The controversy around the state visit of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and the decision by Vince Cable, acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, to boycott the visit, is entirely predictable, said David Blair in The Daily Telegraph. “The absolute monarch of a theocratic state that oppresses women and routinely tortures opponents will never receive a warm public welcome.”
But justifiable as many of the criticisms are, the reality is that Britain “badly needs” the Kingdom as an ally. Saudi Arabia is “pivotal” to the settlement of all three conflicts in the Middle East, agreed The Times: the Israeli-Palestinian question, Iraq, and the potential nuclear threat posed by Iran. The country is the world’s top oil producer, and crucial in maintaining reliable supplies and predictable prices. It is by far our largest trading partner in the Middle East, and the controversial £25bn Al-Yamamah defence contract is the largest such deal ever negotiated by Britain.
Honouring Saudi Arabia with a state visit for these reasons is immoral, said The Independent. Saudi Arabia is “one of the world’s most flagrant abusers of human rights”, a “stonewall autocracy” with a “shackled media”. Far from helping in the fight against terrorism, it is one of the main drivers of the threat. The regime promotes the “most intolerant strain of Islamic theology” and the Saudi heritage of Osama bin Laden and many of the 9/11 hijackers has been well documented.
This is true, said Blair. In the 1980s, the kingdom financed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which became the incubator for Al-Qaeda. Saudi cash has funded extremist schools worldwide. But Al-Qaeda carried out a series of deadly bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004, since when the kingdom has become its most deadly foe, crushing cells inside its borders. Spurning one of the few countries that has inflicted a major defeat on Al-Qaeda would be a “spectacular own goal”. Moreover, the alternatives to Abdullah are not a collection of benign liberals: if his regime were overthrown, “its successors would probably be the most fanatical extremists on earth”.