The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia led to a relationship between the Saudis and Americans that made all the sense in the world and, at the same time, no sense at all. Economically, it was a dynamic and effective model. The Americans were able to purchase more oil as car ownership in the United States escalated throughout the 20th century, meanwhile the Saudis were able to take that money and use it to buy all the latest products and technology from the Americans and transform their country from a pre-industrial kingdom a bustling modern civilization (complete, today, with Starbucks, McDonalds, and shopping malls). Making all this happen, however, meant situating thousands of American civilians in a country in which they simply did not fit. Veteran Middle East scholar and journalist Thomas Lippman's Inside the Mirage examines the 70-year history of the Saudi-American relationship. While he touches on the troubling issues that came to light after the events of 9/11, Lippman's exploration of the quasi-suburban world inhabited by American employees and their families proves most fascinating. Many Americans profiled seem to have been transported out of an old episode of Leave it to Beaver and dropped, in tact, in the middle of a desert nation, dwelling in cordoned off communities and having little contact with the Saudis outside of what was professionally necessary. Cultural and religious differences provide stark contrast between the Americans and the fundamental form of Islam practiced by the Saudi royal family and prevalent throughout the kingdom. These differences combined with the inherent pressures of great wealth and big business to form a relationship that is vitally important to both countries but that was tenuous to begin with and, as Lippman explains has remained so ever since. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
With nearly two decades of experience writing about Saudi Arabia for the Washington Post as a Middle East bureau chief and national security correspondent, Lippman is as effective on today's street-level perspective as he is on a nearly century-long history of political and economic alliances between Saudis and Americans. While "Riyadh is just like Phoenix" on the surface, he proposes, Saudi Arabians have a radically different mindset that often includes resentment over what they perceive as American interference with their way of life. His insightful journalism points to a frayed relationship that may get worse before it gets better. B&w photos, 1 map not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, most Americans couldn't tell the difference between Wahhabism and wasabi. Following the attacks on Washington and New York, Americans quickly began to learn about Saudi Wahhabism because of several unpalatable facts: Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi; Saudi charities and individuals funded al Qaeda; militant Saudi clerics provided theological ballast for Osama bin Laden's anti-American fatwas, and the Saudi government had long obstructed U.S. inquiries into terrorism emanating from its country. And bin Laden himself is a product of the Saudi system, a system that is in deep crisis. Despite floating on top of the world's largest oil reserves, Saudi Arabia has dire problems: Average annual income has dropped from around $20,000 to $8,000 in the past two decades; half the population are teenagers, many of whom are unlikely to have jobs in the future; in the past year, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Riyadh, and a series of massive truck bombs rocked the capital, killing dozens. You don't have to be an Arab Tocqueville to predict that the House of Saud, the only clan in the world to have embedded its family name in a country, must reform substantially or go the way of the Hapsburgs. (An instructive factoid about the glacial pace of reform in the Saudi kingdom: Slavery was abolished in 1962.)After Sept. 11 a number of books were published seeking to illuminate Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque societies on Earth, where even such seemingly basic facts as its population are murky. Former CIA officer Robert Baer penned Sleeping With the Devil, a breezy, anecdotal account of the troubled U.S.-Saudi marriage of convenience. The Sufi journalist Stephen Schwartz wrote The Two Faces of Islam, a jeremiad against Wahhabism, while Dore Gold, a former high-ranking Israeli diplomat, contributed a probing analysis of Wahhabist influence on al Qaeda in Hatred's Kingdom. All of these books painted a deeply unflattering portrait of the House of Saud. Another source of damaging information about the Saudis has been a massive lawsuit filed by many of the Sept. 11 victims' families against various Saudi institutions and individuals for allegedly colluding to help fund al Qaeda. Adding to the tidal wave of negative publicity about the Saudis was the Bush administration's decision to redact 28 pages of last year's congressional report on Sept. 11 that explored possible Saudi links to the attacks, which only served to heighten the sense that the Saudis have much to answer for. Now comes former Washington Post reporter Thomas W. Lippman, who provides an even-handed and well-researched history of the U.S.-Saudi "fragile partnership" in Inside the Mirage. (Note to publishers: Time to retire the "mirage" cliché in future books about the Arabs.) Lippman's book is a quite different proposition from much of the recent post-Sept. 11 coverage of the Saudis. Tellingly, the first time that Lippman mentions the word "terrorism" is more than 300 pages into his narrative, which traces the Saudi-American alliance from its emergence after the birth of the Saudi kingdom in 1932 and the signing a year later of the first oil-prospecting agreement with Standard Oil of California. Lippman skillfully excavates the subsequent Saudi-American modus vivendi in the mid-20th century, a period that now seems as remote and innocent as a flickering home movie from Eisenhower's America. Lippman has done pioneering research on the early days of Aramco, the American company that more or less single-handedly created the oil business in Arabia. Some of the pictures he has found to illustrate that era are as eloquent as the interviews he conducted with the Americans who lived in the Saudi kingdom at the time: black-and-white photos of happy American faces at an Aramco cocktail party in 1950 (no Arabs in view), Aramco wives from the same year kicking up their heels in can-can dresses at some amateur theatrical event and Aramco executives dressed in sober suits sitting down in a tent to share a "goat grab" with their Saudi hosts. While detailing the partnership that the Saudis and Americans forged to create Aramco, Lippman reports on a parallel development: the hitherto unexplored story of how Americans working for Trans World Airlines (TWA) "enabled the Saudis to move from camel travel to jet travel in virtually no time" and in the process created Saudi Arabian Airlines, one of the most professional airlines in the region.This is all interesting stuff, but Lippman, perhaps in an effort to present a more balanced account of the Saudis than we have heard since Sept. 11, treats the issue of terrorism only in a somewhat cursory chapter at the end of his book. As a result readers of the book would not know that even a year after Sept. 11 Prince Nayef, the powerful interior minister, was publicly blaming Zionists, rather than his own citizens, for the attacks on Washington and New York; or that the Saudis started to cooperate with the Sept. 11 investigation only a year and half after the attacks (and then only after al Qaeda had launched suicide attacks in Riyadh); or that significant opposition to the American military presence in the kingdom following the first Gulf War came not only from bin Laden and some radical clerics but also from members of a significant Saudi political movement; or that the Saudis seem not to have arrested any of the mentors or associates of the 15 hijackers who were Saudis. Of course Lippman can't cover everything in his book, but all of the facts in this paragraph surely have some bearing on the yawning cultural and political gulf that exists between the Saudis and the United States, a gulf laid bare by the Sept. 11 attacks. That said, he has contributed valuable on-the-ground reporting about a country that remains largely an enigma. Reviewed by Peter BergenCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
The House of Saud has, ever since its patriarch Abdul Aziz ibn Saud named Arabia after himself in 1932, depended on the U.S. for industrial, financial, and military expertise. But with the relationship now visibly strained, its 70-year existence bears the review that Lippman's survey provides. The author, a former Washington Post journalist now ensconced at a Beltway think tank, describes Ibn Saud's invitation of Americans to his country, the ensuing establishment of the fabled oil consortium Aramco, and the quasi-governmental functions this and other entities, such as the Ford Foundation, performed in Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have worked and lived there; their experiences dominate the incidents Lippman relates, which he frames in terms of a modern culture clash with Wahhabism, the fundamentalist Islam that the Saudis enforce. American readers contemplating a spell of work in the kingdom would positively benefit from Lippman's tour of their predecessors' history there, although the oil politics that underlie the U.S.-Saudi link are not probed. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has always been a marriage of convenience, not affection. In a bargain cemented by President Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia's founding king in 1945, Americans gained access to Saudi oil, and the Saudis sent the dollars back with purchases of American planes, American weapons, American construction projects, and American know-how that brought them modernization, education, and security. The marriage has suited both sides. But how long can it last?

In Inside the Mirage, veteran Middle East journalist Thomas W. Lippman shows that behind the official proclamations of friendship and alliance lies a complex relationship that has often been strained by the mutual aversion of two very different societies. Today the U.S.-Saudi partnership faces its greatest challenge as younger Saudis, less enamored of America, rise to prominence and Americans, scorched by Saudi-based terrorism, question the value of their ties to the desert kingdom.

SYNOPSIS

Written by a former Washington Post bureau chief, this text for scholars and the general reader explores the complicated relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia from the first oil exploration agreement in 1933 to the terrorism of 2003. Drawing upon archival materials and his own observations in Saudi Arabia, Lippman shows how members of two very different cultures have managed to work together for their mutual benefit. Lippman is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Lippman skillfully excavates the subsequent Saudi-American modus vivendi in the mid-20th century, a period that now seems as remote and innocent as a flickering home movie from Eisenhower's America. Lippman has done pioneering research on the early days of Aramco, the American company that more or less single-handedly created the oil business in Arabia. Some of the pictures he has found to illustrate that era are as eloquent as the interviews he conducted with the Americans who lived in the Saudi kingdom at the time: black-and-white photos of happy American faces at an Aramco cocktail party in 1950 (no Arabs in view), Aramco wives from the same year kicking up their heels in can-can dresses at some amateur theatrical event and Aramco executives dressed in sober suits sitting down in a tent to share a "goat grab" with their Saudi hosts. — Peter Bergen

Publishers Weekly

With nearly two decades of experience writing about Saudi Arabia for the Washington Post as a Middle East bureau chief and national security correspondent, Lippman is as effective on today's street-level perspective as he is on a nearly century-long history of political and economic alliances between Saudis and Americans. While "Riyadh is just like Phoenix" on the surface, he proposes, Saudi Arabians have a radically different mindset that often includes resentment over what they perceive as American interference with their way of life. His insightful journalism points to a frayed relationship that may get worse before it gets better. B&w photos, 1 map not seen by PW. 40,000 first printing. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Lippman tracks the evolution of U.S.-Saudi relations by stringing together smaller stories: the pioneering American oilmen in the 1930s, the garrison-like life in what became Aramco, the U.S. role in developing Saudi Arabia Airlines, the always tense relations between non-Muslim Americans and the Saudi state and society, the Americans who helped develop Saudi national parks. In the final few chapters, he discusses the strategic ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia, especially since the stationing of U.S. troops there in the Persian Gulf War. Lippman's approach works: his account is readable and informative, combining the seemingly disjointed stories into a balanced account of this long-term relationship between two such different states and societies.

Library Journal