US embassy cable - 05RIYADH9116

C O N F I D E N T I A L  RIYADH 009116 
 
 
DEPARTMENT FOR R FOR U/S KAREN HUGHES AND DINA POWELL 
DEPARTMENT ALSO FOR NEA PDAS CHENEY AND NEA/PPD FERNANDEZ 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/12/2015 
TAGS: KPAO, PGOV, PREL, PINR, ECON, SA 
SUBJECT: A PUBLIC DIPLOMACY STRATEGY FOR SAUDI ARABIA 
 
REF: A) CAIRO 9063 (B) RIYADH 4605 
 
Classified By: Ambassador James Oberwetter, reasons 1.4 (b,d) 
 
 1.  (C) SUMMARY AND INTRODUCTION: The events of 9/11 
profoundly affected the U.S.-Saudi relationship, forcing a 
rethinking of diplomacy as well as public diplomacy on both 
sides.  This rethinking found positive expression in the 
joint statements issued in Crawford following the April 
2005 visit of then-Crown Prince Abdullah and at the 
November 2005 launch of the U.S.-Saudi Strategic Dialogue 
in Jeddah.  The U.S. mission to Saudi Arabia and, we would 
argue, the U.S. government as a whole, needs to be first 
and foremost a catalyst to advance the goals set out in 
these statements, and only secondarily an entrepreneur.  We 
need to be country-specific in our approach, taking into 
account Saudi Arabia's vast intellectual poverty amidst its 
equally vast material wealth.  We must be timely in our 
response to the shifts in elite and popular Saudi opinion 
that the global media can so quickly influence, yet 
recognize that lasting change will come slowly.  This 
exceedingly conservative, deeply religious, historically 
isolated land is still struggling with the modern question 
of how far and how fast to engage with the outside world, 
and it will do so for at least another generation.  END 
SUMMARY AND INTRODUCTION. 
 
Bringing More Saudi Students to the U.S. 
---------------------------------------- 
 
2.  (C) A Flood of Saudi Students: Sixty years have passed 
since the establishment of the modern U.S.-Saudi 
relationship during the February 14, 1945 meeting between 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abd al-Aziz Al 
Saud.  After Americans built the Saudi oil industry, a 
whole generation of Saudis spent their formative years in 
the U.S. -- their numbers at American colleges and 
universities peaked at 25,000 in 1978 -- and now they have 
children of their own.  The Saudi government decided after 
the April 2005 meeting in Crawford to replicate this 
experience for this generation, announcing a scholarship 
program that will send some 15,000 young people to study in 
the U.S. in the coming months and years.  More than 47,000 
young Saudis applied for these scholarships, and some 3,206 
have been awarded since May.  Three thousand more are in 
the pipeline.  The modest proposal we made to set up an 
undergraduate scholarship program named in honor of the 
1945 meeting between President Roosevelt and King Abd 
al-Aziz likely served as a catalyst for the larger 
decision. New oil wealth has fueled the Saudis' scholarship 
program.  So far it has not proven necessary for us to 
assume any entrepreneurial role in this effort. 
 
3.  (C) The FDR-AAS Scholarship Program: Nevertheless we 
believe it is profoundly in the US interest to move forward 
with implementation of the proposed Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt -- Abd al-Aziz Al Saud (FDR-AAS) scholarship 
program.  As currently envisioned, the FDR-AAS initiative 
would be an elite scholarship program with very competitive 
admissions criteria.  Its aim would be to identify and give 
both an American education and a positive, profound 
experience of American society and democracy to the rising 
new generation of leaders in Saudi Arabia.  As such, this 
program would symbolize the spirit of the Crawford Summit 
Meeting between President Bush and King Abdullah, the 
strength and continuity of the 60-year-old US-Saudi 
relationship, and the role of education in the revitalized 
bilateral relationship and the reform process in the 
Kingdom. 
 
4.  (C)  Boosting Our Consular Infrastructure: Meanwhile 
the Saudis are paying for their larger program out of 
pocket.  We should take advantage of it.  A surprisingly 
diverse group of young Saudi men and women are clearly 
amenable to going to the U.S., now that their government 
has endorsed this idea and paid for it.  These students 
will gain understanding and insight into America and what 
it stands for, even if they do not agree with all of our 
policies.  (For the moment, for several reasons, it is much 
harder for us to bring Americans to the Kingdom.)  The 
principal constraint we face is our limited capacity to 
meet the demand for student visas.  The heroic efforts of 
the officers and staff of our drawn-down Consular 
operations have enabled us to rise to the challenge: we are 
processing ten times the number of student visas we did 
last year.  We cannot sustain this pace in either Riyadh or 
Jeddah, which is currently closed for visa operations.  We 
need to increase capacity at both posts and to reopen for 
visa services in Dhahran as soon as possible.  Visa 
reciprocity issues need to be addressed now. 
 
