects on the Persian Gulf and beyond. Success for this freedom movement would certainly become a powerful stabilizing force.

The unpleasant alternative would likely be more lost decades of totalitarian rule, human rights abuses, regional threats and the continued export of international terrorism, potentially abetted with nuclear weapons.

It is vital for the international community and all freedom-loving people to support the home-grown movement in Iran through means that do not undermine its independence.

The ruling mullahs must understand that they will ultimately be held accountable for their brutal attempts to forcibly destroy the nonviolent civil disobedience and the aspirations of the Iranian people to be governed by a free and just system.

Darab Ganji is a political economist and guest lecturer at SMU’s John Tower Center for Political Studies; he is a board member of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations and lived in Iran for 14 years before the 1979 revolution. Robert Jordan was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia (2001-03), is Diplomat in Residence and an adjunct professor at SMU’s John Tower Center for Political Studies and is a senior partner at Baker Botts LLP.

Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, announced that he would install Charles W. Freeman Jr. in a top intelligence post, the decision surprised some in the White House who worried that the selection could be controversial and an unnecessary distraction, according to administration officials.

Just how controversial the choice would be became clear on Tuesday, when Mr. Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush, angrily withdrew his name from consideration and charged that he had been the victim of a concerted campaign by what he called “the Israel lobby.”

Mr. Freeman had long been critical of Israel, with a bluntness that American officials rarely voice in public about a staunch American ally. In 2006, he warned that, “left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them and enrage those who are not.”

He did not soften his tone even on Wednesday, saying in an interview that “Israel is driving itself toward a cliff, and it is irresponsible not to question Israeli policy and to decide what is best for the American people.”

The critics who led the effort to derail Mr. Freeman argued that such views reflected a bias that could not be tolerated in someone who, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, would have overseen the production of what are supposed to be policy-neutral intelligence assessments destined for the president’s desk.

Some of Mr. Freeman’s defenders say his views on Israel are extreme only when seen through the lens of American political life, and they asked whether it was possible to question American support for Israel without being either muzzled or marginalized.

“The reality of Washington is that our political landscape finds it difficult to assimilate any criticism of any segment of the Israeli leadership,” said Robert W. Jordan, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2001 to 2003.

The lobbying campaign against Mr. Freeman included telephone calls to the White House from prominent lawmakers, including Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat. It appears to have been kicked off three weeks ago in a blog post by Steven J. Rosen, a former top official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group.

On the Middle East, Mr. Rosen wrote, Mr. Freeman’s views are “what you would expect in the Saudi Foreign Ministry,” rather than from someone who would become essentially the government’s top intelligence analyst.

Because President Obama himself has been viewed with suspicion among many pro-Israel groups, the attacks on Mr. Freeman had the potential to touch a nerve. Many of these groups applauded Mr. Obama’s appointments of Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Dennis B. Ross as a special adviser for Iran and Persian Gulf issues, but remain suspicious of other members of his administration who will be dealing with Arab-Israeli matters.

After complaints from some pro-Israel groups during his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama distanced himself from Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, who has sometimes been critical of Israel.

Five days after Mr. Rosen’s blog item appeared, Senator Schumer telephoned Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, to ensure that the White House was aware of Mr. Freeman’s past comments about Israel. According to Senator Schumer, his staff then sent the White House copies of the statements.

Mr. Schumer said that Mr. Freeman showed an “irrational hatred of Israel” and that his statements were “over the top.”

Mr. Freeman said that nobody in the White House ever pressured him to withdraw. He said that he and Mr. Blair had agreed on Tuesday afternoon that he should step aside to avoid any perception of taint to the intelligence assessments he would have overseen at the National Intelligence Council. Hours earlier, Mr. Blair defended Mr. Freeman for his strong views and quick mind, and said he hoped he would challenge an intelligence community that for years had been criticized for groupthink.

In the days after Senator Schumer’s first phone call, other lawmakers and pro-Israel groups began applying pressure on the White House. Representative Steve Israel, a New York Democrat, also called Mr. Emanuel about the pick, and pushed Mr. Blair’s inspector general to examine possible conflicts of interest surrounding Mr. Freeman’s relationships with the Chinese and Saudi governments.

“I was prepared to present my case to anyone at the White House who would listen to it,” Representative Israel said.

Pro-Israel groups weighed in with lower-ranking White House officials. The Zionist Organization of America sent out an “action alert” urging members to ask Congress for an investigation of Mr. Freeman’s “past and current activities on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

With opposition to Mr. Freeman mounting, many in the White House were debating the wisdom of the selection, despite Mr. Blair’s public support for him. “In conversations with people associated with this administration, I never detected any enthusiasm for this pick,” said Ira N. Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, declined to comment on Wednesday.

Before his ambassadorship, Mr. Freeman held a variety of State Department posts. Since leaving government, he has worked with nonprofit groups and on the board of the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a past position that his critics said could be a conflict of interest in his new job.

As head of the Middle East Policy Council, he was a frequent critic of policy toward Israel. In a speech in 2005 he said that “as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.”

Critics also unearthed e-mail messages attributed to Mr. Freeman that seemed to support the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, saying it was not “acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be.”

Mr. Freeman said Wednesday that the passage was taken out of context, and that he had been describing the dominant view in China in the years after the crackdown.

Mr. Freeman, who severed his financial and professional ties to several organizations to re-enter government, said he had yet to decide what was next for him.

“I’m in a position to redefine my life and to press the reset button, and you don’t get that very often,” he said.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B06EED7113FF934A15753C1A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3

Chart: ”Little to Spare”
As the United States’ need for oil continues to increase, it has looked to Saudi Arabia and some of the world’s other big oil producers to step up production. But spare capacity has dropped significantly.

Top crude oil producers
Millions of barrels a day, ‘05, first six months’ average

Saudi Arabia — 9.5
Russia — 8.9
United States — 5.5
Iran — 4.1
China — 3.6

Mexico — 3.4
Norway — 2.7
Venezuela — 2.6
Nigeria — 2.6
United Arab Emirates — 2.5

Kuwait — 2.5
Canada — 2.4
Iraq — 1.9
Algeria — 1.8
Britain — 1.7

Graph tracks World excess oil production capacity, annual averages since 1994.

(Source by Energy Information Administration)(pg. C6)

Last spring, the White House publicly embraced plans by Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production capacity significantly. But privately, some officials and others advising the government are skeptical about some of those Saudi forecasts.

The United States relies on a few producers to maintain enough spare capacity to keep prices and markets stable, even during war or disaster. As oil prices have climbed over the last few years amid surging demand and tight supplies, the Bush administration has looked to the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, to pump extra oil.

But doubts about Saudi Arabia’s assurances of how much it can expand capacity — and for how long — have been raised in a secret intelligence report and in a separate analysis by a leading government oil adviser, according to a federal government official and the oil expert.

If those skeptical assessments are correct, the administration’s hopes of increasing supplies would become still more difficult to fulfill. Washington’s expectations about oil production from Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have proved overly optimistic, and the White House has failed to heed advice about both those countries from industry and government specialists, according to documents and interviews.

The challenges facing the Bush administration on energy come as oil companies are set to report record profits resulting from soaring prices for oil and natural gas. Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest private oil company, is expected Thursday to announce a quarterly profit exceeding $8.5 billion, more than companies like Intel and Time Warner earn in a full year.

Asked about the profits on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, said ”the government and the private sector have a role to play” in restoring the vital infrastructure damaged by the hurricanes this year along the Gulf of Mexico and over Florida. Gasoline prices spiked after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, straining oil markets already tight because of the uncommonly low levels of spare capacity.

