Saudi envoy defends Iraq role

One day after the Iraq Study Group report chastised Saudi Arabia for being "passive and disengaged" in finding a way out of the conflict in Iraq, the kingdom's ambassador to the United States defended his government's policy and said it wants to work with Iraq's neighbors to find a solution to the ongoing war.

"Saudi Arabia has already been acting," Prince Turki al-Faisal said yesterday in an interview with The Daily Princetonian shortly before he delivered a lecture at the Wilson School. "We have not waited [for] the Iraq Study Group to make these recommendations for us to act." (Read the full transcript of his interview.)

The bipartisan committee, charged with the difficult task of crafting a strategy for success in Iraq, was co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker '52. Among its 79 recommendations, the group called for Saudi Arabia, a majority Sunni Muslim country, to support reconciliation efforts between Iraq's minority Sunni community with the majority Shia sect. The group also called for Saudi Arabia to support efforts to keep Iraq a unified nation and to help eliminate al Qaeda factions in its northern neighbor.

"Our main interest is in stabilizing the situation in Iraq and maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq," Prince Turki said. "And it would be counter to our interest to have a continually disturbed Iraq, whether it is through sectarian or ethnic violence."

"The violence in Iraq today is driven by political ambition, not by sectarian or ethnic reasons," he added, "and the political ambition used sectarian and ethnicity for their purposes. So that is why I said a political solution from inside Iraq is the only way we can solve this problem, not military, and definitely not one whereby one sect or another can be described as becoming dominant in Iraq."

Some observers were skeptical of the ambassador's claims. Edmund Hull, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 2001 through 2004, indicated that a strong Sunni presence in the region is a priority for the kingdom. "I think Saudi Arabia is clearly going to do its best to bolster more Sunni forces in the Middle East," Hull said in an interview.

Prince Turki, who became the Saudi envoy to the United States in 2005 after serving as the country's foreign minister and intelligence chief, is no stranger to Princeton. At age 14, his father, the late King Faisal, sent him to the nearby Lawrenceville School. Turki graduated from Lawrenceville in 1963 and attended Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Government, where he was a classmate of former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

At his lecture, Prince Turki highlighted a variety of issues facing the Kingdom today and stressed that educational reform will be vital for the country's future success. "Intolerance, violence and extremism are not part of our Islamic culture, nor are they part of our Islamic faith," he told a capacity crowd in Dodds Auditorium, adding that "Saudi Arabia is heavily investing in its educational system to prepare its citizens for life and work in a global economy."

'Palestinian tragedy'

In his speech, Turki urged an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, calling on both parties to stop the violence and begin talks aimed at the creation of a two-state solution.

He lamented the suffering Palestinians have been subjected to at the hands of the Israelis. "The Palestinian tragedy is truly one of vast human scale," he said, referencing the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the difficulty of traveling to and from work.

Though he said Israeli citizens also faced disruptions in their daily lives, he urged the Bush administration to consider the peace plan put forth in 2002 by King Abdullah. Under the plan, Arab nations would extend total peace to Israel in recognition of full Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab territories occupied since 1967, in implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Israel would also accept an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

"The U.S. has become so enmeshed in our part of the world ... Your officials can affect our lives in Saudi Arabia so immediately, that we think we should have the right to vote," Turki said, adding to laughter that in return, "we'll give you the right to vote in our elections."