Saudi Women Undergo Harsher Restrictions

Saudi Arabia's Royal Family has had a rough time with liberating women from the stranglehold of Wahhabi Sunni male dominance in the harshest patriarchy in any advanced economic country in the world, with the possible exception of Shi'ite Iran, which recently executed by public hanging a sixteen-year old girl for "her sharp tongue," in the words of the Iranian judge.

Back in the '70s, while Political Officer at the US Embassy in Jidda in Saudi Arabia, I was sent by Ambassador Porter to investigate the Shi'ite presence in Eastern Province. While in Dhahran, I was invited to the home of Bandar bin Sultan, then Commander of a Fighter Wing in the SAAF flying F-5s [F-15s came later]. Amid hours of fascinating revelations during an eight-hour conversation after dinner, some of which had been unknown to even the CIA or State Dept, Prince Bandar described the difficulties facing women's education. The secularizing Royal Family faced strong opposition in even allowing girls to go to special female schools when Prince Fahd, later to become King, was Minister of Education in the late fifties and early sixties. Strict Wahhabi interpretation of the Sharia was against education for women. Bandar said that the opposition to the very idea of female education was so strong that all schoolbuses had their windows blacked out so that buses with girls going to the new female schools would not be stoned by irate religious conservatives. After much political and social turmoil, the idea of women's education gradually gained a foothold.

However, in the seventies, as the Kingdom was rapidly modernizing and many social reforms continued, the religious conservatives made a bargain with the Royal Family. The Ulema would drop objections to many modern innovations and social policies if they were given control over elementary education. Higher education would be under a separate ministry. However, the somewhat dated [end of 2003] article in Le Monde notes, another shift subsequently took place:

The shift occurred toward the end of the 1980s and the early ’90s, notably during the war to liberate Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in 1991. A group of young women dared to take the wheel as a protest for the right to drive. Their audacity provoked the ultraconservatives to close ranks and denounce their behavior as scandalous and sinful. Fingers were pointed at the university for fostering such decadence. The women professors who had participated in the protests were dismissed; the university rector created a Department of Islamic Higher Studies and implemented the total segregation of the sexes. From then on, all male teachers taught their female students remotely, via closed-circuit television screens.

Actually, my understanding was that women had learned via closed-circuit when male professors were teaching since the inception of the female higher education. But that is a quibble and as King Fahd's health became weaker, his support of secular education for women waned as well:

In the absence of any secularizing interference from the government, the religious extremists were free to do as they pleased. One student noted the link between the political and religious powers that be. “When the former weakens, the second grows stronger.” Little by little, dogmatic rigor reached the point of absurdity. Abusive religious interference is the norm, even in the smallest details.

If there is one truism among all the Saudis I have met, it is their contempt and derision for the mutawaa, the universally disliked "religious police" who carry out the Ulema's increasingly onerous and frankly silly religious ukases. These are the moronic nitwits who kept a bunch of female students inside a burning school a while back because they deemed the girls not appropriately garbed to escape the flames in the view of some males who may have been scandalized. Several of the girls perished because of these imbecilic Pecksniffian prigs. This is the sort of religious lunacy prevalent in Iran also, in the Shi'ite version of Wahhabi puritanical hypertrophy.

The Saudi Royal Family now faces a population of young unemployed males due to the burgeoning baby boom in Saudi since the seventies, when a private census counted about seven million native-born Saudis. Now there are over twenty-five million and young men without jobs catch the religious bug easily, as religious universities will grant a degree for simply studying religious dogma and interpretation, with barely any secular skills necessary to graduate. These young men are eager to accomplish something, anything, and sneaking into Iraq or Afghanistan to become a martyr for Islam is better than being an unemployed drone.

So the Taliban in Afghanistan and AQ in training camps somewhere have a steady stream of Saudi males hoping to do something to make life meaningful, even if it means blowing oneself up in an act of "martyrdom" that takes many other lives with you.

So despite the harsh restrictions on Saudi women, they may live longer than their male counterparts.

Kissinger's Back Pages Not Pretty

Vanity Fair has a long article on Henry Kissinger during the Nixon Years written by Robert Dallek who is an excellent historian with a slight tilt to the left, but thoroughly grounded in archives, including telephone transcripts of Kissinger's phone calls to the White House.

I am going to do a sidetrack here and give up a few bits of my little trove of Kissinger anecdotes. [The rest, while illuminative, are more boring than these, but basically follow the theme of authoritarian egomania] After joining the State Dept, I served in Vietnam and then Lyon, France, where I was Vice Consul in a two-man post with Peter Tarnoff, who told me a raft of Kissinger stories. Peter was Ambassadorial Assistant to Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon in the sixties. Lodge had run for Vice President under Nixon in 1960 and told Tarnoff that he had been asked by Nixon who would be a good person to go to Vietnam and look things over for Nixon, in case he ran for Prez in '68. Tarnoff told Lodge he'd just read a massive tome On Thermonuclear War by a Harvard Prof named Henry K and, Tarnoff recommended him although Kissinger was a Rockefeller protege. Lodge arranged for HK to do on-site Saigon sleuthing to become a "Vietnam expert." Tarnoff became close with Kissinger as did Frank Wisner and Richard Holbrooke, two of Tarnoff's FSO pals in the Embassy. While in Saigon, Kissinger acquired the nickname "Henri le baiser" because of his addiction to Vietnamese bar-girls, whom I can attest are totally seductive.