But when it comes to oil supply, American companies are limited: the countries that control most of the world’s oil keep out private producers. So whatever the political repercussions from high energy costs, the administration has had little choice but to rely on the promises by Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter, that it would continue to be the market’s linchpin.

”There’s always been this tenet on the American side,” said Nawaf Obaid, a consultant to Saudi Arabia on energy security, ”that the Saudis knew what they were doing and rightfully so.”

But a senior intelligence official, who insisted on remaining anonymous because he was not permitted to speak publicly on the issue, said that the Saudi plans to increase production by nearly 14 percent in the next four years were not enough to meet global demand. Even the Energy Information Administration recently scaled back its expectations of how much more oil the Saudis could pump in 20 years.

To be sure, as Mr. McClellan said Wednesday, there is more to President Bush’s energy policy than seeking to ensure surplus capacity. The administration has called for increasing domestic production and refineries, development of alternative and renewable fuels, expanding nuclear energy and, recently, greater conservation. Still, the Persian Gulf countries are seen as crucial in moderating future prices.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, when high gasoline prices were an issue, Mr. Bush pledged to do a better job of influencing Persian Gulf producers to pump more oil.

Early on, the administration was mostly interested in whether the Saudis would produce more oil during the anticipated conflict in Iraq. Long before the war began, Saudi spare capacity — roughly three million barrels a day above the seven million barrels being pumped daily in 2002 — seemed adequate.

Productive capacity depends on the amount of oil in the ground as well as the infrastructure required to drill, process, store and transport the oil. In addition, increasing capacity is very costly and time-consuming.

”The long-term capacity was not considered a problem,” said Robert W. Jordan, the American ambassador to Riyadh from 2001 to 2003. The Saudis, he added, ”never expressed any concern about the need to expand.”

”Nor did we, or at least me, engage them on this topic,” he said.

In April 2002, when President Bush met Crown Prince Abdullah, now the Saudi king, the focus was not on oil but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, according to Mr. Jordan. The United States did not press the capacity issue because, even two years later, Saudi officials were publicly expressing confidence that there was no need over the next five years to add capacity.

Going to 12 million or 15 million barrels a day was possible, though, because the country had an estimated 150 billion barrels above the 260 billion in proven reserves, Nansen G. Saleri, a senior Saudi oil executive, said at an oil conference in Washington in February 2004.

Soon, though, rising demand from Asia made the need to invest in new production ”a front-burner issue,” according to Spencer Abraham, energy secretary in the president’s first term. By May 2004, under pressure from the United States and other consumers, the Saudis promised to pump more oil. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, was planning to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009.

Before long, Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, and Saudi oil executives were saying that the country could add 200 billion barrels — from existing fields and yet-to-be-discovered resources — to its reserves, enabling production of 15 million barrels a day for 50 years or perhaps longer.

Just before meeting with Prince Abdullah in April, President Bush said he wanted ”a straight answer” about how much extra oil the Saudis could pump.

At that session in Texas, the prince reaffirmed the previously announced expansion plans. Saudi Arabia’s capacity now stands at about 11 million barrels a day. The Saudis pump about 9.5 million barrels, leaving a cushion of about 1.5 million barrels, mostly of heavier grades not very usable in the West. There is virtually no other global spare capacity.

Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, told reporters after the meeting that the Saudi program was ”a very good plan because it addresses the underlying issue you have when you talk about price, which is an issue of availability of oil and availability of capacity.”

But there are doubts about the Saudi assertions about how much oil they have. Data about reserves is tightly guarded, and the Saudis dismiss skeptics as uninformed.

But they do not dismiss Edward O. Price Jr., the former head of exploration for Saudi Aramco and an adviser to the United States government on Persian Gulf oil during both Iraq wars. He questioned future reliance on Saudi capacity in an article in The New York Times last year and wanted to know from his former colleagues how they reached their estimate of more than 150 billion barrels of extra oil. Twenty years ago, a detailed study by geologists from four large American oil companies then in partnership with Aramco found little in the way of undiscovered oil resources, he said.

Mr. Saleri, who manages Saudi reservoirs, met with Mr. Price in the United States last year. Saudi Aramco officials declined to respond to questions about the meeting. But Mr. Price said in an interview that Mr. Saleri told him that the basis for the higher oil figures was a global study in 2000 by the United States Geological Survey estimating Saudi Arabia’s undiscovered resources at 87 billion barrels.

Mr. Price said he responded that the estimates ”by the U.S.G.S. had no credibility and far exceeded the detailed studies by the old Aramco team.” The Aramco study, unlike the survey estimate, involved detailed field work.

Questions about Saudi Arabia’s long-term estimates were also raised last year in a report by the National Intelligence Council, an advisory panel that produces the government’s most authoritative intelligence estimates, according to a government official who insisted on not being identified because the report was classified.

In addition to Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration has viewed the United Arab Emirates as a supplier with excess capacity. In 2001, the emirates planned to increase capacity to 3 million barrels a day by 2005 from 2.5 million barrels a day then. But capacity has not grown in four years, which one administration official attributes to a lack of urgency by emirates officials and a lack of high-level attention by American officials.

An energy policy report by Vice President Dick Cheney in May 2001 recommended that the president actively support initiatives in Persian Gulf nations allowing foreign investment that could lead to increased production. The United Arab Emirates was cited as one of the few countries that could increase its oil-production capacity.

A status report on Mr. Cheney’s task force, released in January by the Energy Department, said administration officials moved to carry out the recommendation in four countries. The U.A.E. was not among them, however, and the president was not mentioned in the report.

When Mr. Bush spoke after the Iraq war with Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the emirates’ ruler until his death late last year, he discussed security and Iraq, not oil investment issues, according to a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of not being identified because of the sensitive nature of discussions between heads of state. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Since the status report in January, the emirates announced that they would increase capacity to 2.7 million barrels a day by 2006, and long-stalled negotiations with Exxon Mobil to develop an offshore field began moving to completion. But the country’s capacity remains at 2.5 million barrels a day, with nothing in reserve, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In Iraq, too, the Bush administration’s hopes have been disappointed. The removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 changed Iraq from a pariah into a possible backstop for global oil markets. Soon after the invasion, top administration officials were bullish about Iraq’s production: they said it would exceed the prewar level of 2.5 million barrels a day and reach 3 million barrels by the end of 2003 or late 2004.

But a report in July by the Government Accountability Office found that Iraqi production had declined since late 2004 to 2.1 million barrels a day from 2.5 million barrels, despite White House legislative requests for almost $3 billion to restore the oil industry there to its prewar abilities.

An important reason for the decline, the report found, was improper management of the reservoirs. Gary Edson, then a deputy national security adviser, was told two years ago that Iraqi production would drop, not increase, according to an outside report presented to him.

A White House spokesman, Frederick Jones, declined to discuss the report. But, according to Wayne Kelley, a petroleum engineer who wrote the report and discussed it with Mr. Edson in November 2003, the message fell on deaf ears.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/international/middleeast/21bandar.html?scp=4&sq=%22robert%20w.%20Jordan%22&st=cse

WASHINGTON, July 20 – Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who in 22 years as the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States operated as an insider’s insider and wielded enormous influence in Washington over successive administrations, is resigning for “private reasons,” Saudi Arabia announced Wednesday.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan is said to have had health problems.

Prince Bandar, 56, the son of the Saudi defense minister, is to be replaced by another royal family member, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the brother of the Saudi foreign minister and a former Saudi intelligence chief who in that position had dealings with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the period before Sept. 11, 2001.

According to current and former American diplomats, Prince Turki tried in the 1990’s to persuade the Taliban to return Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia to stand trial for plotting against the Saudi government. The prince currently serves as the ambassador in London.

