On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (37 page)

Optimists about the current and future stability of Saudi Arabia invariably cite prior pessimistic predictions that did not materialize. If the Al Saud regime has survived numerous crises over the past five decades, there is little reason to think it cannot continue to do so. To the optimists, past is prologue. But history is not always a reliable guide, and the status quo will not be the future. Few “experts” foresaw the fall of the shah of Iran or of Mubarak in Egypt, and fewer still predicted the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. One fears that the optimists, who see “strawberry fields forever,” may be whistling past the graveyard.

No single problem in Saudi Arabia—and as we have seen it has many—is likely to be fatal to the regime. Rather, it is the confluence of so many challenges coupled with the rigidity of the regime, the sullenness of the society, the escalating demands of youth, and most important, the instability inherent in generational succession that could well prove fatal to Al Saud rule. It is not that Saudis are worse off than other Arabs—they lead more comfortable lives than most. It is not that King Abdullah has been a worse monarch than his predecessors—on the contrary, he is more sincere and benevolent
than most. It is not that Saudi Arabia is making no progress. But the confluence of challenges is far greater than at any time in the past. More important, the Saudi people are less patient and more demanding than they were in the past. And the ever-expanding and increasingly divided Al Saud family, once upon a time both feared and respected, these days is neither.

There is a growing lawlessness in Saudi Arabia that is at odds with its reputation for rigid adherence to Sharia law. King Abdullah has promised more freedom to women, more space for open political and religious discourse, and reforms of education and of the economy. But hardly any of these reforms have been institutionalized and codified in law, and even where new rules and regulations have been announced, they are often not enforced. So authorities and citizens are not accountable to each other. Day to day the princes and the prominent do as they like, while most of the kingdom’s passive people dare not confront society’s unwritten rules or unenforced regulations. Instead, most have the temerity for only myriad minor infractions they think will go unnoticed or unpunished, from flagrant traffic violations to bribing officials for access to government services; from mistreating domestic servants to erecting ostensibly illegal satellite dishes; from lying to authorities to lying to each other. But the list grows longer, as more and more Saudis do whatever they feel they can get away with. These all are signs of a disintegrating society, and the deterioration is only accelerating.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in
The Ancien Regime
, described a kingdom of France “
made up from different, disunited orders and from a people whose citizens have only a small number of ties in common. As a result, no one concerns himself with anything but his own private interests.” Louis XVI was the only French king in that nation’s long history to make an effort to unite his people in anything other than “an equal state of dependency.” But after so many years of divide-and-conquer rule, the French discovered, de Tocqueville wrote, that “
it had been much simpler to divide them than it was thereafter to reunite them.” He could have been describing today’s Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

A monarchy is at greatest risk, de Tocqueville wrote, when it acknowledges the need to reform and begins to offer small changes. “
Only a great genius can save a ruler who is setting out to relieve his subjects’ suffering after a long period of oppression. The evils, patiently endured as inevitable, seem unbearable as soon as the idea of escaping them is conceived.” Louis XVI’s regime on the eve of its downfall “
still looked unshakeable even to those who were about to topple it.” Louis XVI’s reward for small reforms, of course, was the guillotine.

As we have seen throughout this book, Saudi society is cracking in multiple ways. Religion, the glue that long has bound the kingdom, is a source of division, with contending forces wielding the Koran to challenge each other and the regime. An overwhelmingly youthful society with access to outside information and influences is challenging authority of all sorts. The oil-based Saudi economy remains one-dimensional and unable to create jobs to absorb the youth bulge. Saudi women, notwithstanding some small new freedoms in recent years, remain largely subjugated, frustrated, and sidelined from contributing to the stagnant economy. Oil production may well have peaked.

From abroad, Iran poses a far greater threat to Saudi Arabia than has any foreign power in recent decades.
A confident President Ahmadinejad has said Iran feels no threat from Saudi Arabia’s latest purchase of $60 billion in sophisticated U.S. arms, but he wryly observed at a New York press conference in 2010 that those arms “might fall into the wrong hands” if the House of Saud lost power. It was a clever way of saying the arms might one day wind up threatening the United States, as did those the Americans sold to the shah in the years before his sudden ouster.

