NEWSWEEK: What do you think the odds are right now that there will be a war in Iraq? PRINCE SAUD: We are not people who believe the United States wants war regardless of what the considerations are, and I think the president has shown wisdom and patience in his policy. This is why we have optimism that war can be avoided.
Do you think that there is a struggle underway in Saudi Arabia between what could generally be called the Wahhabi forces versus the more moderate forces in society? [Foreign] newspapers view Saudi Arabia as a country seething with people frustrated because they want development, and the government is blocking all sorts of reform. It is the other way around. You go around the country and see that it is the government that wants to move in all these directions, but it is not going to move by forcing a revolution from the top. It is going to move at the speed the social structure [will allow]. We don’t want to break the social contract of the country by forcing on people things that they don’t want to do.
But do you think the public supports the [anti-vice police’s] enforcing certain social traditions in the way that it does? Not blindly. People are religious here. This is undoubtedly true. But this is not bad. I mean, why is this considered an evil thing? And extremists are not only in Saudi Arabia. Historically there have been firebrands everywhere. You go to the Bible Belt in the United States, and you hear religious people talking perhaps in the same language that religious people are talking in here–hell and damnation and things of that sort.
What are some of the steps your government is taking now to fight terrorism? We have arrested and questioned close to 3,000 people. Some of them who are guilty are still incarcerated. We have frozen assets for those [charities] linked with terrorist organizations. Saudi Arabia and the United States maintain a counterterrorism committee that not many people know about, comprised of intelligence and law-enforcement personnel who meet regularly to share information and resources.
Don’t these acts of cooperation and good faith get undermined when your ambassador to Great Britain praises suicide bombers? He is talking about the Palestinian question. There is poetic license in this, in order to identify the damage and injury that is being done to the Palestinian people.
But can you understand how the American public might say, “Well, is there that much of a distinction between being willing to kill innocent civilians in Israel and being willing to kill innocent civilians in the United States?” No. There is a difference. I mean, what are the Palestinians supposed to do? Just tie their hands behind their back and say, “We won’t retaliate”? We think it is the worst kind of reaction that the Palestinians can have because it does injury to their cause more than it does benefit. But in the final analysis, how can you stop it?
Then Americans see Prince Nayef [the powerful Saudi Interior minister] quoted as saying, “Well, September 11 was all a Zionist plot.” I can tell you now that the position of the government of Saudi Arabia is that these people [the hijackers] were Saudis and were planted by Osama bin Laden, not by anybody else, in order to create an air of suspicion between the two sides and to drive a wedge between us.
Do you think that Prince Nayef should apologize for having left a different impression? He was speculating. I mean, why is it all right for an official in some other country to speculate about the implications of Saudi Arabia with Osama bin Laden and not allowed for an official here to speculate on somebody who may gain from the act?
Why do you think that Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace plan [for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] has not gotten more traction in the Middle East? Because of the position that Israel has taken. For example, what is happening with the “road map” that the United States was supposed to bring out now? Who is stopping that? Is it the Arab countries that are stopping that? It is Israel.
But wouldn’t it have helped advance the process if Islamic Jihad and Hamas had embraced Crown Prince Abdullah’s plan? They were on the verge of signing a document renouncing violence when the Israelis bombed the headquarters of Hamas. We have said that if this peace is achieved, immediately there will be a signature to end hostilities between all the Arab countries and Israel, complete normalization of relations between Israel and all the Arab countries. What are the Arab countries going to offer more than that?