“Yes, he knew members of Al Qaeda,” an American official said. “Yes, he talked to the Taliban. At times he delivered messages to us and from us regarding Osama bin Laden and others. Yes, he had links that in this day and age would be considered problematic, but at the time we used those links.” The official said that Prince Turki seemed to have “gotten out of that business” since 2001 and that “he understands that times have changed.”

Saudi officials declined to specify the personal reasons for Prince Bandar’s decision to retire, but people close to the embassy noted that he had spent little time in Washington in recent years and had suffered from exhaustion and health problems. His absence also left the embassy leaderless at a tumultuous time in Saudi-American relations, a source of rising concern in Riyadh, the capital.

Prince Bandar’s last major public appearance in the United States was in April, when he was a crucial figure in Crown Prince Abdullah’s visit to Crawford, Tex., for a meeting with President Bush, with whom he had previously discussed plans for the Iraq war in its early phases, according to Robert W. Jordan, a former ambassador to the kingdom.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said of Prince Bandar that presidents “past and present” had “enjoyed his wit, charm and humor” as well as his advice. “The president bids Ambassador Bandar and his family a fond farewell and wishes them all the best on their return to the kingdom,” he added.

Like Prince Bandar, Prince Turki was educated in the United States, at the Lawrenceville School and Georgetown University, but is said to be a more cautious, ascetic and intellectual figure unlikely to cut the same swath that his predecessor did, especially in establishing intimate ties with powerful Americans.

Prince Bandar courted friends for Saudi Arabia at his air-conditioned tent in the Saudi desert and in Aspen, London, the south of France and in what Mr. Jordan said was “a beach house to end all beach houses” in Jidda. But it was his closeness to the Bush family that made him a pivotal player in recent years.

Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to the first President Bush, said in an interview, “I think his role was indispensable,” referring to planning for the first war with Iraq in 1991. “He has an easy air and way about him, and presidents just like to have him in and talk to him.”

Mr. Scowcroft said one reason for Prince Bandar’s influence was his closeness to his uncle, King Fahd, who suffered a stroke in 1995. Friends of the ambassador say he never established the same closeness with Crown Prince Abdullah, who has been ruling the kingdom as regent for the last decade.

Another former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman Jr., said Prince Bandar was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest diplomatic figures of the last quarter century” who cultivated close ties not only with the Bushes but also with Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Russia.

Among his accomplishments, Mr. Freeman said, was his crucial role in persuading Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to take responsibility in recent years for the downing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, a move that paved the way for American diplomacy that persuaded Libya to renounce its nuclear arms program last year.

“He is charismatic, charming, ingenious and relentless, with a great sense of humor and a great understanding of Americans from his time in the air force,” said Mr. Freeman, referring to his time as a fighter pilot training with Americans in the Royal Saudi Air Force.

Mr. Freeman said Prince Bandar had also been “grotesquely underutilized” in recent years because of his uneasy relationship with Crown Prince Abdullah and had “been trying to get out of Washington for at least a decade” but was unable to get leaders in Riyadh focused on picking a successor.

In recent years, amid mounting charges of Saudi complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks and charges that the Saudis had not been doing enough to combat terrorism, the absence of a visible ambassador in Washington has hurt the Saudi image in the United States, an American official said, and stirred concerns in Riyadh that it was “not well served” in Washington.

In addition, the ambassador was sharply criticized at home and in the United States for saying in an interview a few years ago that he would not be bothered if as much as $50 billion of Saudi Arabia’s development money over the years had been siphoned off through corruption.

The vacuum left by Prince Bandar’s absence in the last two years was filled in part by Adel al-Jubeir, an adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah and the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

Current and former American officials said they expected Prince Turki to become a prominent fixture in Washington and in American public forums even though he is more reticent than Prince Bandar.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E4D61531F936A15757C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON AND JEFF GERTH; RICHARD W. STEVENSON REPORTED FROM CRAWFORD FOR THIS ARTICLE, AND JEFF GERTH FROM WASHINGTON.
Published: April 25, 2005

Photo: Tensions are said to have eased since Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s 2002 visit to President Bush’s ranch, above. He is to visit again today. (Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press)

When he meets at his ranch here on Monday with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President Bush will confront one of his trickiest diplomatic relationships. He will look for help on oil prices, try to find common ground on the Arab-Israeli conflict and prod the crown prince to allow more democracy at home , even as both sides struggle with deep strains set off by the involvement of Saudis in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, American officials and analysts said.

Three years after the two leaders held a tense meeting here, American officials and analysts say the atmosphere has improved. But Mr. Bush remains under pressure from members of both parties in Congress to take a hard line with the Saudis when it comes to terrorism and Israel, they said, while the Saudis remain resentful that they do not get more credit for what they see as intensive efforts to be helpful and responsive to the United States.

American officials give the Saudis some credit for stepping up their efforts to combat terrorism within their borders and to stop the flow of money from Saudis to terrorist groups. They said Saudi Arabia was also helpful in recent months in pressuring Syria to begin withdrawing from Lebanon.

At the same time, the Saudis have been heartened by Mr. Bush’s stepped-up involvement in seeking peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, analysts said. Now Mr. Bush will be seeking help from the Saudis to help bring down crude oil and gasoline prices, which are taking a toll both on the economy and on Mr. Bush’s approval ratings.

”Since the Sept. 11 attacks, you’ve had this growing chorus of anti-Saudi voices in the United States, and not from the fringes,” said Flynt L. Leverett, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and former senior director at the National Security Council under Mr. Bush. ”From the Saudi point of view, this administration, while not joining the anti-Saudi perspective, has not done much to quiet it. But now that Bush has been re-elected, they’re in a sense willing to give the administration another shot at improving the quality of the relationship.”

Their meeting is unlikely to result in any big breakthroughs. When it comes to oil, the Saudis have less ability to drive down global prices by increasing output than at many times in the past, because they are already pumping closer to their maximum sustainable capacity than during past price spikes.

But in part because of the growing domestic political pressure on Mr. Bush to show that he is doing everything possible to help bring down crude oil and gasoline prices, oil issues will play a more prominent role at this meeting than at the previous one here, in 2002.

”This is a new ballgame,” said Robert W. Jordan, a former United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He said he expected Mr. Bush ”to make a pitch to Saudi Arabia to expand production.”

When the two leaders last met at the Bush ranch, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gas was $1.41, according to the American Automobile Association. The price is now about 50 percent higher.

Over the same period, global demand for oil has risen sharply, fueled by consumers in China and India. In 2002, Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, says it produced 6.8 million barrels of oil per day. The Saudis are now estimated to produce about 9.5 million barrels a day.

As demand and production have increased, the Saudis have been left with less spare production capacity to smooth out price spikes. Three years ago it was about three million barrels a day, according to Saudi Aramco. Today ”the cushion is very, very small,” about 1.2 million barrels, according to Nawaf Obaid, an oil and security consultant.

The drop in Saudi spare capacity is a major reason why the Saudis are less able to influence the price of oil today, according to Mr. Jordan and Mr. Obaid.

The Saudis have announced new development plans. Their aim is to offset declines in older fields and to increase overall capacity to 12.5 million barrels.

Refineries are operating at more than 90 percent of total capacity in the United States. Still, gasoline prices have not risen as fast as crude oil prices in the last three years. Crude oil traded at $26.36 the day of the 2002 summit meeting, about half the current price.

Meanwhile, the Saudis have shifted away from their historical dependence on American oil giants, who once controlled Aramco. Six months after the 2002 meeting here, the crown prince complained in a private meeting with American diplomats that the American companies were being too greedy in their negotiations over a plan to give foreign investors access to some of Saudi Arabia’s natural gas resources, American and Saudi officials said.

In relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, much rides on personal relationships because the diplomacy tends to be conducted at the highest levels. Vice President Dick Cheney met Sunday in Dallas with the crown prince and will be at the Bush ranch on Monday, as will other top officials, including Fran Townsend, the White House’s homeland security adviser, who has often been an envoy to the Saudis on terrorism and security issues.

Analysts said the Saudis remained suspicious about Mr. Bush’s intentions when it comes to a final agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. They said the Saudis were concerned about a number of developments in the Middle East, including the growing Shiite influence in the region, especially in Iraq, where the continued instability is a worry to the Saudis. Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment is dominated by the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam.

Members of both parties in Congress are pressing Mr. Bush to do more to compel the Saudi leadership to crack down on clerics who are inciting anti-American and anti-Western feeling within Saudi Arabia, and to take more concrete steps to ensure that money given to charity in Saudi Arabia is not making its way to terrorist groups.

”The alliance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in terms of fighting terrorism is still a work in progress,” said Representative Sue Kelly, Republican of New York, who met recently with Abdullah in Riyadh.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saud/interviews/jordan.html

Robert W. Jordan was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2001 to 2003. In this interview, he talks about the difficulty the Saudi leadership is having in coming to grips with the competing interests in the society, the efforts to date to reform what is taught in the schools and preached in the mosques, and he tells a story of his own personal intervention with the government in a religious freedom issue. “I have been reminded of that incident by senior members of the royal family from time to time and they say: ‘We really respect what you did in this case. You didn’t have to do this. But we respect what you did.’ And so I knew I had pushed about as hard as I could push in that case.” Jordan also talks about why the outcome in Iraq will greatly affect how the Saudi government views political reform, and he assesses the uneasy U.S.-Saudi relationship.”We’re learning more about each other and in many cases, neither side likes what they see. And so we’ve got to find ways to work on the common interests and to help the Saudis through a period of coming into the 21st century. They’re dealing with this in fits and starts. And it’s not always going to be pretty. … ” This interview was conducted by producer Martin Smith on Nov. 23, 2004 in Dallas.

When you arrived in Saudi Arabia, how was your mission described to you?

My initial discussion with President Bush occurred before 9/11, and so the mission at that time was somewhat different. It was a troubled relationship that had to do primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so making progress on that, as well as maintaining the stability of the price of oil [and] maintaining the economic ties and the political support that we needed in the Muslim world, were really the initial thoughts.

9/11 changed all that. And so after 9/11, my mission initially was to secure Saudi support for removing the Taliban from Afghanistan, … [for] using Saudi airspace and logistics to help support our effort in Afghanistan, and then [for] the broader war on terrorism, in countering the Al Qaeda terrorists, bin Laden and others, we saw so graphically mounting such a huge threat.

What did you find in Saudi Arabia when you arrived in terms of their reaction to 9/11?

At the official level, they were appalled; they were embarrassed. Some of them, frankly, were in denial. Some senior Saudi Arabian princes were claiming that this was a Zionist plot, or that 3,000 Jews stayed home from the World Trade Center that day because of some nefarious plot. After the period of denial wore off, they became more absorbed with “How could this have happened to us? What is it about our society that is causing this?” And so they went into a period of what I would call introspection, of self-examination, self-criticism. And this was healthy for them, and long overdue in my opinion. …

I remember meeting with Prince Salman, who is the governor of Riyadh province and one of the very most senior royals, a very well-respected individual. But he clearly was in denial. He said: “This has to have been a Zionist plot. Saudis are not like this. And Saudis by themselves frankly are not capable of launching a plot this sophisticated, that requires this kind of training and this kind of technical capacity. This is just not like what Saudis do.” He found it incredulous that there could be something Saudi about this plot.

Was there denial that bin Laden was involved in the plot?

Not directly. There had been a great deal of unhappiness with bin Laden for a number of years. He had been kicked out of Saudi Arabia. His citizenship had been stripped. And so they were not fans of bin Laden by any means. But they, I think, failed to appreciate the level of sophistication of an organization that he had put together, and they were somewhat dismissive of him, but they were not claiming that he could not have been involved.

I think it’s also important to recognize that there were, at the same time, a number of senior Saudi leaders who did fully accept bin Laden’s involvement and Saudi involvement in the plot — Prince Saud, the foreign minister, for example. Even Crown Prince Abdullah ultimately came around pretty quickly to understand what the true causes were. And of course we were pretty active in briefing the highest levels of the government about what we knew so that they would fully appreciate how big a threat this was, and the fact that it really was bin Laden and Saudis involved.

What does that denial, the level of denial at the highest reaches of the government, say about the society?

I think it says a lot about the society. It says that Saudis find it hard to believe that their sons, members of their tribes, could have done something like this, just as it would be hard for me to imagine one of my three sons committing such a horrific act. They were a little naive, I suppose, in this way. They find it hard to think ill of another Saudi, another member of one of the tribes, and so they tend to gloss over the faults and in many ways the social tensions that may have led to some of what we saw out of 9/11.

Can you say more about those social tensions that they sit astride?

Well, they have a very difficult time right now coping with modernization, coping with globalization in the world. This is a very, very conservative society. They have moved in about 50 years from, frankly, living in the desert in mud huts to now skyscrapers and superhighways and luxury cars. But the roots of this society go back centuries and centuries as a very insular, inward-looking, family-oriented and tribal-oriented society.

They are now moving forward and changing at what they would consider to be warp speed. Their world has turned upside down in the last 50 years. Their culture has been attacked and threatened, in their view, by outside influences, primarily Western influences. And so there is a great deal of fear and resentment at these outside influences. This, I think, has converged with a certain interpretation of the Muslim religion. So there’s a very intolerant and unaccepting kind of religion. And if you’re not part of this particular sect of Wahhabi Islam, you’re really considered to be an infidel and not worth very much.

Frankly, what we’ve seen in the education system, when this is in the mosques, we’ve seen a number of teachers from Egypt and Syria who were kicked out in the ’60s because they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they came to Saudi Arabia. Many of them became teachers and have played a huge role in the way this religion has been interpreted and, frankly, hijacked in many ways to [promote] an intolerant view of the world.

What happened that caused this Muslim Brotherhood to come from Syria and Egypt to Saudi Arabia, and what effect did it have on Saudi Arabia?

The secular societies and governments in Egypt and Syria did not any longer want the radical Muslim Brotherhood activists in their countries, and so they were expelled. Many of them were teachers. And many of them were welcomed with open arms in Saudi Arabia, which had a growing population which did not have a homegrown educational system and which, frankly, needed educated people to help the new schools that were coming up. These people were radicalized and had a very radical view of Islam. This was then conveyed and indoctrinated into the school system in a way that now has left generations with a view of the world and a view of their religion that is at odds with the mainstream, normal, tolerant view of Islam.

You have said that what is taught in their schools and mosques affects our national security. What did you mean by that?

It’s no longer an internal matter. I think for many, many years, the Saudis would have considered what they teach in their schools and what they preach in their mosques to be their business. But when they start preaching intolerance and hatred and anti-Semitism and marginalization of human beings who are not of the same religious persuasion, then it’s a very fine line that you walk between mere intolerance and incitement to hatred and terrorism and support for the kind of almost religious war that is going on right now in the Muslim world.

Do you say that to Prince Abdullah? What kind of reaction do you get?

He agrees with me. And I think he would tell you that he has taken steps to reform what is taught in the schools and what is preached in the mosques. He would tell you that they have fired or retrained probably 2,000 imams. They have sat these imams down with what they would call moderate clerics with copies of the Quran. And they will sit there and show these radical clerics where they’re wrong in the book. And they will then obtain commitments to them to go back out and do it right and preach a more tolerant version of Islam.

