(Mint Press) – The power of the Saudi oil lobby has an undeniable corrupting influence on U.S. politics. As a country that speaks of human rights and democracy promotion the world over, the U.S. continues to sell millions of dollars in weapons to a hegemonic kingdom knowing that arms will be used to violently suppress citizen demands for democracy and equal rights. The root of this hypocrisy, of course, is rooted in America’s insatiable demand for oil.
This is a three part investigation examining the breadth of Washington’s long running relationship of convenience with Riyadh by interviewing Dr. Hussein Askari, a professor of International Affairs at George Washington University, and Ali Al-Ahmed, an expert on Saudi Arabian affairs at the Gulf Institute in Washington. Two additional installments — 1. The lobby on campus, exercising soft power approaches; and 2. Fueling terror, the spread of Wahhabism at home and abroad — will accompany this introduction to the Saudi lobby.
“All of this support for illegitimate rulers will hurt U.S. interests in the long run. The whole region is turning against us,” said Askari in a recent MintPress interview. As Arab Spring uprisings continue to send shockwaves through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia remains a bedrock of stability due largely to the strong, but silent presence of the Saudi oil lobby in Washington.
By securing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for weapons, U.S. taxpayers continue to subsidize the systematic oppression of Saudi citizens and maintain robust support for finite petroleum resources that exacerbate the effects of global warming. Although not as open as the lobbying conducted by powerful Washington lobby groups such as the pro-Israel lobby and the pro-gun lobby, the effects of the duplicitous relationship threaten long-term U.S. security interests while preventing the spread of democracy to one of the most oppressive societies in the world.
The house that oil built
The development of the alliance between Washington and Riyadh began with the discovery of oil in the early 20th century.
Saudi Arabia was a desolate, impoverished country throughout British and earlier Ottoman rule of the territory. However, the discovery of oil in 1938 changed the entire economy of the country with the mass influx of petrol dollars, largely from the U.S. and multinational oil corporations.
The discovery was made by American geologists working for Standard Oil, a California company given an exploratory permit to survey the area for viable oil wells. Their findings yielded the largest oil fields known to the world at that time.
President Roosevelt solidified the relationship with Saudi Arabia in 1945 during a meeting with King Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia. The historic meeting took place on U.S. Navy cruiser Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake segment of the Suez Canal.
Since the proliferation of mass drilling, oil now accounts for 95 percent of Saudi Arabia’s exports and approximately 70 percent of government revenues. Second only to Venezuela, Saudi Arabia has the second largest known oil reserves in the world and remains a key member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil cartel.
Defining the lobby
Unlike the pro-Israel lobby which maintains a strong presence along K Street in Washington, D.C., lobbying on behalf of the Saudi regime takes a much more insidious form. Because there is no registered American Israel Public Affairs (AIPAC) equivalent for the Saudi regime, tracing the influence of the monarchy in Washington takes place noticeably in more subtle ways.
Money sent to third party PR firms and lobby groups allows the Saudi government to wield significant power, influencing the decisions of lawmakers through substantial donations to political campaigns and political action committee (PACs) advocating on behalf of a particular politician or party.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a contributor for Atlantic magazine, claims that during the first decade of the 21st century, the Saudi oil lobby contributed $100 million to lobby firms including Qorvis Communications. Goldberg reports that Qorvis reportedly received $60.3 million in funding from Saudi clients in the past decade.
Dozens of other smaller firms — including Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Boland & Madigan, Inc., Burson-Marsteller, Cambridge Associates, Ltd. and Cassidy & Associates among others — have received millions of dollars in cash payments for similar lobbying work.
The use of PR firms and lobbying groups makes it difficult to trace the exact trajectory of these lobbying dollars to specific politicians, but the effects of the lobby are abundantly clear in Washington.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the charismatic face of Saudi lobbying, developed close personal relationships with five U.S. presidents, 10 secretaries of state, 11 national security advisers and 16 sessions of Congress, according to David Ottaway, a senior scholar at the Wilson Center’s Middle East program.
Prince Bandar still wields tremendous power in his new role as director of Saudi Intelligence, a position he assumed in 2005. His power and lasting effect in Washington, according to the Economist, is unparalleled by any Arab ambassador or dignitary.
“No Arab ambassador — perhaps no ambassador — has come close to matching Prince Bandar’s influence in the American capital. At the height of his powers he was indispensable to both sides: in Mr Ottaway’s words, ‘at once the king’s exclusive messenger and the White House’s errand boy.’”
He successfully secured the purchase of AWACS surveillance aircraft during the Reagan administration despite vociferous opposition from Israel and Israeli supporters in Washington. Additionally, Prince Bandar is credited with supplying $32 million to help right-wing paramilitary death squads fight the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Like the pro-Israel lobby, there are many groups connected by extension to the influence of the main Saudi lobbying efforts. Other oil rich Gulf dictatorships, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman, have also cultivated close economic relationships with the U.S. and have in return served as well armed deterrents against Iran, a country that the U.S. sees as a growing threat to oil markets and U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.
This common aversion has drawn the U.S. and absolute monarchical governments together, the former protecting oil markets and military bases, the latter group selling national resources as a self-survival strategy aimed at protecting increasingly unpopular governments.
“The Saudis never felt that they could be as open about their lobbying as the Israel lobby,” adds Askari. However, in some areas, the Saudi government makes spending public, in areas where they can quietly buy good will and generate soft power within U.S. institutions.
Large gift giving to American colleges and universities has been a means to secure goodwill for Saudi Arabia within the classroom. While Bill Clinton was president, a donation of approximately $17 million was sent from the Saudi government to the University of Arkansas alone.
