The terror exporters.(Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia)(Book Review)

Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, by Thomas W. Lippman (Westview, 354 pp., $27.50)

SAUDI ARABIA is an alien, even incomprehensible, land for Americans--closed, illiberal, and backward. And yet, so crucial has the United States been to the development of modern Saudi Arabia that in the country's flag, somewhere between the sword and the words "There is no god but God," there deserves to be stamped, "Made in the U.S.A."

In Inside the Mirage, Thomas Lippman recounts the history of the close relationship between the two countries, describing what has often been Riyadh's utter dependence on the United States. There is much to be learned from this book, and given the centrality of Saudi Arabia in the war on terror, a fair amount of it is worth learning. But for Lippman, a former Washington Post reporter and a scholar at the Arabist (and reportedly Saudi-funded) Middle East Institute, the Saudis' radical evangelism overseas is almost an afterthought, very odd considering that it has been going on for more than two decades and has had world-historical significance.

An air of nostalgia hangs about Inside the Mirage, as if Saudi Arabia could still be considered that weirdly charming country with which we have always had warm relations, disturbed only by the occasional dispute over whether or not women should be permitted to wear miniskirts. September 11th should have obliterated this attitude. Whatever the Saudis are, they aren't quaint. But that is not to say there isn't much to be remembered fondly about the relationship, as Lippman demonstrates throughout his book.

The founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz, got a favorable impression of Americans from his contacts with Christian missionary doctors and a businessman named Charles Crane, who offered to help him search his country in the early 1930s for natural resources. In Crane, Lippman writes, Aziz ran across "the same phenomenon the king had encountered in the American doctors: an infidel foreigner who was willing to help him and asked nothing in return. From that time onward, the king inclined toward American interests in economic and strategic decisions."

During World War II, the United States began to realize the oil potential in Saudi Arabia, and FDR declared the country strategically important to the U.S. A 1945 meeting between Roosevelt and Aziz aboard the USS Quincy in Egypt's Great Bitter Lake dramatized the new relationship, and its cultural contradictions. The king wanted to bring his own sheep on board for fresh killing, and his 48-person entourage insisted on sleeping in tents pitched on the deck of the USS Murphy on their way to the meeting.

The influx of American corporations over the years would be the best thing to happen to Saudi Arabia. For the longest time, the U.S. oil company Aramco was basically the Saudi treasury, department of health and human services, and department of education all rolled into one. "Inside Saudi Arabia, Aramco was a virtual government," Lippman writes. "Frozen meat and other food for the royal entourage was imported by Aramco and stored at oil company facilities ... Aramco staff translated government documents into English and company documents into Arabic. As schools opened, the company supplied textbooks and other materials about Arabian history and culture." And on and on.