I can’t testify today to how successful this reform effort has been. It certainly has a long way to go. What I do know is they had been conducting this kind of effort even during the time I was there as ambassador. But shortly before I left, in October of 2003, I received a translation of a sermon in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and this sermon clearly was an effort at greater tolerance. The imam talks about condemning violence and condemning hatred and condemning terrorism. But then what does he do right at the end? He says, “Oh, God, please destroy the Jews, the infidels and all of those who support them.” …

Why can’t they move things quicker?

Well, they would say they are moving quicker. … I think it’s a little easier once you’re there to understand how far they’ve come and how hard it is for them to move at the pace we would like them to. But they would say that they have to maintain traction with their people. There’s a certain elasticity to this society that they would say cannot be broken. And so you push the envelope as far as you can push it, but you have to maintain that traction. And if you break that elasticity, if you break that rubber band, then you have lost contact with the people, and you lose the legitimacy of the royal family. I think they are very concerned about their legitimacy, very concerned about their ability to maintain the confidence of the people.

| Read an analysis of the Saudi Islamists

So your job becomes pushing them, pressuring them? When do you know if you have gone about as far as you can go?

Well, I had one situation involving a religious freedom issue. There are rules in Saudi Arabia against preaching Christianity and public assembly for worship other than Muslim worship. There are many Christians in Saudi Arabia who meet privately, and the Saudis’ official policy is that the private worship of other religions is permissible.

The rub comes when you try to define what is private versus public. And so when a young man who is a Christian from Sudan hosted a group of 40 or 50 Christians in his living room for a weekly religious service, he was arrested. And he was not really formally charged with anything, but the inference was that he was conducting a public religious service, or perhaps there might have been a Muslim or two in the room, and proselytizing a Muslim is almost a death penalty kind of offense in Saudi Arabia. He was detained for about eight months. His wife couldn’t find him for a couple of weeks. She finally located him, and through kind of the underground Christian movement in Saudi Arabia, I was made aware of this situation after he was released.

He was released for the purpose of deporting him back to Sudan. Well, we all know what’s going on in Sudan right now. This young man’s father had actually been killed in Sudan for being a Christian, and had he returned to Sudan, he would have been killed as well.

And so I intervened with the Saudi government, and I asked them to give me 30 days to find a place to send this young man, hopefully in the United States, so we could rescue him. And the government said: “Mr. Ambassador, this is a personal request you’re making of us, and we honor that. And we will give you the time to do what you need to do.” Working with the State Department, we were able to get this young man placed in an Episcopal seminar near Pittsburgh, where I believe he still is to this day with his wife. And frankly, I think we were able to save his life.

I have been reminded of that incident by senior members of the royal family from time to time. And they point that out to me, and they say: “Mr. Ambassador, we really respect what you did in this case. You didn’t have to do this. But we respect what you did.” And so I knew I had pushed about as hard as I could push in that case. I knew that I didn’t have a lot of personal favors left after this one.

I’ve also had a similar experience in child custody matters. One of the most agonizing parts of my job was having to deal with American mothers who had married Saudi men. And they would have children, and then they would go back to Saudi Arabia, and the marriage would fall apart. And the wife would leave the husband, but the husband would refuse permission for the wife to leave Saudi Arabia, because under Saudi law the husband or father has to give permission. Likewise, the mother was not able to take her children out of the country. And so I intervened with the foreign minister and with the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Justice, to try to establish some sort of mechanism for dealing with these cases.

Again, I was pushing about as hard as I could push. We were able to get, I don’t know, 16 or so women out of the country during this time even though the husband or the father was not necessarily agreeing to it. And the crown prince met with me and made it clear that he would give permission personally on humanitarian grounds for a number of these women to leave. The tragedy, though, still is that the women have not been able by and large to take their children with them. And giving custody of a Muslim child to a non-Muslim mother to go back to the United States is just something that isn’t going to happen in Saudi Arabia. …

What about the question of charities and the support that’s gone to terrorist organizations through the charities?

We learned early in my tenure, probably in the first quarter of 2002, that a number of Saudi charities were actually out of control. They had millions and millions of dollars and were using it in what we might call evangelical activities in other countries. Many of these countries were sort of failed states like Bosnia and Albania, which had kind of a vacuum. And so these Muslim charities which come into these states would proselytize, would increase the number of Muslims who signed up to read the Quran. And sadly, they would also allow radicals, in some cases actually cell members, to use their facilities and their abundant resources. As our intelligence learned more and more about this, I went to the crown prince, and he agreed that something needed to be done.

He wasn’t surprised?

He was cautious, I suppose, in his reaction to me about this. But we worked with the Ministry of Interior to investigate, to give them more of the facts that we knew. And of course part of our problem is, particularly at that early stage, our intelligence officers were very reluctant to share very much with the Saudis. We wanted to protect sources and methods. We wanted to be sure that we didn’t burn a source. We also wanted to be sure how much we could trust the Saudis.

As we got deeper and deeper into it, we [were] slowly coming to realize that this was a major problem. And the major charity we were dealing with, The Call, Al Haramain, was sort of like the United Way of Saudi Arabia, the charity of choice for many Muslims who have an obligation to give alms to the poor. And these alms are measured in billions, not in anything less than that. And so Al Haramain was encouraged to try to clean up their own shop. They closed a number of branches, in Bosnia, Albania, Chechnya. We also had some branches in Africa, in Tanzania and Kenya –

They were involved in the bombing?

Exactly. And the Sudan and Somalia. They told us they had closed these offices. It then became apparent that these offices were then springing back up somewhere down the street in another location, maybe under a fictitious name, within a few days of closing the first office. It was kind of like crabgrass sprouting back up again.

And so we went back to the Saudis and said, “This isn’t working.” And they made it clear that part of the problem was in those other countries as well. We needed those countries to help shut them down. You can’t just push a button in Saudi Arabia and have a branch office in Chechnya disappear. And so, because the funds were so dispersed, and many of the funds had already been transferred into these other countries, they didn’t need to be told by some bureaucrat in Saudi Arabia to knock it off. They could thumb their nose and go ahead in that other country. And so we worked through our embassies with those host countries as well.

There are presumably well-connected Saudi princes contributing to these charities?

There are well-connected Saudi princes contributing to the charities. We have not yet received any reliable intelligence information that they knowingly contributed to any kind of terrorist activity. And part of the problem is you have charities that are involved in orphanages and many important and good charitable activities. And yet, at the same time, some official or some office of that charity can go completely off the rails and do something horrific, like we saw with Al Haramain. You’ve seen this with Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Hamas has both a charitable arm and a military arm. And so we’ve had Saudis and other Arabs contributing, Muslims contributing, to Hamas in the same way.

With the Saudi charities there’s a slight distinction, because a lot of the major contributors would say, “What we’re trying to do is simply get the Muslim belief out into the world. We want to go into South Asia; we want to go into East Asia; we want to go into Africa,” with these evangelical kinds of outreach programs called da’wa, or outreach. “This is what we’re trying to do. We don’t want Al Qaeda to succeed,” is what most of them will say, “because we’re a big target of Al Qaeda ourselves.” And so it has been a very difficult task to identify any specific individual who contributed with knowledge that this money was specifically going to be used for terrorism. …

On the question of charities, we requested from the [Saudi] Embassy in Washington to be able to see the organization that monitors charities. We were told, actually out of the ambassador’s office in London, that such an office is not yet up and running. They haven’t set up a monitoring outfit?

They are very good at taking positions and staking out programs, but the follow-through is still in many ways a Third World follow-through. I think it is not yet where it needs to be. There is a lot of work that needs to be done. And that was very frustrating to me during my time there.

And yet we saw some progress. Al Haramain has been taken down. The head of Al Haramain has been removed. All contributions that are destined for foreign operations of charities must now go through Saudi government scrutiny. And to my knowledge, we are not seeing the kind of wholesale shipping abroad of millions and millions of dollars unregulated anymore.

