In a move that has more complexities than it seems on the surface, the US and Saudi Arabia have announced a big increase in the number of college students coming from the West's oil partner to campuses near you. Five times more students will get admitted to American universities -- and, of course, America -- than will have been in the country before:

Thousands of students from Saudi Arabia are enrolling on college campuses across the United States this semester under a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah.

The program will quintuple the number of Saudi students and scholars in the United States by the academic year's end. And big, public universities from Florida to Oregon are in a fierce competition for their tuition dollars.

The kingdom's royal family -- which is paying full scholarships for most of the 15,000 students -- says the program will help stem unrest at home by schooling the country's brightest in the American tradition. The State Department sees the exchange as a way to build ties with future Saudi leaders and young scholars at a time of unsteady relations with the Muslim world.

But some officials say efforts to fast-track educational diplomacy with Saudi Arabia could use additional scrutiny. Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the U.S. government has yet to ensure proper safeguards are in place to do effective background checks on all applicants.

At first blush, and perhaps second blush, many will ask whether the Bush administration has lost its collective mind. At the very least, announcing this on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 seems politically inept. Not too many of us have forgotten that the terrorists attended Jihadi U for a one-day seminar five years ago at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, admitted here through the same kind of mechanism and the exact same country. Quintupling the number of Saudi students, even without Visa Express, sounds like a strange notion given the lack of progress we have seen in Saudi-supported Wahhabi schools and their exhortations of hatred against Jews and Westerners.

On the other hand, an argument can be made that this program could have a moderating effect on Saudi sensibilities, and that the Saudi royal family may honestly desire that end. They seem to have seen the end result of their fanatical Wahhabism as it came back to bite them in the form of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden took Wahhabism at face value rather than just a means to keep anger in Saudi Arabia focused outward, and bin Laden has applied it to the Saudis themselves. They have fought AQ ever since 9/11 and have discovered that they don't much care for the terrorists either.

Sending young men abroad to study in Western universities accomplishes two goals for the Saudis. It lowers the number of young men in Saudi Arabia, which helps hold the political temperature down. In polygamous societies, young men provide a destabilizing influence if given nothing to do, as the number of marriageable women is kept artificially low. Without social outlets, they turn to radical pursuits. Getting them out of the country for a few years allows the pressure to recede and gives them the opportunity to find something other than radicalism to occupy their time.

The second goal gets accomplished on their return. Having been immersed in open democracy, the students who return will hopefully bring that moderating influence back with them. Although that could eventually create a challenge to the power of the monarchy, the House of Saud apparently feels that the risks of jihadism are greater, which is why they have taken a few tentative steps towards democracy. Those young men who return also will have more earning capability and have better prospects for marriage, extending the moderating influence to another generation.

All of this doesn't address the question of whether we benefit from the exchange -- and whether the benefits are worth the risk we assume.

I'd say that the benefits of a more moderate Saudi Arabia make this a program worth considering -- as long as the risks are properly managed. It appears that the government has learned its lesson from the disastrous Visa Express program. The replacement will track classroom attendance and completion of studies to keep the students under careful watch. As we saw with the ten Egyptian students who suddenly disappeared, the FBI found out about it very quickly and resolved the situation, deporting the students once they were found (most of them turned themselves in).

And let's not forget another potential benefit in this war on terror, which we can assume will last for several more years. Saudis who come to the US could later provide good intelligence on radical movements abroad. They will hold highly-prized American university degrees and will likely find work all over the Middle East. If we can convince them of the superiority of freedom, democracy, and tolerance, we may find that we can create a network of intelligence resources throughout the region within a short period of time. That could go a long way to addressing the chronic humint shortage we have faced, especially in that region, since the Carter Administration.

This could work to the benefit of both nations, if properly managed. It could have waited until next semester, however.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is