In one of his first public appearances as Saudi Arabia’s new ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir presided at an embassy ceremony on March 28 honoring a 99-year-old American, Joe Grant. The jovial Mr. Grant was the military pilot who delivered the DC-3 airplane that President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud at their historic 1945 meeting. He stayed on in Saudi Arabia as the king’s personal pilot, and remembers him with admiration and respect. The event honoring him was also a testimonial to the friendship between the two countries, which has endured through all the vicissitudes of Middle East history since Grant and the plane arrived in Riyadh 72 years ago. “In Saudi Arabia we have a saying,” Ambassador al-Jubeir told the gathering. “Fire warms the body and friendship warms the heart.” The appreciative Americans in attendance might have felt less comfortable had they been aware of what had happened in Riyadh a few hours earlier: the current king, Abdallah, delivered a strongly worded speech at an Arab summit conference in which he described the US military presence in Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” His words shocked Washington, for several reasons. Blunt, open criticism of the US has never been Saudi Arabia’s style; the Saudis always prefer personal and discreet diplomacy. Abdallah, then still crown prince, and President George W. Bush had seemed to put their differences behind them when they met at the president’s Texas ranch two years ago. And the Saudis have not been urging the Americans to pull out of Iraq; on the contrary, they have been telling Washington that a precipitate withdrawal now would only increase the chaos there and give the Shi’ite regime in Iran a free hand to influence Iraq’s future. “It’s outrageous, in part because it’s not illegitimate,” sputtered Richard Haass, a former senior State Department official who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, in a CNN interview. “We’re there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is not an occupation in the sense of anything that’s enforced. More important, the Saudis know full well that they want us there, and they have been one of those who have been cheerleading against Congress and others who have been seen to somehow have been pulling out the rug and leading the United States to a hasty withdrawal … They don’t want us to leave.” “It’s clear I think to everyone at the invitation of the legitimate Iraq government and that presence has been endorsed and given a mandate specifically by the UN Security Council and that mandate has been renewed several times,” said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman. “So certainly there’s no question in our mind that our forces are there in a legal and legitimate capacity in every sense.” In plain sight. Yet Abdallah’s harsh words should not have come as a surprise. It has been apparent for months that the Saudis were putting distance between themselves and the US on several Middle East issues, charting their own course even when the Americans disapproved. The Saudis brokered the Mecca agreement between the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas, which the US has tried to isolate. The result was the formation of a coalition government that frustrated American efforts to get peace negotiations started again - and may have made Washington’s diplomacy irrelevant. The Saudis invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Riyadh even as the US and Israel were pressing other countries to shun him and isolate his country. The Saudis have talked to Hezbollah about the political crisis in Lebanon and to Syria about Lebanon and Iraq, both over the objections of Washington. And Washington’s discomfort was intensified because these events came after a period of intense but futile speculation in Washington about what was really going on inside Saudi Arabia’s ruling family - speculation sparked by the abrupt and still unexplained departure last fall of the previous ambassador, Prince Turki bin Faisal, the brother of Foreign Minister Saudi al-Faisal, and by the brief and equally unexplained visit to Riyadh of Vice President Dick Cheney. Washington’s small coterie of Saudi-watchers seemed convinced that some upheaval was imminent inside Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, and that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who preceded Prince Turki as ambassador and has been close to the Bush family, was orchestrating it. But there was no upheaval in Riyadh, and Foreign Minister Saud and the oil minister, Ali Naimi - both believed in Washington to be on the way out - were reappointed to their cabinet positions last month. The true upheaval has come from King Abdallah’s decision to go his own way in regional affairs, leaving the US out of the loop. Real world. Abdallah has recognized that he and his country have to live in the real world of the Middle East, not in the imaginary Middle East that exists in the minds of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a make-believe world in which people will behave better if sent to their rooms like pouty schoolchildren. Abdallah has decided that somebody has to try to steer the Arabs out of the violence and political impotence that has come to define their world, and he is positioning himself to be that person. For that reason, he could hardly have said anything about Iraq other than what he did to a gathering of Arab leaders. He was not in a position to say publicly that he wanted the Americans to stay in Iraq; even those who privately agreed with him would have had to dismiss him as a lackey of the White House or a captive of the Bush family. By establishing his independence from Washington on this issue, he was more credible as he delivered the rest of his summit remarks, which were actually more interesting and provocative even if they attracted less attention in Washington. He told the delegates that the mess in which the Arab world finds itself is their own fault. Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, wherever he looked, “the real blame should fall on us, the leaders of the Arab nations. Our permanent differences, our refusal to take the path of unity - all of that led the nations to lose their confidence in our credibility and to lose hope in our present and future.” This was courageous talk in an environment where bad news is routinely attributed to outside forces - the CIA did it, or Mossad, or the “Crusaders.” “Disunity is not our fate, nor are we condemned to backwardness as an inescapable fate,” Abdallah told the delegates. “The Almighty God has bestowed dignity upon us and given us brains to differentiate between truth and falsehood and a conscience that differentiates between good and evil … The first step on the path of salvation is the restoration of confidence in ourselves and in each other. Once confidence is restored, it will be accompanied by credibility. And if credibility is restored, then the winds of hope will blow. And when that happens, we will never allow any forces from outside the region to design the future of the region. Then no banner other than that of Arabism will hover over Arab land. God Almighty says in the Holy Koran: ‘Never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves.’ I call upon you, starting with myself, to have a new beginning aimed at uniting our hearts and closing our ranks. I call upon all of you to embark on a continuous march until our nations’ goals of unity, dignity, and prosperity are achieved. Such goals are not difficult to attain by the will of God Almighty and the determination of faithful men.” What was the goal for the Arab world that Abdallah set out here? It was not democracy or human rights reform of any of the other well-intentioned objectives so dear to Americans. It was that “no banner other than that of Arabism will hover over Arab land,” an objective that would reinforce the influence of Abdallah and Saudi Arabia and diminish that of outside powers, including of course the US. New course. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud, said in a revealing interview with Newsweek that Abdallah was driven to seek a new course by his sense that disaster was coming upon the Arabs and they had no choice but to seize the initiative to save themselves. The clear implication was that the answers did not lie in American diplomacy, which it was therefore time to cast aside. “It’s all of these things together,” Saud said, referring to Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinians and the growing power of Iran, “the feeling that in the Arab world things are happening as if there are no people in the region who have their own separate will, that there are no people in the region who can protect their own interests, or even their own territory. And added to this there was this internecine fighting between the Palestinians themselves, which really, I think, created in the king a feeling that disaster was going to happen in the Arab world, that unless we grasp our fate in our hands and move forward to resolve our own problems, we’re going to be just a people that once were there and are no longer there.” The king, he said, was in “a very emotional state” over the infighting between Palestinian factions. “He just couldn’t believe that Palestinian guns are turned against Palestinian people and blood is shed and people are killed and children are orphaned by them fighting against each other while they’re facing such horrendous treatment from the Israelis. He just couldn’t take that.” In the face of such feelings, what was the importance of the US desire to keep Hamas out of the Palestinian government? What was the value of deferring to American diplomacy in the region? Abdallah has given his answer.

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