We’re also seeing a robust banking system and banking scrutiny through their monetary authority. Of course that only goes so far, since so many of these transactions are in cash. Using the bank system is not something that is going to be very productive for these terrorists. And they know that. So there’s only so much mileage you can get out of bank regulatory scrutiny.

But we have seen improvement. And the Saudis have joined with us in designating a number of charities to the United Nations for sanctions and for freezing the accounts. But they’ve got a long, long way to go. …

You were involved in the Crawford meeting [at President Bush's Texas ranch]. Tell me about it.

Well, you have to set the scene, and the scene starts with the rise of the second intifada, the violence in the Palestinian territories that occurred in the spring of 2002. We actually had thought we were making some progress, that there could be grounds for peace discussions between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We then had some horrific suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa. We had Hamas running amok.

And then we had a very harsh Israeli retaliation. We had Israeli Defense Force airplanes level an 11-story apartment building in the middle of the night for the purpose of taking out a Hamas leader, and they incidentally took out all of the residents of that complex. We had alleged massacres in Jenin and Nablus. And so the Arab world was outraged at what they considered to be a disproportionate response. They were also outraged at what our government referred to in the Israeli reaction as simply being heavy-handed.

So what happens? Do you get a phone call from the crown prince?

… I received a phone call from the foreign minister. I spoke with him. I spoke ultimately with the crown prince, urging them to keep Hamas as well under control as possible. They, of course, don’t have direct control over Hamas, but they had communications with the Palestinian Authority and with [Yasser] Arafat’s entourage. And so our efforts were really aimed at asking Arafat to take a leadership role and to take charge of reining in Hamas at this point.

Then the Jenin and Nablus incursions — there was outrage. I wasn’t summoned in to be lectured about it, but it came up in the course of my other meetings with both the foreign minister and the crown prince. And they were outraged. And so there was a lot of talk that the crown prince would cancel his trip to Crawford [in 2002] out of protest over America’s failure to rein in the [Ariel] Sharon government. Many of the crown prince’s advisers were telling him he should not make the trip. But he said: “No, I’m going to make this trip. This is important for me to meet the president face to face. It’s important for me to express my views of what needs to be done, and so I’m going to make the trip.”

I think he made that trip in a very courageous way and at some personal risk to his own personal safety. There was a great deal of anger within Saudi society at the mere fact that he would go to Crawford to make the trip.

I was told that the crown prince was initially not sure that it was a good idea to go to Crawford as opposed to meeting at the White House in Washington. And he was reported to have wondered whether this was a snub that he was not really meeting in the Oval Office with the president and was simply meeting with him in Crawford, Texas. The word was sent back to the crown prince that this was a rare invitation that only two or three world leaders had ever received, and that he was one of a handful who had ever been invited to the personal quarters of the president’s in Crawford, Texas. And so that helped set a tone.

We then went down to Houston, actually, for dinner with the crown prince and the vice president the night before the trip to Crawford. The crown prince was visibly nervous, worried, I think, about what he was going to say. And so it was a fairly somber evening. It was a very small group of us — the foreign minister, the vice president, two or three others. …

The tension mounted that night and the next morning, because in The New York Times there had been an article quoting an unnamed Saudi source as saying the Saudis, because of their outrage at our Israeli policy, were ready to use oil as a weapon. This was hotly denied by the Saudis, but many people were surmising that Prince Bandar was actually the source of that article. And he denied it personally to me the next day.

We then flew from Houston to a Waco airstrip for the purpose of greeting the crown prince as he arrived there. Waco is about an hour’s drive from the ranch in Crawford, and the crown prince doesn’t like to fly in helicopters, and so he had purchased two or three very ornately decorated tour buses. And his tour buses pulled up as his plane arrived on the tarmac. … We got on this tour bus, and it looked like something that Dolly Parton had found to be too ornate. It was gilded everywhere. …

We arrived in Crawford. The crown prince had brought some photographs and videos. I broke off at that point while they met privately, and [I] was told that the crown prince had shown the president these photos and videos that were very graphic of the violence in Palestinian territories. And some of the violence I think may have been in Afghanistan as well, but it was really a plea for mercy for the Palestinians.

He was angry?

He was angry, and he was very, very concerned. And then something really magical happened. The president and the crown prince got in the president’s pickup truck. And the president loves this ranch. It’s about 1,600 acres. And he gave the crown prince a tour of the ranch, just the two of them plus the interpreter. And they were gone for about 45 minutes. And I’ve taken that trip with the president through the ranch. And he describes the various varieties of trees; you see the waterfalls; you see the pastureland. It’s a beautiful ranch. And there was something peaceful that apparently occurred, that came over both of these men, that broke the tension. And when they came back they had bonded in a way that was I think very significant to the relationship between our two countries. …

It was clear that the crown prince had arrived expecting what we would call deliverables. There had been apparently an eight-point request or policy position paper that Prince Bandar had delivered to the White House. Well, the president hadn’t seen this and had not been properly briefed on it, apparently, and so he was surprised by some of the requests. And it took us a while to work through them there in the screened-in porch area. … I think we were able to reach some accommodations and reach some common ground that wasn’t so clear was going to happen earlier in the day.

In the final analysis, the president agreed, subject to contacting the Israelis, to try to achieve the release of Arafat from his confinement in Ramallah, and also try to end the siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. And the Saudis agreed to work even more diligently to encourage Arafat to rein in the terrorists, to dismantle the terrorist apparatus, and to move toward a more productive dialogue with the Israelis.

| Read FRONTLINE’s interview with Crown Prince Abdullah.

What was discussed in terms of the troops in Saudi Arabia?

Nothing.

It had not come up in any earlier discussions?

We did not ever feel from the Saudis that they were asking us to remove our troops. And I think this is a very important point in history that needs to be clarified. We had about 5,000 Air Force personnel at Prince Sultan Air Base. That number ramped up several times that amount during the Iraq invasion in the spring of 2003, and then it ramped back down again. But the first time we had any high-level discussions about the troop levels was when I went to the defense minister, Prince Sultan, and his son after we had been successful in removing Saddam from Baghdad.

So April of 2003.

Actually, Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld then came out at the end of April 2003 for a more formal discussion, but I had the discussion initially with the defense minister and simply said now that Saddam is gone, we no longer need to enforce the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, and so the mission of our Air Force here in Saudi Arabia has been accomplished. This has been an 11-year partnership with you, and we’re thankful for this. But this removes the necessity for that kind of troop level and that kind of commitment here in Saudi Arabia. …

The Middle East peace plan from the Crawford meeting — what has come of all of that?

Well, it’s still there, and it’s still part of the road map. And the road map that ultimately came out later specifically incorporates and alludes to the crown prince’s vision for peace that was adopted at the Arab League summit in Beirut. The crown prince, I think, felt very good that the president included that reference. And the crown prince’s vision for peace and normalization of relations is very much in tune with the conceptual framework of the road map. The road map simply makes more specific, with some timetables and deadlines, the way you get to that kind of a normalization.

This brings us to the war in Iraq. You had the job of convincing the Saudis that this was a good thing to do.

Right. They were much more receptive to my suggestions and my requests for help than most of the public fully understood. We had some very positive conversations over a period of about a year at various levels of the Saudi government. And while there was not a specific commitment, there was a kind of dialogue and body language and nuance to the conversations that made me believe that when the time came, we would get what we needed. …

Throughout the latter parts of 2002, it was no secret that we had great problems with Saddam and we needed to figure out what to do. And we were consulting with our allies, including the Saudis, about these concerns. And so obviously, as things became more specific in late 2002, it was necessary to engage the Saudis a little more directly in what they would allow us to do from their territory. … We shared with them ultimately our battle plan, and that was a necessary thing for us to do because we were asking a great deal of them and in some ways jeopardizing the standing of the regime with its own people if they were going to support us in the way we needed.

