From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Jul 21 2009 - 01:31:19 EDT
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/17/revisiting_obamas_riyadh_meeting
Ricks : Drezner : Walt : Rothkopf : Lynch
Revisiting Obama's Riyadh meeting
Fri, 07/17/2009 - 5:46pm
U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia are always something of a proverbial black
box. And President Barack Obama's meeting with Saudi King Abdullah last
month was no exception. A late add-on to Obama's planned June itinerary to
Egypt, Germany, and France and conducted at King Abdullah's horse ranch
outside of Riyadh, the June 3 meeting was quickly overtaken by coverage of
Obama's high-profile June 4 speech to the Muslim world from Cairo.
But two sources, one a former U.S. official who recently traveled there and
one a current official speaking anonymously, say the meeting did not go
well from Obama's perspective. What's more, the former official says that
Dennis Ross has told associates that part of what prompted Obama to bring
him on as his special assistant and NSC senior director for the "Central
Region" last month was the president's feeling that the preparation for the
trip was insufficient. The White House vigorously disputes all of that,
some of which was previously reported by the New York Times.
Sources say Obama was hoping to persuade the king to be ready to show
reciprocal gestures to Israel, which Washington has been pushing to halt
settlements with the goal of advancing regional peace and the creation of a
Palestinian state.
"The more time goes by, the more the Saudi meeting was a watershed event,"
said the former U.S. official who recently traveled to Riyadh. "It was the
first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was
not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of
persuasion."
"The bottom line is that the Saudis were not prepared," the former official
continued, for Obama to ask them to take steps toward Israel. Obama changed
his trip to go to Saudi Arabia, he pointed out.
"Senior sources in the Saudi national security team," he said, "think the
president's trip was poorly prepared." From their perspective, "he was
coming and asking them for big favors with no preparation," but "the Saudis
never give big" in that situation.
The former official said that Ross has told associates that Obama was
"upset" about the meeting "because he got nothing out of it." Ross didn't
respond to a query.
The former official said Ross's move to the NSC was in discussion before
the Riyadh summit. "But the meeting may have been 'the final straw,' he
said. "People at the NSC will obviously strenuously dispute that, but
Dennis Ross is saying it to everybody. That's his narrative about the NSC
and I have heard it from a number of people."
Another official, speaking not for attribution, said last month that the
85-year-old Saudi monarch had launched a tirade during Obama's long meeting
in Riyadh, and that other Saudi officials had later apologized to the U.S.
president for the king's behavior. The official seemed to imply that the
tirade was related to Israel, and that the king may be showing his age.
The Obama administration pushed back hard on those allegations about the
meeting, and said furthermore that the sources could not know what went on.
"It was a very small group of folks who planned that trip," a White House
official said, disputing every aspect of the accounts. "The Saudi addition
came on late."
The meeting included the two principals -- the king and Obama -- plus two
advisors each, the White House official said. So "only four people" beyond
the two leaders "know the real story," the White House official continued.
"It was deliberately designed to continue building their relationship and
not to bring home deliverables," and any source who says differently is
"making things up."
Among those involved in the prep work, he said, were three top White House
foreign-policy advisors: deputy national security advisor and chief of
staff Mark Lippert, deputy national security advisor for strategic
communications Denis McDonough, and White House counterterrorism chief John
Brennan, who previously served as CIA station chief in Riyadh.
"I can't imagine Obama pressing the Israelis on settlements without
expecting the Arabs to do something," University of Vermont Saudi and
Persian Gulf expert F. Gregory Gause told Foreign Policy, while saying he
had no specific knowledge about the meeting. "He is pushing the Israelis,
but he wants to show that in pushing them, it's also bringing the Arabs
closer" to peace with Israel. "He wants the Saudis to make some gesture to
make it easier for the Israelis to stop settlements."
"And my reading of the Saudis," Gause continued, "is they are not
interested. We can criticize. But their line on this is, ‘We have done
that already and gotten nothing. We did that in 2002 with the Abdullah
peace plan and renewed it in 2007, and got the entire Arab league to sign
on. Now why do more? We did that and got nothing.'"
Former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman said he is not
surprised there may have been different expectations for the meeting. "I
spoke to the king's advisors on the topic not long after the meeting, and
they thought it went extremely well," Freeman told Foreign Policy. However,
Freeman continued, "From the American side, Washington has repeatedly
misunderstood or been deluded about the Saudis on issues connected with
Iran and Israel. The notion that somehow or other the Saudis will turn a
blind eye to an Israeli strike on Iran -- it does not compute."
Freeman also said Riyadh would reject the idea that an Israeli halt in
settlement building "would bring forward some gesture from the Arabs."
"They have been around this road again and again with Madrid and Oslo,"
Freeman said. The Saudi-led Arab peace initiative of 2002 is very carefully
framed, he explained. "If the Israelis and Palestinians work out something
mutually acceptable whatever it was ... then this would be rewarded by
wholesale normalization of relations between the Arab world and Israel."
But in Riyadh it's seen as a "bonus," Freeman continued, or an
all-or-nothing proposition. "Not something to dicker over."
A Washington Middle East hand said on condition of anonymity that that may
very well be the position of the Saudis, but it was not one that Washington
had to accept as immutable and that Obama was perfectly wise to try to
cultivate a relationship with the leadership and discuss these issues over
time.
Obama's experience in Riyadh may be one factor prompting what some analysts
see as recent adjustments and tonal shifts in the Obama administration's
articulation of its Middle East policy.
"We don't know if sending more junior people before [Obama's] trip would
have meant that the path would have been paved and everything would have
been teed up for the presidential visit," said David Makovsky, senior
fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and coauthor with
Ross of a new book on U.S. policy toward the Middle East, Myths, Illusions
and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East. It's
perhaps possible that better prep work, he said, might have made Riyadh
more amenable to a presidential request for tangible, confidence-building
measures, or alternatively, that it would have tipped the White House off
that the Saudis were prepared to offer nothing but "the back of their
hand."
"If he'd known that in advance, the president would probably not have
visited," Makovsky said.
He described Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech this week as
demonstrating "a kind of recalibration of the Obama administration's
approach," making clear that "the president has expectations on both
sides," as opposed to chiefly on the Israelis to halt settlements.
"Progress toward peace cannot be the responsibility of the United States --
or Israel -- alone," Clinton said Wednesday. "Ending the conflict requires
action on all sides.... Arab states have a responsibility to support the
Palestinian Authority with words and deeds, to take steps to improve
relations with Israel, and to prepare their publics to embrace peace and
accept Israel's place in the region. The Saudi peace proposal, supported by
more than 20 nations, was a positive step. But we believe that more is
needed. So we are asking those who embrace the proposal to take meaningful
steps now."
"When the secretary of state says she needs [Arab states'] help in word and
deed and that the Arab peace initiative is just a beginning and there is
much more to do," Makovsky said, "this administration is trying to resist
easy characterizations that they are only leaning on one side."