Bush Ties Attack in Saudi Arabia to Iraqi Elections

A Call To Action
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Assault Is Part of a Campaign by Extremists to Drive Americans Out of Mideast, President Says

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 7, 2004; Page A19

President Bush tied yesterday's deadly assault on a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia to the upcoming elections in neighboring Iraq, depicting it as part of a broader campaign by Islamic extremists to drive Americans out of the Middle East.

"The attacks in Saudi Arabia remind us that the terrorists are still on the move," Bush said. "They're interested in affecting the will of free countries. They want us to leave Saudi Arabia. They want us to leave Iraq. They want us to grow timid and weary in the face of their willingness to kill randomly and kill innocent people. And that's why these elections in Iraq are very important."

Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Iraq's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, Bush offered no specific information linking the attack that left nine dead in Jiddah to the Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30. But he said it fit a pattern in which radicals "will do anything they can to stop democracy," and he reaffirmed his opposition to delaying the Iraqi vote. "I think that the capacity of these killers to stop an election," he said, "would send a wrong signal to the world and send a wrong signal to the Iraqi people themselves."

Bush's attempt to draw a connection struck some outside foreign policy specialists as an oversimplification that ignored the complicated web of alliances and animosities that plague the Middle East. Rather than an attack on democracy, they said, the attack probably stemmed from the long-running struggle by Islamic extremists against the decidedly undemocratic Saudi monarchy backed by Washington.

"It's a fatuous connection," said James B. Steinberg, who was deputy national security adviser under President Bill Clinton. "It's a bad thing, but it has nothing to do with the Iraqi election. They're trying to undermine the Saudis."

Bush's meeting with Yawar and a subsequent session with Jordan's King Abdullah were intended to keep up the pressure to proceed with the Iraqi elections despite calls by some Sunni Muslim leaders to delay or boycott the vote. In showcasing his meeting with Yawar, Iraq's most prominent Sunni official, Bush sought to reach out to a minority population that has fueled the insurgency and fears losing power to the majority Shiites in the elections.

Yawar rejected the notion that the resistance to Iraq's U.S.-supported interim government represents a Sunni uprising and denied that ordinary Sunnis oppose elections. "Nobody in Iraq wants to boycott the elections except for some politicians," he said.

Yawar added that he believed victory over the insurgency is in sight. "Right now we are faced with the armies of darkness who have no objective but to undermine the political process and incite civil war in Iraq," he said. "But I want to assure the whole world that this will never, ever happen, that we in Iraq are committed to move along. After all these sacrifices there is no way on earth that we will let it go in vain."

The election would choose a 275-member National Assembly that would write a constitution, but proceeding with the vote represents a powerful risk in a country still volatile 20 months after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein. "If we don't get it right on January the 30th, we'll be in real trouble," said Geoffrey Kemp, a former Reagan administration official now at the Nixon Center. "So I think the debate is: Do you delay in hopes that things would get better or would delay make things much worse? It's a close call."

As he often has in the past, Abdullah pressed Bush to reenergize U.S. efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the president agreed to take advantage of the opening provided by the death of Yasser Arafat and the Jan. 9 election of his successor. "We have a moment, a window of opportunity, and I intend to work very closely with his majesty to seize that moment for the good of the Palestinian people and for the good of the Israelis," Bush said.

Although Bush has signaled that he will become more involved in pushing for Israeli-Palestinian peace, some administration officials remain unsure how far he will take it or what options might be on the table. In large part, they said, that will depend on who emerges from the Palestinian election.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company