Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [67]
Terrorism and security are questions of cost. That’s what a Saudi oil official told me when I interviewed him that summer. He was irritated with America for urging its citizens to leave the kingdom.
“The U.S. government is discouraging people from coming to Saudi Arabia, and at the same time they’re recruiting people to go to Iraq,” he snorted. “As if that were safer.”
We were sitting in a Riyadh skyscraper, one of the many anonymous towers hemmed in by webs of freeway. Far below Mercedeses and Hummers coursed through the dusk toward a flat horizon, along corridors of shop windows asparkle in silver and silk.
“I believe in the human capacity for making good things and making bad things,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s a question of cost. It’s an economic issue.”
Saudi men often raised the question of women with me; they seemed to hope that I would tell them, out of courtesy or conviction, that I endorsed their way of life. They blamed all manner of Western ills, from gun violence to alcoholism, on women’s liberation. “Do you think you could ever live here?” they asked. It sounded absurd every time, and every time I would repeat the obvious: No.
I was there when, inspired by the war in Iraq and a general enthusiasm for Arab voting, the kingdom called for municipal elections. Women couldn’t vote, let alone run, in elections that filled just half the seats on impotent city councils. Still, in a simulacrum of democracy, candidates pitched tents in vacant lots and hosted voters for long nights of coffee and poetry readings. I stepped inside a tent one night; men milled around on thick layers of carpet, sipping thimbles of coffee in white robes bleached spotless by a hidden army of women. When they caught sight of me, they turned their backs and muttered. The campaign manager, who had invited me to the tent in a flourish of liberalism, rushed to my side, apologies spilling from gritted teeth. The citizens were angry at the sight of a woman, he said. I was costing his man votes; if I stayed, he’d lose the election. So I picked my way back out of the tent, eyes dazzled by portable lights, and waited in the vast desert night for one of the men to drive me home.
A few days later, a U.S. official from Washington gave a press appearance in a hotel lobby in Riyadh. Sporting pearls, a business suit, and a bare, blond head, she praised the Saudi elections.
“[The election] is a departure from their culture and their history,” she said. “It offers to the citizens of Saudi Arabia hope … It’s modest, but it’s dramatic.”
The American ambassador, a Texan oilman named James Oberwetter, chimed in from a nearby seat.
“When I got here a year ago, there were no political tents,” he said. “It’s like a backyard political barbeque in the U.S.”
One afternoon, a candidate invited me to meet his daughter, a demure twenty-something who folded her hands in her lap and spoke fluent English. I asked her about the elections.
“Very good,” she said impassively.
So you really think so, I said, even though you can’t vote?
“Of course. Why do I need to vote?”
Her father interrupted. Speaking English for my benefit, he urged her to be candid. But she insisted: What good was voting? She looked pityingly at me, a woman cast adrift on rough seas, no male protector in sight.
“Maybe you don’t want to vote,” I said. “But wouldn’t you like to make that choice yourself?”
“I don’t need to,” she said, slowly and deliberately. “If I have a father or a husband, why do I need to vote? Why should I need to work? They will take care of everything.”
Some Saudi women are proudly defensive, convinced that any discussion of women’s rights is a disguised attack on Islam from a hostile Westerner. But some of them fought quietly, like the young dental student who sat up half the night for months to write a groundbreaking novel exploring the internal lives and romances of young Saudi women. Or the oil expert who scolded me for asking about driving rights, pointing out the pitfalls of divorce and custody laws: “Driving is the