LONDON, 2 September — As the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11 last year approaches, emotions understandably remain highly charged.
The dignity of the victims and their families (from many countries, nationalities and creeds) on the one hand seem to be undermined by right wing hawks in or close to the Bush administration who have their own political and economic agenda, and on the other hand by the sporadic anti-Western terrorist attacks by perceivedly Islamic extremist groups as in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
A recent report by an analyst at the Rand Corporation who is not even a Saudi or Gulf specialist, presented to a Pentagon advisory group chaired by Richard Perle, that arch hawk and proponent of “Israeli foreign policy by proxy” by the Bush administration, labeled Saudi Arabia “as the kernel of evil” and warned that the Kingdom should be treated as an enemy because it was a prime sponsor of terrorism. The report recommended that the US should demand that Riyadh crack down on its Islamic extremists or risk seizure of its oil fields.
A few days later lawyers acting for a group of family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks filed a suit against Saudi Arabia alleging that the Kingdom indirectly was complicit in these attacks and seeking damages totaling $300 billion under a law that enables US citizens to sue foreign governments involved in terrorism.
Both these events have caused an outcry with Secretary of State Colin Powell scurrying to limit the diplomatic damage unleashed by the hawks in the Defense Department and their cronies, by assuring Riyadh that the Rand Corporation Report is not administration policy. There are those who maintain that the report was leaked deliberately to undermine Powell and the State Department, who are perceived as being too soft on the fight against international terrorism.
These events have resulted in a frenzy of reports and misinformation such as Saudis having repatriated $200 billion from the US in protest against this anti-Saudi, anti-Arab, and anti-Islam campaign, which perceivedly started even before 9/11 but came under much greater scrutiny after the tragic events. Saudi lawyers have also filed countersuits against the US government on behalf of Saudi citizens claiming various damages. Some Saudi economists have called on the Kingdom to diversify its exports away from a near total dependence on the US and Western markets; and much fewer Saudi students are studying at US universities and colleges.
The war of words (and policies) do not come free of charge. The economic costs of Saudi-US relations post-9/11 are piling up fast, and they are tilting heavily in favor of Riyadh. A few weeks ago, some Saudi commentators warned against the Arab penchant to throw money at problems and to buy public opinion through ill-judged PR campaigns.
The news last week from the US was not encouraging on this front. According to a report in the New York Times last Wednesday titled “Saudis try to improve image in US” written by Christopher Marquis, despite embarking on a long-term lobbying strategy and spending millions on PR campaigns aimed at ordinary Americans in various metropolitan areas across the country, to project the Kingdom as a long-standing ally and friend of the US going back over 60 years, the publicity campaign “has failed to improve Saudi standing among Americans.”
The paper citing a poll conducted last week by Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates, a predominantly Republican firm, “found that Americans’ negative opinion of Saudi Arabia had surged to 63 percent, from 50 percent in May.”
Yet the dreaded Arab media campaign in the US and the West shows very little signs of abating. The Arab League, that giant of an instrument of Arab unity, is raising $10 million for a major media campaign to right the distorted image of the Arabs and Islam in the West. Later this month, the General Council for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions, based in Bahrain and chaired by Saleh Kamel, will hold an Islamic banking conference at the Capitol Hilton in Washington ostensibly “to educate US policy makers about the stability and soundness of Islamic financial institutions” and to increase public awareness of Islamic banking. This conference is part of $2 million campaign which a US PR company is handling on behalf of the council.
Judging by the program, it is like preaching to the converted. The participation of US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill remains unconfirmed. In fact, he was the only US official on the speaker list, although William J. McDonough, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank, New York is down as an invited lunch time speaker. Other VIPs including senators and congressmen have been invited to attend.
It is rather strange that US banks such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, who are the backbone of handling short-term Islamic banking funds, are conspicuously absent. As if they had never heard of the phenomenon. In fact, it was Citibank which way back in 1983 structured the first Islamic finance deal (for Shell Malaysia) that heralded the start of the involvement of Western banks in a nascent Islamic banking movement.
Some of the topics are the same old tried, tested, and failed. This goes for some of the speakers as well, with the notable exceptions of the likes of Dr. Zeti Akhtar, governor of Bank Negara (the Malaysian central bank); Atif Abdel Malik, CEO of First Islamic Investment Bank, which has an investment exposure to the US real estate and direct equity markets of over $1 billion; Mike McMillen, Partner in the US law firm King & Spalding, who has pioneered Islamic project finance structures; and one or two others. This lack of imagination is a microcosm of the lack of imagination that the Arab and Muslim countries and organizations in general display per se, especially when they are on the back foot. If the conference succeeds in bringing Prince Muhammed Al-Faisal, head of Dar Al Maal Al Islami (DMI), and Saleh Kamel, head of the Dallah AlBaraka Group, the two pioneering Islamic financial groups, to the same platform, then that in itself would be a major achievement.
Lobbying like charity and reform should begin at home. When I asked a Gulf banker recently why he and his colleagues did not lobby the government and parliament over the delay in the implementation of new banking law, he looked at me rather bemused, stressing “we do not lobby politicians in this country. It is unheard of.”
Lobbying is also a double edged sword. No sooner do you try to improve your image abroad and you have an incident at home where a group of innocent young girls are needlessly burnt to death because some people refused to let them come out of a school because they were not covered from head-to-toe. At an instant all the publicity money can buy is negated.
Lobbying and PR campaigns carry a huge cost. What Saudi Arabia, for instance, has been spending is nothing compared to others in the US, whose democracy is in danger of being undermined and corrupted by the lobbyists and moneyed interest groups. In the first half of 2001, according to the New York Times, the Kingdom spent only $256,770 on two lobbying firms. By contrast, during the same period, Israel spent $5.1 million on eight firms and Japan spent $24.6 million on 58 firms.
It would be naive to assume that it is because of a measly $5 million that Israel commands such pre-eminence and support by successive US administrations.
The sooner the Arab and Muslim countries realize that it is not PR campaigns that shape your image abroad, but reforms, attitudes, accountability, justice, and transparency at home, the better.