There must have been some complaints that you heard from the royal family about the consequences of the war.

I’ll never forget being told by some members of the royal family, “Mr. Ambassador, please don’t win Iraq and lose Saudi Arabia.” I think they meant that there was a great possibility that if they supported us in the way we needed and the way I think they were inclined to support us that it could destabilize the regime, that it could lead to, frankly, some of the terrorist activity we’ve seen in Saudi Arabia. It would further alienate the arch conservatives and the Islamist extremists from the royal family and from the government.

And so we really have seen the Saudis take a major risk in order to support what we needed to have done there. And I think ultimately they will get the credit they deserve for having supported us at a very difficult time for us and for them.

Those concerns have come true?

To some degree. And that’s why we need to not turn our backs on them right now, but to assist in fighting these terrorist threats both to their regime and to peace in the region. … They have greatly enhanced their security forces. Their intelligence apparatus has improved. They have now published the faces and names of their 26 most wanted Al Qaeda terrorists, and about 16 or 17 of those have now been either captured or killed. And so they have had some measurable success in confronting this terrorist threat.

I think this is not lost on their people. They have shown their people that they are capable of dealing with a terrorist threat. We’ve also seen a great deal of popular resentment, I think, in Saudi Arabia of the tactics that have been used by some of these terrorists, both in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq. These kidnappers, these beheadings, these suicide bombings in Riyadh in May of 2003, which killed both a number of Muslims as well as Americans, have all, I think, led to the Saudi population being pretty disgusted with the level of violence they’ve seen in their society. They don’t like it, and they’re increasingly intolerant of it.

Would the Saudis have supported us if they did not believe that there were weapons of mass destruction and a grave and gathering danger to the security of the United States?

Well, we’ll never know, but I think there’s still a chance they might have. That was not the only argument out there, of course. The Saudis have had vivid experience personally with Saddam Hussein in a way that only Kuwait could match, and so they had no love lost for Saddam. They knew of his brutality. They knew of his threat to the region. …

There was some reluctance to accept that Al Qaeda could be a domestic threat, and you yourself made some well-known criticisms of the Saudis for failing to provide security. Put me back into that timeframe.

In roughly April of 2003, we received intelligence reports that Al Qaeda terrorists were in the final phases of planning attacks against Western interests in Saudi Arabia, possibly including Western housing compounds. And so I went to the Saudis. In fact, I sent them three letters asking them to provide armed security at Western installations, U.S. government installations and Western housing compounds. And over a period of two or three weeks they were studying the issue, I guess is the best way to put it.

And then on the night of May the 12th, 2003, three housing compounds were attacked by suicide bombers. Several hundred people were injured. Nine Americans were killed. And I was livid. And so I did make the statements that I was disappointed that they had not provided the security that I’d asked for. And nine Americans paid with their lives.

How does this square with all the more optimistic statements that you’ve made about the progress that we’re making and their realization of common cause on the war on terrorism?

The next day, May 13, 2003, [then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell and I visited the crown prince, and he was white as a ghost and absolutely shaken to his core by what had happened. And to the extent they had been in denial about the terrorist threat in the kingdom, that denial ended on the morning of May the 13th.

And after that time, we saw a complete sea change in the attitude of the Saudis towards security, towards terrorism and toward rooting out the Al Qaeda threat in the kingdom. And so they have now probably captured or killed more Al Qaeda than about any other country I can think of. And they’ve lost quite a number of their own officers in the line of duty.

We set up a joint intelligence task force in which we now have Saudis and Americans sitting shoulder to shoulder reading the same intelligence off of the same computer terminals in a secret location in Saudi Arabia. By use of that intelligence, we have penetrated cells. We have seen a lot of reports about shootouts with terrorists in Saudi Arabia. Most of those are initiated by the Saudi police to some degree on the intelligence that we have jointly gathered or analyzed. But it shows that they are being proactive, and they have these terrorists on the run to a great degree. There are fewer and fewer safe havens for them in Saudi Arabia. And we have not seen, thankfully, at least in the last year and a half, the kind of carefully orchestrated theatrical attack that we saw on May the 12th within the kingdom. So yes, progress is being made.

Is it enough? Of course not. It’s not enough with any of our allies around the world. We all have to do more. But I do think the Saudis deserve a lot of credit for finally getting it, finally catching on after May the 12th. This was as big a threat to them as it was to us. …

After your departure, 26 clerics came out encouraging Iraqis to resist the American occupation. This seems to be a step backward.

It looks like a step backward to me as well. These are clerics who had supposedly, in many cases, been retrained. And this shows you the limits, I suppose, of retraining.

I’m not sure anyone really knows what happened. These clerics issued this fatwa (Read the fatwa.) It doesn’t specifically incite Saudis to go to Iraq, but you could sure read between the lines and conclude that’s what they’re after. To my knowledge, their statement has been condemned. And Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., made a very strong statement condemning this fatwa. In fact, Prince Bandar at about the same time in a speech stated that the Saudis really need to start waging a jihad on terrorism using the same kind of ruthlessness and brutality that the terrorists themselves are using. They need to root out these terrorists with the same kind of energy and zeal as would be expected in a real jihad against an adversary.

But nobody’s been arrested.

No. And it’s hard to explain, particularly at a time when there have been petitions for greater reform in Saudi Arabia and for a constitutional monarchy, and the authors of those petitions, in fact, were put in jail. And so there is a disconnect here, I think, that is very hard to understand and very hard to explain.

I think it tells you probably some of the give-and-take and some of the difficulty that the Saudi leadership is having in coming to grips with these competing interests. They have a reform movement that they certainly support but don’t want to get too far encouraged to too great a degree. At the same time, you have an extremely intolerant, backward and conservative religious environment where at least certain sects and certain segments of this religious theocracy are allowed to do and publish and preach things that are absolutely unbelievable. And so I think you’re finding it very difficult to read all of these tea leaves at the same time. We all are. …

It doesn’t sound like our ally.

Well, ally, you know, is a flexible term. And I think we have common interests that are served. But it doesn’t mean that we agree with an ally on every point. We certainly don’t with our European allies. We have enormous disagreements with them. But we have the fundamental basis and a fundamental common interest in going forward. I think that’s the way we’ve got to look at Saudi Arabia as well. We have some fundamental common interests here, even though our cultures are diametrically opposed in many ways to each other. And we’re learning more about each other, and in many cases, neither side likes what they see. And so we’ve got to find ways to work on the common interests and to help the Saudis through a period of coming into the 21st century.

They’re dealing with this in fits and starts. And it’s not always going to be pretty. We need to encourage the reformers. We need to encourage the members of the royal family who want to move forward. And there are plenty of those. And they have great younger leadership that I think is emerging. They have some very well-intentioned and sincere leadership right now in many aspects of their government. But they need more. And they need that side to be encouraged.

One of the challenges for America is we’re so unpopular over there right now with the people that the more we publicly praise or encourage what goes, the more that could be the kiss of death. So we’ve got to find ways to be very careful about how we provide support. But at least let it be known at the most senior levels that these kinds of fatwas and these kinds of statements are absolutely poisonous to the relationship.

There are many neoconservatives who have advocated for the war in Iraq in order to put pressure on the Saudi royal family to modernize.

Well, the Saudis will feel pressure only when there is a viable Iraq that shows they can have an economically viable and a politically viable society that can be successful. I think at that point they will feel some pressure. They will also feel some encouragement and I would say relief, because it may further legitimize the efforts of the reformers. But if there’s simply chaos in Iraq and a failed state, then that really gives aid and comfort to those who resist reform and to those who would prefer to have a very eighth- or ninth-century kind of culture in Saudi Arabia.