Most significant is the generational leadership change that will be forced on the Al Saud somewhere in the next decade unless the family finds the courage to preempt Father Time and make it sooner. Either way, the change is sure to be more difficult than the one nearly six decades ago, when the strong-willed founder died. Even with shared fealty to their father, Abdul Aziz’s eldest sons, King Saud and Crown Prince
Faisal, squabbled for nearly a decade before Faisal emerged triumphant. Today none of the elderly surviving sons of Abdul Aziz has the clout to establish a clear generational transition that would pass the monarchy down through one branch of the family. This has set up an intense rivalry among the remaining sons and many grandsons of the founder. Power sharing is not a feature of absolute monarchies. The prospect of Al Saud family feuds frightens ordinary Saudis, who are impotent to influence the outcome. “When elephants fight, we gnats get crushed” is the way Saudis so often express their fear.

So what might the Al Saud do to resolve some of the kingdom’s challenges and prolong its rule? Doubtless, if regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt are seen a few years hence to have yielded no improvements, the Al Saud will benefit. Saudis almost surely will again be grateful at least for stability, even at the price of dependency and indignity. But if the Al Saud, rather than banking on failure elsewhere, prefer to take the initiative to improve their standing with Saudis, they could consider a number of steps.

For starters, the royal family should codify into law and enforce the modest reforms that King Abdullah has enunciated over the past half-dozen years, so that they do not fade away under a new monarch. Moreover, the Al Saud should find a way, presumably well short of Western democracy, to provide elements of political pluralism that would engage the best and brightest of Saudi society, not just more and more princes, in governance.

Such reforms could include a parliament at least partially elected by Saudi society and a prime minister and council of ministers chosen for competence rather than genes. The Al Saud should take economic reform far more seriously and sharply accelerate it, not just plan it on paper with teams of consultants and then bury it in bureaucracies, if the country’s youth bulge is to be employed. They should curb the influence of the conservative clergy in education and elsewhere in society, to enable the female half of society to become part of a productive workforce—the Saudi ARAMCO model writ large. And today, not tomorrow, the Al Saud should be
announcing a formal line of royal succession to what will be something less than an absolute monarchy, in order to demonstrate that national unity and stability are more important than the fates and fortunes of princely factions.

Reforms of this magnitude would amount to the dismantling of traditional Saudi Arabia, so it is almost impossible to imagine the royal family undertaking them. In my five years of meeting dozens of princes, only one, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, has ever proposed a path that would lead to the Al Saud eventually sharing power with the people. The prince was exiled to Lebanon in 1962 after he and several of his half-brothers—the so-called Free Princes—proposed democratic reform and a constitution for Saudi Arabia while their two eldest brothers, the king and crown prince, squabbled over power. Prince Talal, now eighty and long since returned home, has softened his contrarian style but has not shed his ideas.

“
We have to go step by step,” the elderly but still forceful prince explains in his modest Riyadh office, adorned with black-and-white photos of more than three dozen of his half-brothers. “The Majlis and the king should create a plan for five to ten years of reform, and people would be happy to wait.” But the country, he insists, must start by giving its Potemkin political bodies some real power. For instance, he advocates giving local municipal councils, elected for the first time in 2005, the right to tax citizens to fund programs they favor. He wants members of the Majlis Ash Shura, or parliament, to be elected by citizens, not appointed by the monarch, and empowered to play a role in selecting and removing government ministers and in naming a prime minister to help the king run the government. These proposals are being ignored now as they were in the 1960s. “I made up my mind I would give my honest advice to the king, but I will do what he says,” Prince Talal concludes with a small shrug of resignation.