5.  (U)  In terms of support for this effort from the 
public diplomacy side of our mission, we have put 
audio-visual equipment and/or Washington-generated 
materials ranging from "Hi" magazine to e-Journals to 
poster shows in the Consular waiting areas at all three 
posts, and will continue these initiatives.  For our 
in-house educational advising services, we need another 
year of special funding for salaries.  This will buy us 
time to persuade the Saudis, here and in Washington, to 
allow us to contract out this function to AMIDEAST or 
another qualified U.S. non-governmental organization such 
as the Institute for International Education.  The ACCESS 
microscholarship program for intensive English preparation 
can serve as an important bridge to the U.S. experience for 
Saudi youth: most are behind their regional peers in both 
foreign language competency and social skills, justifying 
the higher intensity (now 630 hours of instruction in a 
year, versus 200-300 elsewhere) and slightly older 
population (mainly 18-20 year olds, versus 15-17) of our 
program.  We continue to encourage a small, one-way 
high-school exchange program, run by AFS, in the hope that 
security conditions and/or a change to fully private 
funding will allow a two-way exchange in time. 
 
Inside the Kingdom: More Focus on Education and Engagement 
with Saudi Youth 
--------------------------------------------- --------------- 
--------------- 
 
6.  (U)  Within the Kingdom, we should support and 
encourage the growing trend toward privately-funded 
U.S.-style colleges and universities.  In our view, 
"match-making" is the most important thing the U.S. 
government can do in this arena, whether informally by 
networking into the U.S. education industry or using tools 
like the international and voluntary visitors programs to 
send Saudis to the U.S.  This trend is visible from Dar 
al-Hekma and Effat Colleges for women and the College of 
Business Administration in Jeddah, which opened five to 
seven years ago, to Riyadh's Al-Yamama College and 
Al-Faisal University and Dhahran's Muhammad bin Fahd 
University, starting up this year and next.  All have 
explicit ties to American institutions.  To a lesser 
extent, we have begun to see the impact of the U.S. model 
on the public universities, from the Ministry of Higher 
Education's nationwide "community college" network, which 
was based on state of California system, to the recent 
memorandum of understanding between Jeddah's King Abdulaziz 
University and Virginia Tech. 
 
7.  (U)  American and Western studies programs per se have 
failed to gain acceptance here at the ministerial level. 
Our observation is that they have produced mixed results in 
the region.  They are unlikely to succeed here.  However, 
providing support for this kind of university-level 
coursework in the form of materials and possibly guest 
speakers or lecturers will be of value, including at 
additional "American Corners."  At the primary and 
secondary levels, the Saudis are already in close touch 
with U.S. textbook suppliers like Harcourt, Brace, as well 
as with American technology companies like Microsoft. 
 
8.  (U)  Libraries and Publishers: We can make a separate 
but related push to support the Kingdom's newly-announced 
plans to build many more public libraries with referrals to 
American publishers and gifts of materials.  We envision 
using tactics from the highly symbolic, such as delivering 
sets of 200 classics of American literature like that sent 
to Dar al-Hekma on the occasion of U/S Hughes' visit, to 
the very substantive, notably by acting as a catalyst to 
link American scholars and librarians to their Saudi and 
regional counterparts. 
 
9.  (C) Fighting Terrorism by Filling the Intellectual 
Vacuum:  We would also like to reiterate the proposal made 
in reftel (B), regarding creation of a regional on-line 
library that would contain the classics of both Arab and 
Western literature.  The aim of this initiative would be to 
attack the intellectual vacuum in the Arab and Islamic 
world, which is so conducive to the spread of extremism and 
bigotry.  The on-line library would have a strong focus on 
democracy, democratic thought, and civil society.  As noted 
in reftel, we believe that the USG can act as a catalyst in 
establishing this initiative, which would then be handed 
off to a consortium of US, European, and Arab universities, 
institutes, and scholars.  We here in Mission Saudi Arabia 
can contribute by engaging with both the Saudi government 
and the Kingdom's library and university systems, as well 
as the private sector.  Once again, the Kingdom's currently 
booming economic growth should provide much of the funding 
needed to support Saudi involvement in such an 
initiative. 
 