Other universities, including Harvard, the University of Southern California, Georgetown and dozens of others, have also enjoyed millions of dollars in direct funding to boost endowments and academic research programs.
These donations, on the surface, are “designed to legitimately do some good,” claims Askari. However, the donations do not come without subtle censorship of classroom and university criticism of flagrant Saudi Arabian human rights violations.
Dr. Ali Al-Ahmed, an expert on Saudi affairs for the Gulf Institute in Washington, D.C., relays a personal story in a recent MintPress interview. Al-Ahmed agreed to appear in the St. Thomas University alumni publication when asked by university officials, but, as an outspoken critic of human rights abuses by the Saudi monarchy, Al-Ahmed was later denied a spot in the publication when key Saudi donors threatened to withhold funding for the university.
The Carter Center, the Clinton Initiative and a bevy of other pet projects by former U.S. presidents and high level politicians have received millions of dollars in funding as well. This again is not a direct form of lobbying, but rather a goodwill gesture designed to generate “soft power” for the Saudi government.
Financing the spread of Wahhabism
One of the most troubling aspects of unwavering U.S. support is the spread of Wahhabism and Salifist doctrine, extreme ultra-orthodox practices within Sunni Islam, supported by the monarchy and spread through evangelical outreach to poor Muslim communities.
In addition to non-Muslims, Salafists frequently label Sufi, Shiite and moderate Sunni Muslims as “infidels” that must be oppressed. Salafist doctrine provided the spiritual inspiration for al-Qaida and the most extreme Sunni Islamic terrorist organizations.
It is no surprise that Saudi Arabia has seen one of the most brutal internal crackdowns on minority Shiite communities, including arbitrary arrests and state censorship of Shiite practices.
The U.S. has done little to stop the considerable crackdown against Shiite protesters in Bahrain, a neighboring oil producing kingdom that has seen a significant citizen uprising against the oppressive Sunni monarchy.
Using American weapons, Saudi Arabia sent 1,000 soldiers to Bahrain at behest of Bahraini King Khalifa, helping to crush the democratic citizen uprising in 2011. After briefly suspending arms sales to Manama, the U.S. resumed the $50 million sale of weapons to the Bahraini government in May despite knowledge of massive human rights violations against protesters.
Saudi Arabia has a sizable Shiite minority, constituting about 10 percent of the overall population. Residents are denied basic rights, including the right to freely practice Shiite rituals, including, most notably, the annual Ashura ritual commemorating the death of the prophet’s grandson, Hussein.
“All the Saudi Shiite want is for their government to respect their identity and treat them equally,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a 2009 interview. “Yet Saudi authorities routinely treat these people with scorn and suspicion.”
The systematic oppression extends much further. In 2011, Human Rights Watch reports that the Saudi government “banned public protests, tightened press laws, and arrested scores of peaceful rights advocates and protesters.” HRW adds, “Saudi Arabia struggles with a poorly defined and non-transparent justice system based on religion that metes out draconian sentences.”
US turns a blind eye
Despite all the talk of supporting democracy and human rights, the U.S. has shown unwavering support for a brutal absolute monarchy through the sale of robust arms packages.
In 2011, the U.S. sold a record $66.3 billion in weapons to countries abroad. Saudi Arabia bought $33.4 billion worth of arms, the most by any country in the world. The arms sold are justified as necessary security measures to deter any attacks by Iran against U.S. bases and allied countries in the Gulf. In reality, the arms prop up dictatorships and secure the smooth passage of Gulf oil to Western markets.
“What started to matter to Saudi Arabia after 1979 was Iran,” said Askari. The ascendance of a major Shiite state capable of challenging Saudi hegemony in the Gulf mattered to the royal family wary of internal revolt and revolution against the crown.
“From the start, the sale of oil has been tied to national security and keeping the Al-Saud family in power. The religious folks, the Wahhabis, do not want democracy, it’s a fact,” added an anonymous source in a recent MintPress interview.
What happens when the oil runs out?
Going forward, this convenient alliance will be challenged as oil disappears. Petroleum is a finite natural resource that cannot be extended indefinitely. Even with the advent of new horizontal drilling in offshore wells and natural gas sites that use hydraulic fracturing, the world has long passed the era of giant well discoveries yielding vast oil reserves.
A WikiLeaks report in early 2011 shows that Saudi Arabia has already reached peak oil production, meaning the world’s largest oil wells will decline in their overall output in the coming years. The classified correspondence reveals that the senior Saudi oil minister warned the U.S. that oil wells in Saudi Arabia are in fact 40 percent lower than original estimates.
With approximately 300 billion barrels less oil than originally expected, the cozy Washington-Riyadh relationship will be strained as resources vanish in the decades to come.
The myopic strategy of developing a single sector economy based on a single non-renewable resource has prevented the development of institutions that can benefit all Saudis while facilitating the long transition to a democratic government.
“If you look historically at countries that have had valuable deposits of a natural resource, countries that have good institutions have benefited. Countries that don’t have good institutions have not benefited,” said Askari.
He adds, “The reason that Saudis have not benefited is because if they had good institutions, the hegemonic leaders will be voted out. I believe, for instance, that if you look at the whole issue of development, it goes back to Adam Smith. Smith claimed that a society needed good institutions. If you rule as a king or a dictator, you have no incentive to develop good institutions. The U.S. is one of the main hindrances to this development.”
Despite all the talk of democracy promotion, Washington has historically been willing to sell the democratic aspirations of 28 million Saudi citizens for barrels of oil, arguably the most tragic externality of the nearly 80-year relationship Washington has cultivated with the Saudi monarchy.