Vision or Mirage Quotes

“Early in 2017, the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Saleh Al al-Sheikh, hosted a dinner at his home in Riyadh for the Committee of Senior Scholars, during which Mohammed bin Salman outlined his plans for economic and social reform. The prince told the religious scholars that economic development was crucial to the kingdom’s future but could not advance without social liberalization. He assured them that Islam and their role as its guardians would always be respected in Saudi Arabia but insisted that some things would have to change and that their support was both needed and expected.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s nascent participatory institutions—the appointed national Majlis al-Shura, elected municipal councils, and the royal family’s Allegiance Council—have all been marginalized.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“As royal authority becomes more concentrated, the number of princes who can actually help the average citizen has sharply declined. People have begun to feel less personally connected to their leaders.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Saudis posting messages critical of the crown prince have been pressured to publish apologies.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“This distinctive balance of fear and favor has now shifted. Under King Salman, Saudi Arabia has become more autocratic. Civil liberties, which were never prominent, have become even more restricted. The sophisticated electronic surveillance systems developed to monitor violent terrorists have been used to detect nonviolent political dissent. Saudis who once spoke freely have become hesitant to criticize their government.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Comparisons with Saddam’s Iraq, Stalin’s Russia, or even Sadat’s Egypt are misleading. Instead, the Al Saud practiced their own brand of autocratic paternalism combining generous economic cooption with authoritarian political control, and generally placing more emphasis on the former.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Corruption still exists in Saudi Arabia, but it is no longer openly accepted. A large public relations campaign reminiscent of the one against al-Qaeda has been launched against corruption. All of this appears to be a sustained effort to reduce corruption in the kingdom.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Local public reaction to the detentions was overwhelmingly positive.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Unlike the Arab Spring uprisings, Riyadh’s anti-corruption campaign was implemented by the highest levels of government in order to preserve, not overthrow, a government. Furthermore, it was not, as is often heard, a power-grab by an ambitious young prince. By November 2017, Mohammed bin Salman and his father had already neutralized any serious opposition.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Upon release they were asked to pay the bill for their months-long stay at the Ritz, but fortunately they were all allowed to keep the loyalty points they had earned.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“King Salman was more decisive. The overwhelming majority of the 100 billion dollars in assets obtained from the Ritz Carton detainees was not in cash or equities, but in raw land. Well over 50 percent of the undeveloped urban real estate in Riyadh and Jeddah was returned to government ownership. Along with a new mortgage law that finally found a way to deal with sharia opposition to foreclosures, this new stock of available building sites has begun to resolve the Saudi housing shortage.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“investment rather than develop it. As a result of high land prices, most Saudis cannot afford their own home. After the 2011 Arab Spring unrest in neighboring countries, King Abdullah sought to address this longstanding social problem.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“One often overlooked aspect of the Ritz Carlton detentions was land reform, a topic more often associated with Egypt than Saudi Arabia. Because of high land prices, not construction costs, urban housing in Saudi Arabia is very expensive. In the United States the value of residential real estate is roughly 25 percent land and 75 percent the actual building. In Saudi Arabia, these ratios are reversed,”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“King Salman went on television stating, “The law will be upheld and applied firmly to all those entrusted with public funds(.…). This is part of the reform agenda against abuses that have hindered our development for decades.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“One group left untouched was the senior ulama who were allowed to keep their own very substantial land holdings and would soon sign off on the issues of women driving, movie theaters, and gender mixing.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The SCCC wasted no time making its presence felt. Within hours of its creation, General al-Howairini efficiently conducted a wide-scale series of detentions unprecedented in Saudi history. Those taken to Riyadh’s five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel included eleven princes, four serving ministers, dozens of former ministers, deputy ministers, and prominent businessmen.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“he created an independent Supreme Committee for Combating Corruption (the SCCC) chaired by Mohammed bin Salman.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Only when they controlled all the levers of power and faced little effective resistance, did the king and his son strike out at corruption.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“As we have seen, succession—not fighting corruption—was the new king’s first order of business. Salman’s concentration of power was well planned, gradual, relentless, and successful.