Impressions of Arabia by Chas Freeman

Two weeks in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula left me impressed by the extent to which Arab estrangement from the United States and Americans appears to be settling into a new phase of resignation and lowered expectations. The mood among Arab elites since 9/11 has progressed from shock at the event, through distress at rejection by their former American friends, through desultory efforts to test the possibility of renewed friendship, into fatalistic acceptance that the mutual confidence and regard that have been lost will not be restored. Interest in placating American views or in cooperating with the United States on regional or global issues has been succeeded by passive-aggressive indifference and obstructionism, barely concealed by the exquisitely agreeable manners that are the hallmark of Arab political culture. Arab leaders are increasingly pursuing foreign policy agendas that bypass the United States or dissociate themselves from us. Similarly, while they are engaged in far-reaching domestic reforms with major potential to reshape their societies over time, they are doing so increasingly without reference to the United States or the American models of modernity that once inspired them.

A quiet weekend in Paris is a time to reflect on the experience of a two week visit to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait in which I was immersed in dialog about how to overcome the sullen suspicion with which Americans and Arabs now view each other. Sadly, by contrast with six months ago, this time I found little, if any, willingness on the part of Arab interlocutors to make a serious effort to reforge close ties with the United States. One by one, those in the private sector who had been enlisted by their governments to do so have given up. In some instances, this reflects insulting treatment by US immigration and law enforcement officials, who accurately communicate popular hostility and suspicion of Muslims in general and Arabs in particular and thereby discourage both from continuing their so-far unrewarding attempts to reach out to Americans. In others, it reflects mounting despondency born of simple frustration. Both optimism and courage are needed to persist at the difficult and unpromising task of reforging Arab political, economic, and cultural ties with the United States. Most Arabs now see no reason to be anything but despairing about U.S. policies toward their region. They have no expectation that the 2008 elections will bring anything but more of the same. Speaking well of Americans to Arabs now draws the same disapproving reaction that speaking well of Arabs to Americans does. Anything other than disapproval invites imputations of unpatriotic, even immoral, coddling of sinister foreign foes.

Frustrated by their inability to turn around post 9/11 relations with the United States or to dissuade us from pursuing policies inimical to their interests, Arab governments have turned their attention elsewhere. Egypt is obsessed with its internal affairs, which are dominated by a continuing struggle between secular autocracy and a strengthening Islamist democratic movement with close ideological ties to Hamas, a domestic platform of clean government and a foreign policy plank promising rejection of Camp David's acceptance of Israel. While the Egyptian government has sunk into domestic impasse and a sort of senile repose in foreign policy, Saudi Arabia is unprecedentedly active in the region and beyond it, sometimes supportively (as in Iraq and Lebanon) and sometimes at cross purposes (as in Palestine and Syria) with the United States, and is in the midst of domestic reforms that are little short of revolutionary in their implications. Riyadh, like the smaller Gulf Arab states, is obsessed with countering the Iranian reach for hegemony that U.S. policies have facilitated and very apprehensive about future American policies and actions in the region.

To one degree or another, all of the Arabs are reaching out to new diplomatic partners in China, India, Russia, and strengthening longstanding ties with European partners like the UK and France, in part to reduce their dependency on America. Ironically, of course, the avalanche of profits from high oil prices has boosted Arab economies and their investment capacity to levels that Wall Street cannot ignore. As the Arabs seek to distance themselves from us, American financiers have resumed their active pursuit of Arab wealth.

With Baghdad flattened, Cairo immobilized, Damascus sidelined, and the oil wealth pouring in, Riyadh has become the center of the Arab diplomatic world. Hardly a day passes without the arrival in Saudi Arabia of at least one chief of state or government who must be greeted by the 85-year-old Saudi monarch. King Abdullah handles this task with grace and dignity but his focus is elsewhere, on using the limited time available to him to rectify past developmental errors in his kingdom and to revitalize its culture and that of Islam. In this context, the resurgence of Iranian political influence in the region and Iran's apparent drive for a nuclear deterrent against American or Israeli attack are unwelcome but pressing distractions.

Saudi Arabia's politico-economic intervention in Iraq has helped divide conservative Sunni tribesmen from Al-Qaeda, slow the flow of Saudi youth to the fight, and gain the Kingdom some bargaining chips in Iraqi politics and in a putative future disengagement deal with Iran but few expect renewed stability in Iraq and fewer still see the United States as likely to contribute to its achievement. Saudi officials resent American and Israeli policies that have undercut their efforts to broker the establishment of a Palestinian government willing and able to make peace with Israel by splitting the internal wing of Hamas from the hardline ideologues in Damascus. Nor, though they have their own problems with Damascus, do they admire the inflexibility of American diplomacy toward it.

Abdullah and his advisers have not fallen for renewed American hints that we might now actually be willing to do something to induce Israel to negotiate a settlement of differences with the Palestinians that most could accept and that therefore could be endorsed by all Arabs. Having seen the peace process become a means of evading rather than pursuing the exchange of land for peace, no Arab now sees any merit in anything but establishing a firm border and hammering out an actual deal between Israel and the Palestinians. The Saudis and Egyptians are, in close coordination, demand actual progress toward peace as the price of their participation in American attempts to revive our lapsed role as peacemaker. Since the political conditions for closure of a deal do not exist on either the Israeli or the Palestinian side, the Annapolis meeting is shaping up as a huge year-end diplomatic embarrassment for the United States.

Meanwhile, there is a disturbing tendency by Americans and Arabs to hear what we want to hear when we discuss the challenges posed by Iran. Arab politesse then assures that mistaken impressions linger without correction. An example is our tendency to interpret Saudi pleas that something urgently be done to counter Iran and its nuclear weapons program as endorsement of a U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic. Some Saudi aficionados of air power may indeed wish for this but they are a distinct minority. In urging action to counter Tehran, most are simply expressing nostalgia for a past in which they routinely looked to the United States as patron-protector to come up with some way of solving problems without demanding anything of them except, perhaps, some of their money. But the U.S. now seems to have no ideas, only bombers.