Inside the Kingdom: Other Kinds of Engagement and Exchange 
--------------------------------------------- ------------- 
 
10.  (U)  Small programs often take the same amount of time 
as large ones in the difficult operating environment of 
Saudi Arabia, and we will continue to do what we can to 
achieve the most for the investment of our time.  Yet as 
our staffing pattern slowly returns to a more normal 
profile from the drawdown, we can revive our efforts to get 
mid- and entry-level officers from all mission elements 
involved in public diplomacy events and programs.  Our 
Consulates in Jeddah and Dhahran, in particular, represent 
more liberal areas of the country, and can do things that 
can't be done in the Saudi capital.  Timely new Washington 
product offerings, such as the "All Americans" poster show 
featuring artwork by Texas schoolchildren, as well as the 
materials on civil rights activist Rosa Parks, will be of 
great help. 
 
11.  (C)  Classic exchange programs continue to yield great 
benefit in our outreach to certain segments of Saudi 
society.  The country-specific religious educators 
international visitor program, just renewed for 30 
participants this year, is perhaps the best example.  By 
adapting the traditional recruiting model slightly, i.e., 
by working closely with the Saudi government to select most 
of the participants from among "persuadable conservatives," 
we were able to reach a previously inaccessible group that 
has taken on new importance in the post-9/11 policy 
environment.  At the "liberal" end of the political and 
social spectrum, we can continue to use invitations to 
travel on exchange programs to press the Saudis to allow 
political reformers and activists to travel, thereby 
signaling U.S. interest in their cases. 
 
The Private Sector 
------------------ 
 
12.  (U)  In addition to our own and Saudi government 
programs, we need to approach the U.S. and Saudi private 
sectors to do more.  There was never an Arab socialist 
model in place here, so speakers and other programming 
about free enterprise, business and commerce work well, and 
are topical as Saudi Arabia accedes to the WTO.  Economic 
reform means regulatory training programs, which we are 
currently pursuing ad hoc by having our traditional State 
officers contact Washington entities such as the Securities 
and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to 
lobby them to develop special training programs for 
Saudis.  We need someone in Washington to take this effort 
on.  The Humphrey Fellowship program simply does not meet 
the need.  The network of Chambers of Commerce throughout 
the country, including the women's sections that exist in 
Riyadh, Dhahran and Jeddah, can serve as good partners in 
our programming goals. Recent events, such as women being 
both elected and appointed to the Chamber of Commerce in 
Jeddah, have had a national impact. 
 
The Media 
--------- 
 
13.  (U)  Finally, in Saudi Arabia's increasingly 
interesting media environment, we need to make more use of 
our senior officers, as well as the Ambassador and our 
designated spokespersons.  We would like to endorse Embassy 
Cairo's observations about the use of television, 
especially the pan-Arab channels (Ref A, para 7), since in 
Saudi Arabia, over 90% of households are satellite 
subscribers.  Our view is that Washington is doing a much 
better job getting senior officials before the pan-Arab 
media, but that there is still room for improvement. 
 
Concerns and Needs 
------------------ 
 
14.  (C)  Our concerns about the U.S. government's public 
diplomacy efforts include these: 
 
1) Too many tools, each with differing standards, and 
recruiting methods for exchange programs.  Can some of 
these programs be sunset? 
 
2) Timely media outreach.  Who can help us cut through the 
clearance thickets so that we can respond to issues on a 
timely basis? 
 
15.  (C)  Our needs fall into three categories: 
 
A) Personnel: Our greatest need in Saudi Arabia is for 
qualified officers and staff to carry out this PD 
strategy.  For most of the past two difficult but 
critically important years, we have been operating at half 
strength in terms of American officers, yet we have seen 
more than one promised public diplomacy hand diverted to 
other posts.  We need to assign language-qualified, 
at-grade, PD-cone officers to the existing public diplomacy 
positions at Embassy Riyadh and the two Consulates General 
in Dhahran and Jeddah.  In addition, in order to implement 
this strategy successfully, we need four new public 
diplomacy officer positions in the Mission, two in Riyadh 
and one each in Jeddah and Dhahran.  Commensurate increases 
in LES staffing in the public diplomacy sections in the 
Consulates will also be necessary. 
 
B) Funding: Even though ours remains a highly-leveraged 
plan of action, a second need is for additional funding to 
carry out plans, either directly or through outsourcing. 
Inter alia, additional funding would support implementation 
of our FDR-AAS and on-line library of classic Arab and 
Western works of literature, with a strong focus on 
democracy and civil society. 
 
C) Political Support: Support and focus from Washington 
policymakers is the third and last but not the least of our 
critical needs.  We would like to thank the new 
Undersecretary for the opportunity to participate in this 
exercise, and look forward to further discussions. 
 
 
OBERWETTER