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“There is now a Shia minister of state, president of Saudi Aramco and chairman of the Crown Prince’s mega-project NEOM, an ambitious and yet unproven concept for an entirely new futuristic city to be built near the border with Jordan.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Although Shia account for at least 10 percent of the Saudi population, they hold barely 4 percent of seats in the Majlis al-Shura. There has never been a Shia member of the Council of Senior Scholars, or a Shia Saudi Ambassador to any country but Iran.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“More demonstrations erupted in 2014 when Sheikh Nimr was sentenced to death. He was executed in May 2016, along with more than two dozen convicted Sunni al-Qaeda terrorists and the radical Sunni preacher Faris Zahrani. Although most of those executed were Sunnis, al-Nimr’s death set off demonstrations across the Shia world and the burning of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“What is not in dispute is that in the months before al-Nimr’s execution, more than a dozen Saudi police officers were killed in the Shia districts of the Eastern Province. Most were from the Bani Khalid and Ajman, and these important Sunni tribes were demanding retribution against the killers of their fellow tribesmen. To the Saudi authorities, this appeared a deliberate, and possibly Iranian-backed, attempt to start a sectarian tribal war in the oil rich Eastern Province.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The only Arab Spring-related protest in Saudi Arabia occurred in the Eastern Province, where Saudi Shia held large demonstrations in support of ongoing protests by Bahrain’s predominantly Shia population. The Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr emerged as the leader of these Saudi protests”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia sits on both the world’s largest oil field and a cultural fault line between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Very few Shia live in the remainder of Saudi Arabia. In the Eastern Province, nearly half the population is Shia.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“In some ways, the Saudi response to Iran has followed its long-established security policies; spend billions of dollars on advanced weapons and turn to traditional partners for support. In 2019, Riyadh made the first payments on an estimated $15 billion contract for Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense system. That summer, Saudi Arabia reopened the Prince Sultan Air Base for the deployment of US aircraft, air defense missile batteries, and several thousand soldiers and airmen. Yet in other ways the Saudi response under King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman has been unconventional and may become even more so. Launching an independent air campaign in Yemen or investing seriously in a domestic defense industry were new approaches. Most worryingly, as the former head of Israel’s National Security Council Yaakov Amidor warned—a nuclear armed Iran would not only surround Israel with a “ring of fire,” it would very likely drive Turkey and Saudi Arabia to seek their own nuclear weapons.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“On at least two occasions, Tehran launched highly effective cyber attacks against Saudi Arabia, one of which destroyed thousands of Saudi Aramco computers.20 In September 2019, Iranian cruise missiles and drones attacked the kingdom’s Abqaiq oil processing facility and succeeded in taking nearly half of Saudi oil production offline for several weeks.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“It is worth remembering that in March 2015, Mohammed bin Salman was not the king of Saudi Arabia nor the crown prince or even the deputy crown prince. He was the newly appointed minister of defense. The experienced Saud al-Faisal, though ill, was still foreign minister. The popular view that 30-year-old Mohammed bin Salman recklessly took his country to war and that ten sovereign states, including Britain and the United States, blithely followed him, is a misreading of history. King Salman made the decision in order to stop the “Hezbollahization” of Yemen. Major Western powers supported the Saudis in order to prevent the expansion of Iranian influence into the Red Sea, especially in the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb strait, and to maintain Saudi support for then-ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“did not create this confused situation. However, it took every opportunity to vigorously exploit it. Tehran does not control the Houthis, but it funds, arms, trains, and advises them. In terms of history, religion, politics, and even family ties, Iran’s recent relationship with the Houthis differs substantially from its deep, long-standing connections with Lebanon’s Shia community and Hezbollah—but the Saudis found little solace in that distinction.19 From Riyadh’s perspective, the Houthis have been a vehicle for Iranian expansion into the Arabian Peninsula. That is something that no Saudi king could accept, and planning for intervention in Yemen began while King Abdullah was still on the throne.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Saudi Arabia established a robust alliance with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These two neighbors created a very powerful bloc, producing between them nearly half the Arab world’s GDP and 40 percent of OPEC’s oil. Their crown princes, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, were close personally and professionally. Although their interests were not completely aligned, from 2015 onward the two neighbors fought together against the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen. In June 2018, their de-facto alliance was given a formal structure through a new Saudi–Emirati Coordination Council. Led by the two crown princes, the new body issued a “Strategy for Resolve” listing forty-four joint economic and military projects that the two nations planned to carry out over the following five years.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads