To understand what happened, we should generally begin with very open-ended questions in order to avoid excluding crucial areas of investigation. Gradually, one focuses on hypotheses. A hypothesis is not a fact. It is a basis for fact-checking.
Think back to 9/11. The very idea of Saudi complicity got short shrift. We noticed that there were Saudis in the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the middle of Pennsylvania. But a number of Saudis were immediately allowed to leave the U.S. by air, even while other planes were grounded. The 9/11 Commission noted that charities sponsored by the Saudi government probably funded the attacks. But then the connection largely disappeared from public view and the focus turned to Osama bin Laden. That’s not a great recipe for finding out what happened. The hypothesis was too narrow at the start – Saudi Arabia, friend; Osama bin Laden, enemy.
It’s past time to investigate the assumption that Saudi Arabia was a friend. Saudi Arabia was selling us oil and we were selling them arms. But commercial transactions don’t automatically create friends. They do encourage friendly manners in order not to roil negotiations. And they create motives to avoid antagonism which might ruin commercial arrangements. But there can also be contrary motives. In spite of the benefits of the commercial arrangements between the Saudis and the U.S., were there reasons that the Saudis might have been inclined to attack and incinerate thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, especially if the Saudi connection could be hidden and denied?
Think about the changes in the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. went to war and hasn’t yet extricated itself. Our defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eliminated a large commercial competitor of the Saudis. It meant the Saudis might be able to pump much more oil without lowering its price. It could also make the Saudis seem much more important to the U.S. once Iraq had been eliminated as a major Middle Eastern player. And if America could then be convinced that Iran had become the major Middle Eastern antagonist to the U.S., then Saudi Arabia could use this country to take out a second of its major competitors. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the French Foreign Minister in 2010,the Saudis want to "fight the Iranians to the last American." Middle East politics can be very complex and deceptive.
I don’t know whether the Saudis conspired to bring that about by attacking the U.S. My point is a more limited one. It is not beyond possibility that Saudi Arabia had motives to inflict a powerful terrorist attack on this country in order to get the U.S. to do its military bidding for them. That certainly doesn’t exclude the vicious role of Osama bin Laden. It means he could have been used by the Saudis for their own purposes. And, in all likelihood, he could have been stopped by the Saudis if they had wanted to.
The current occupant of the White House told us he is not interested in exploring the Saudi impact on American security at the cost of his and the country’s commercial relations with Saudi Arabia. But once you realize the extent of the deceit and manipulation practiced by Middle Eastern dictators, why in God's name would this country want to supply them with a single round of ammunition, much less sophisticated weapons systems, bombers and fighter airplanes, before we can be much more certain of what Saudi Arabia is and has been up to? And it also makes sense to look much more skeptically at the things we have been certain of. Is Iran, which historically had quite good relations with Israel, really the major problem, or have the Saudis been stoking enmity toward Iran in order to make Saudi Arabia the major player in the Middle East?
I don’t know. I’m not writing a text. I’m asking a question, one which lawsuits are still exploring. It hasn’t yet been satisfactorily addressed, and it should be.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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