The U.S.'s relationship with Saudi Arabia has weathered disagreements over how to rein in Iran, regime change across the Middle East and several large military adventures. Now it faces a new question, which was crystallized Friday in a speech by influential progressive Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)
"No one has a particularly credible long term strategy [for the Middle East] because it would involve facing some very uncomfortable truths -- about the nature of the fight ahead of us, and imperfections of one of our most important allies in the Middle East,” Murphy said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
The carefully worded address pointed to Saudi Arabia's backing of extremist Islamic ideology and its reckless military intervention in Yemen as evidence of the need to question unwavering U.S. support for the kingdom.
"For all the positive aspects of our alliance with Saudi Arabia, there is another side to Saudi Arabia" that America doesn't often see, Murphy said. "And it is a side that we can no longer afford to ignore as our fight against Islamic extremism becomes more focused and more complicated."
For all the positive aspects of our alliance with Saudi Arabia, there is another side.... that we can no longer afford to ignore." Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) Murphy's frank and measured critique is one of the most high-profile of its kind, evidence in itself that questioning the relationship between Washington and Riyadh is becoming less of a political heresy.
Initially rooted in a shared interest in protecting the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, the U.S.-Saudi partnership has evolved into a broad, shadowy military relationship that is difficult to fully detail.
The two countries cooperated to funnel fighters into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s, together kicked Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait during the Gulf War, and have now grown closer in the broader war against groups like al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State. The two are now supporting groups fighting in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and beyond.
Saudi Arabia has an outsized role in these efforts despite its relatively small population and weak military because it has bought more weapons from the U.S. than any other country in the world. Between 2009 and 2014, the U.S. delivered over $12 billion of weapons to the kingdom, much of which is being used in the bloody Saudi-led war in Yemen.
To Murphy, this relationship and the general assumption that it cannot be questioned has been risky and occasionally self-defeating.
It has required the U.S. to largely ignore the Saudis' decadeslong funding for fundamentalist thinking in the Muslim world -- a mindset that experts say makes communities more vulnerable to recruitment by militant groups like ISIS. "Less-well-funded governments and other strains of Islam can hardly keep up with the tsunami of money behind this export of intolerance," Murphy said, noting that the monarchy in Saudi Arabia relies heavily on its alliance with hardliners known as Wahhabis. “It is important to note the vicious terrorist groups that Americans knows by name are Sunni in derivation, [rather than Shiite, the sect of Islam most common in Iran], and greatly influenced by Wahhabi, Salafist teachings,” he said, citing an ultra-conservative form of Sunni Islam.
Murphy acknowledged that Shiite clerics supported by Iran also often invoke religion to inspire violent acts. But the U.S. does not provide Iran with billions of dollars of weapons annually or support its military endeavors.
The costs of aligning with Saudi Arabia are especially clear now because that friendship has led the White House to join the controversial Saudi campaign in Yemen. Almost 6,000 people have died there, including thousands of civilians, since Saudi Arabia launched a U.S.-supported campaign to restore the country's government last March, according to the United Nations. Some of the strikes by the Saudi-led, pro-government coalition may count as crimes against humanity, the U.N. said this week.
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