What, if anything, might the United States do to encourage enlightened evolution inside the kingdom? The sad truth is the United States doesn’t have much influence and seems unwilling to try to use even what little it has. Once upon
a time Washington did. It was 1962; John F. Kennedy was president; Egypt’s Nasser was the Middle Eastern bully; Yemen, then as now, was in turmoil. Saudi prince Faisal came to Washington seeking a U.S. commitment to defend Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity if threatened by Nasser and his Yemeni allies.
Kennedy, no fan of the Saudis, offered the commitment but conditioned it on a package of Saudi reforms that included some limits on Al Saud absolute rule and the abolition of age-old slavery in the kingdom. Absolute rule, of course, continues to this day, and reforms remain more talk than substance, but slavery, at least, is gone since 1962. It was a small victory for U.S. pressure.

In all the decades since, Washington has been wedded to the Saudi status quo. Successive U.S. administrations found any significant change in that status quo to be so threatening as to be almost unthinkable. But the greater danger now lies precisely in clinging to the status quo, as rapid changes swirl both inside and outside the kingdom.

It is undoubtedly true that the United States cannot itself reform Saudi Arabia. Any effort at doing so through public pressure is bound to backfire, dooming the reforms with an infidel kiss of death and further weakening the monarchy. Only an Al Saud can save the Al Saud. And therein lies Washington’s one slim opportunity.

American self-interest dictates that it convince the royal family that its self-interest—indeed, its preservation—requires the aging band of brothers to forsake tradition and ambition, to forswear brief turns on the throne. Rather, they now need to coalesce and crown the son of one of them who has the energy, the boldness, and the longevity to proclaim and then actually to implement a panoply of social, economic, and political reforms that hold government accountable for serving people.

Such younger princes do exist. The United States, as the Al Saud’s ultimate protector, does have some influence. The United States also has multiple channels of communication to multiple senior princes. But for U.S. diplomacy—not known for subtlety, secrecy, or prescience—it would be a new challenge. The United States has a rich history of sticking
with losers too long. It has some experience with helping to depose dictators, such as Iran’s shah or Egypt’s Mubarak, but too late to shape what follows. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the change the United States would be seeking would be relatively modest; after all, it would be all in the family, merely asking old princes to make way for a younger, more energetic one of their choice while there still is time to save the Al Saud. Given the mutual U.S.-Saudi dependency and their common self-interest, this should not be an impossible diplomatic mission.

So America conceivably could influence the kingdom, but in no way is the United States the role model for Saudi Arabia. Increasingly educated Saudis want to modernize, but they most surely do not want to Westernize, and they resent the American view that modernization means Westernization. Saudis don’t pine for democracy, but they do seek a more open civil society where they are free to congregate and express views and where society’s rules are clear and enforced equitably on all. They want iPads and access to the Internet, but the conservative among them—and most Saudis still are conservative—do not want all the other alien infidel influences emanating from America and the West. Saudis are unique and seek to remain so.

So the Royal Saudi 747, richly appointed but mechanically flawed, flies on, its cockpit crowded with geriatric Al Saud pilots. Buffeted by mounting gales, the plane is losing altitude and gradually running out of fuel. On board, first class is crowded with princely passengers, while crammed behind in economy sit frustrated Saudi citizens. Among them are Islamic fundamentalists who want to turn the plane around, and also Islamic terrorists who aim to kill the pilots and hijack the plane to a destination unknown. Somewhere on board there also may be a competent new flight team that could land the plane safely, but the prospect of a capable pilot getting a chance at the controls seems slim. And so the 747 flies on into the headwinds, perhaps to be hijacked, or ultimately to crash.

Many people, especially Saudis of widely diverse backgrounds and perspectives, have assisted me on this book. Some I can thank by name; others, given the constraints of Saudi society, ask to remain anonymous. To all these hundreds of Saudis who welcomed me, informed me, introduced me to others, and in some cases took risks to do so, I owe a deep debt of gratitude. Whatever the flaws of Saudi society, the Saudi people, once connected to me through a trusted friend, invariably were as generous with their time and thoughts as they are in sharing their tea and dates with a stranger.