Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
05RIYADH9116
2005-12-12 14:30:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Riyadh
Cable title:  

A PUBLIC DIPLOMACY STRATEGY FOR SAUDI ARABIA

Tags:  KPAO PGOV PREL PINR ECON SA 
pdf how-to read a cable
O 121430Z DEC 05
FM AMEMBASSY RIYADH
TO SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 2541
INFO AMEMBASSY BAGHDAD PRIORITY 
AMEMBASSY CAIRO PRIORITY 
AMEMBASSY RABAT PRIORITY
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)

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