So it’s correct to say that there is a battle inside Saudi Arabia over the war in Iraq?

Oh, absolutely — not just the war in Iraq, but on a broader scale of relationships with the West. How do they deal with their religion? I think they’re much more focused on how to deal with the intolerance and hatred that so many of their children have been taught over the last 20 or 30 years. And how do you accommodate that in a globalized world, where you have to have interaction with the rest of the world, including interaction with infidels? You have to have foreign investment. You have to have foreigners being able to travel in the country safely. And so there are enormous challenges for Saudi Arabia right now. …

The conservative nature of the culture is something that I tried to respect. And in many ways there’s a lot to respect. They value family; they value peace; they value a low-key kind of lifestyle. Yet at the same time, they have a completely different view of the role of women, a completely different view of the role of religion. And so it’s both a fascinating and a frustrating kind of place to deal with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/15/international/middleeast/15SAUD.html?scp=8&sq=

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 14 ? The United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia charged today that some weeks before the car bombs of Monday night, American intelligence operatives picked up signs of an imminent terrorist attack and urged the Saudi government to improve security at foreign compounds here, but got little or no response.

Reflecting what some officials said was increasing American frustration with the Saudi efforts against terrorism, the ambassador, Robert W. Jordan, praised Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, for their “sincere” vows of a crackdown on military groups. But he also said that “executing the plan to provide additional security is another matter, and I think there’s some ways to go on that, quite frankly.”

The ambassador’s comments, coming two days after three bomb blasts in Riyadh killed 34 people including 8 Americans, illustrate the depth of continuing strains between American and Saudi officials over cooperation in fighting terrorism.

Even the White House, which has tried in recent months to repair relations with the kingdom, said today that Saudi efforts to combat terrorism remain inadequate, despite some recent improvements.

“As with many countries around the world, the fact is that Saudi Arabia must deal with the fact that it has terrorists inside its own country, and their presence is as much a threat to Saudi Arabia as it is to Americans and to others who live and work in Saudi Arabia,” the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said today.

Responding to Mr. Jordan’s claim that the United States had requested additional security at the compounds, Prince Saud said that he doubted that it could be true. “At no time have there been requests for added security in which we haven’t afforded that security,” he said at a news conference today. He did acknowledge that more than a dozen Saudis linked to Al Qaeda had carried out the bombing, and regretted that Saudi authorities had let them slip through their hands during a raid on their headquarters last week.

A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Nail al-Jubeir, said later that he did not know of any specific request made by the United States for additional security around the Riyadh compounds.

“Was there more that could have been done?” Mr. Jubeir said. “You can always ask that question in hindsight. But the fact is, these were soft targets, and it’s very difficult to protect every residential compound.”

Less than a month before the bombings on Monday, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, J. Cofer Black, came here to try to win further cooperation in efforts against Al Qaeda, American officials said today.

The officials would not say whether Mr. Black specifically requested that the Saudis tighten security around installations housing Westerners in Saudi Arabia. But without providing details, a State Department spokesman said today that the government had made such a request before the bombing and had been unsuccessful in winning Saudi action by the time of the attack.

“We did request additional security for sites,” said the spokesman, Phillip Reeker, who added, “There were clearly some shortcomings in this.”

This afternoon, Mr. Jordan met with the American “wardens” who act as security liaisons at residential compounds and businesses for the estimated 12,000 Americans living in scores of residential compounds in Riyadh, and explained why nonessential workers were being ordered to leave the country. He urged other foreign workers to consider doing the same.

“Saudi Arabia is now one of the fronts in the battle against terrorism,” an aide quoted the ambassador as telling them. “Innocent civilians and children don’t belong on battlefields.”

During Mr. Black’s visit on April 15, American officials said, he and a top Treasury Department official, David Offhauser, met with Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the third-ranking official of the Saudi Interior Ministry. One indication of the sensitivity of the talks was that, even on condition of anonymity, the American officials refused to discuss the specific subjects of the conversation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/04/us/bush-faces-scrutiny-over-disclosing-90-stock-sale-late.html?scp=6&sq=%22robert%20w.%20Jordan%22&st=cse

As President Bush prepared to make a major speech on Wall Street next week about corporate responsibility, the White House found itself on the defensive again today over the kind of action for which Mr. Bush is assailing corporate executives: his own failure in 1990 to disclose a stock sale as promptly as required by law.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said today that Mr. Bush did not promptly disclose the sale of stock 12 years ago because of a ”mix-up” with his lawyers. In the 1994 race for governor of Texas, however, Mr. Bush said the Securities and Exchange Commission misplaced the proper forms.

Mr. Fleischer could not completely explain the inconsistency, and he said he did not know when or why Mr. Bush changed his explanation about the reason the sale was disclosed late.

But he said that Mr. Bush’s stock sale was examined by news organizations in 1990 and many times since and that the president had done nothing wrong.

”It’s been used as an issue by every political opponent in every campaign in which he’s run,” Mr. Fleischer said. ”When he ran for president, your investigative reporters all looked into this, and you have the documents.”

At issue are 212,140 shares of stock in the Harken Energy Corporation, a Texas oil and gas company, that Mr. Bush sold for $4 a share, or $848,560, on June 22, 1990, when his father was president. Mr. Bush sold the stock to pay off a $500,000 bank loan he had used to help buy his share of the Texas Rangers.

Eight days after Mr. Bush sold the stock, on June 30, 1990, Harken finished the second quarter with a loss of $23.2 million, more than eight times the loss it showed for the second quarter of 1989. When the second-quarter loss was publicly reported on Aug. 20, the share price fell to $2.37.

Mr. Bush, who was on Harken’s board of directors, has said he quickly realized that the stock’s slide would raise concerns that he had sold based on inside information, a potential crime. The suspicions grew when the Securities and Exchange Commission said it did not have a document from Mr. Bush, a Form 4, that insiders must file when they sell stock. Mr. Bush did not file the Form 4, and officially report the sale, until March 1991.

Mr. Bush had promptly filed another required document, a Form 144, disclosing his intent to sell the stock.

In 1994, when Mr. Bush was asked why he had not filed the Form 4, he said that he thought he had and that the S.E.C. must have misplaced it. Today Mr. Fleischer said the fault lay with a ”mix-up, a clerical mistake” by lawyers for Harken.

”The best explanation is the attorneys thought the form had been filed, which is what led George W. Bush to say he thought it had been filed and the S.E.C. had lost it,” Mr. Fleischer said. ”That was not the case.”

The securities commission investigated the transaction, which Mr. Bush’s lawyer Robert W. Jordan defended by arguing that Mr. Bush had not known about the impending loss when he sold the stock. Mr. Jordan also said Mr. Bush had sought the clearance of a Harken lawyer before the sale.

In an interview in 1999 when he was running for president, Mr. Bush also defended the sale. ”Listen, I was the son of a president,” Mr. Bush said. ”I was very sensitive to the scrutiny. I felt like liquidating the stock for personal reasons, but I was also fully aware that any deal I did was going to be fully scrutinized.”

In 1993, the securities commission dropped the investigation and in a letter to Mr. Jordan said that ”at this time no enforcement action is contemplated.”

In a speech about corporate responsibility this spring, Mr. Bush proposed that corporate officers be required to disclose sales of company stock within two days. White House officials say Mr. Bush would make stronger proposals in what they are billing as a hard-line speech about corporate responsibility next week, to be delivered to 1,000 people at a hotel in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Fleischer said the president’s speech would reflect ”the faith he has in our free-enterprise system.”