While vowing to "smoke out" bin Laden, Bush's real interest was in taking down Saddam. In the end, U.S. policy toward Al Qaeda turned out to be not too different from that of Riyadh: hostility when it dared bomb the homeland, but tolerance and even approval when its activities dovetailed with U.S. foreign-policy goals.
As long as ISIS, Al Qaeda's hyper-brutal spin-off, confined itself to making life miserable for the Baathist regime in Damascus, the U.S. was thus content to look the other way. It was only when Islamic State left the reservation and attacked America's clients in Baghdad that it took umbrage.
But where U.S. officials once felt obliged to keep relations with Al Qaeda under wraps, the accelerating pace of events in the Middle East are now allowing them to speak more openly. Amid plunging oil prices, a hard-line king has taken the throne in Riyadh, an equally tough-minded prime minister has won re-election in Israel, while the U.S. is counting on an unprecedented nuclear deal to improve relations with Iran.
The effect has been to reset the rules, although not quite in ways that people expected. Where the impending deal with Iran soon led to speculation that "the most fundamental realignment of U.S. foreign policy in a generation" was underway, the reality has been the opposite as Republicans and Democrats rushed to reassure their strategic partners that the old alliance would continue undisturbed.
Thus, Netanyahu's clout on Capitol Hill has only grown while Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states have gained a free hand to do what they like with regard to the Shi'ite "crescent" supposedly threatening them from Sanaa to Beirut.
Little more than a month after his accession, King Salman met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and agreed to stepped-up support for Syria's Sunni rebels, including those with ties to Al Qaeda that had previously been beyond the pale. Instead of boycotting such groups as the U.S. demanded, the new approach was to support Al Nusra and other such forces on the grounds that they were the only ones capable of getting the job done.
The upshot came a couple of weeks later when Al Nusra and Ahrar al Sham announced the formation of a new coalition known as the Army of Conquest (Jaysh al Fateh) that would include a number of smaller Islamist groups as well. In late March, the new coalition took Idlib, about 30 miles northeast of Jisr Ash-Shughur. In late April, armed with U.S.-made TOW's, it took Jisr Ash-Shughur.
Anxious to shore up relations with the Saudis in view of the impending deal with Iran, the Obama administration did not dare object. The same logic prevailed when Saudi Arabia launched its air assault on Yemen on March 25, just as the negotiations with Iran were moving into high gear. If Riyadh felt it had no choice but to subject Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, to nightly bombing raids, then the U.S. would not object either.
As a Defense Department official observed, it's "important that the Saudis know that we have an arm around their shoulder." More than a thousand Yemenis have died as a consequence, some 300,000 have been forced to flee their homes, while Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has taken advantage of the chaos to seize control of the port of Al Mukalla in the country's east and much of surrounding Hadramawt province as well.
But where the U.S. had once used drones to harry Al Qaeda regardless of the collateral damage to the surrounding civilian population, its attitude now seems distinctly blase. If the Saudis don't care about Al Qaeda's new foothold, then the U.S. doesn't care either.
As such policies drive Syria and Yemen to collapse and generate a tidal wave of refugees, the only consolation is that the Saudis may be cracking under the strain as well. With its mountainous terrain and deep tribal divisions, Yemen has long been a study in controlled chaos. But Riyadh has seemingly done everything in its power to make a bad situation worse.
As U.S. diplomats noted, the Houthi insurgency now tearing the country apart did not start on its own. To the contrary, it was a surge of Saudi-financed Wahhabist propaganda that played into the worst fears of Yemen's Shi'ite minority and put the Houthis on the warpath. As secret State Department cables noted in 2009, Saudi-backed Salafism "has spread rapidly in Yemen over the last two decades," causing Houthis to feel "increasingly threatened."
Where it was once said of the northern province of Sa'ada that it was "so Shi'a that even the stone is Shi'a," residents felt besieged by a growing profusion of Sunni-Salafist schools and mosques bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's cash-rich petro-sheiks.
Growing Saudi sectarianism fueled Houthi sectarianism and pushed the country into all-out civil war. U.S. diplomats also assailed the Saudis for attempting to impose a military solution on the Houthis rather than seeking a political settlement.
As U.S. Ambassador Stephen Seche put it in November 2009, Riyadh was foisting so much military aid on Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh -- now, ironically, a Houthi ally -- that it was inevitable that the guns would "find their way into Yemen's thriving grey arms market. " From there, it is it is anyone's guess as to where the weapons will surface, potentially even in the hands of extremist groups bent on attacking Western interests in Yemen -- and ironically, Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries in the Gulf."
"We urge the [State] Department," Seche went on, --to convey to these 'friends of Yemen' that they are undermining their goal of a stable and secure Yemen by providing large amounts of money and military assistance." It was excellent advice, but unfortunately it fell on deaf ears. Instead of less militarization, the Saudis opted for more -- with predictably disastrous consequences.
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