Nixon was duly elected after the catastrophic Chicago Convention separated Humphrey from the anti-war McCarthy/RFK Dems. [I participated in those festivities as well.] Kissinger became his NSC advisor and Tarnoff by this time had come to the Paris Peace Talks as US advisor. When HK first arrived, he and Peter were in an elevator together and PT asked HK how it was. Peter told me that Kissinger grabbed him by the arm and started effusively gushing "Peter, the president listens to everything I say!" Peter said HK's eyes literally bulged as he said this.

Later, when the Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers fiasco hit, Peter told me that Ellsberg had sent him Polaroid photos of himself in Thailand with small boys. Peter mentioned that other friends of Ellsberg told him they had received the same kind of Bangkok billets doux.

My own experience with Kissinger came while I was Political Officer in Jidda and he arrived during the "Shuttle Diplomacy" days after the Ramadan/Yom Kippur War [the dates coincided]. I was HK's "Control Officer" and when I extended my hand to shake his hand, he looked at me with disdain. A mere FSO. His assistant Peter Rodman treated me with less disdain, as my Arabic allowed me to bargain for him in the gold suk and the weapons suq where I bought him an Arab bunduqiyya, or muzzle-loading musket. Later Rodman would live next door to me in DC, but pretended not to remember me nor my services.

At the Jidda Embassy, Isa Sabbagh was the USIS chief and Kissinger would employ Isa as his personal translator during HK's Arab visits. Isa said that Kissinger would never fail to derogate the Israelis constantly in his conversations with the Arabs, however he always left the impression that the Israelis might have the bomb and could go crazy, so in that sense Isa believed HK was playing good cop to Israel's bad cop.

Another Embassy denizen was Ed "Skip" Gnehm who had served in Damascus and had additional gossip from that embassy on HK's meetings with Assad. Isa Sabbagh said that Hafez Al-Assad and HK got along like gangbusters, with HK telling jokes on how nasty and greedy the Jews were and Assad countering with jokes on how stupid and untrustworthy the Arabs were. The one bright light for Isa was HK's admiration for Golda Meir, whom he left the impression that he highly admired. As for Assad, HK constantly told people that Assad was the smartest leader in the Middle East, period.

Later, I was introduced to SecState Vance's Executive Secretary by Peter Tarnoff, the Executive Assistant to Cy Vance [who remembered Peter when Vance was in charge of the Paris Peace Talks]. She and I became very good friends and I began to get pillow talk from the Secretary's Office. But her most interesting revelations about Kissinger, who would talk to Vance on a frequent basis, concerned her interfacing with her predecessor, Mary Musallem, who had been Secretary to the Secretary of State for everyone since Christian Herter under Ike. Mary was an attractive statuesque blonde who told my friend that HK would make passes at her. When he was spurned, as always happened, he would push everything off his desk and tell Mary to put it all back on the desk precisely as it was before.

My friend Vance's Secretary also became friends with the Russian translator for the State Dept, who sat in on conversations as was legally required with Dobrynin. The translator told her that Kissinger would often take the final transcript of the conversation and alter it so that the historical record would show something different from the actual discussions. Always to Kissinger's benefit, the translator added.

Later, after leaving the State Dept., I did a stint at Georgetown CSIS and had Kissinger [and Brzezinski] as fellow Fellows, although vastly separated by rank and accouterments [I had a cubbyhole]. Zbig B actually was courteous and civil, whereas Kissinger was unapproachable.

Even later, as Foreign Editor of the Oil Daily, I accompanied Anne Louise Hittle, who worked for Kissinger at Kissinger Associates. We were stranded in Vienna together for an OPEC meeting and she recounted her experiences as Kissinger's amanuensis/exec. secretary [she also worked for L. Paul Bremer at K Assoc. as I recall]. Anne was extremely circumspect and only described him as having the biggest ego of any person she had met in her career. And she got a bit poetic, saying it was an ego beyond her comprehension, looking down upon mere mortals as chattels in a game.

Some of these memories may have been slightly off, but back in the day, a lot of things happened that won't see the light of historical day for a while. Good those telephone transcripts couldn't be altered.

Hardy Perennial: Saudis Running Out of Oil---Not!!!

One of the most predictable news stories recurring every six months or so has surfaced again. It usually takes one of three forms: the Saudi Royal Family is on the verge of collapsing and will be taken over by the military, by religious fanatics, or by religious fanatics in the military. Take two: the Saudis are on the verge of running out of oil. Take three: the Saudis are going to force the price of oil down to help the USA elect a Republican president, or alternatively the Saudis are going to let the price of oil rise to punish the USA for its Middle East policies.

The Oil Drum is a variant of number two. The logic of the link above, despite impressive-looking graphs, doesn't hold much water.

First, Oil Minister Ali Naimi did say in November that the Saudis would go along with OPEC production cuts, a factoid the author neglects to mention. The reason for this might be OPEC solidarity, including Persian/Arabian Gulf regional politics. This Gulfie perspective includes the first visit in living memory of an Iranian highest-level official [President Ahmedinejad] to Saudi Arabia. Not even in the days of the Shah did an Iranian head-of-state or senior official visit Saudi Arabia. Indeed, I don't believe that this has happened for centuries. Of course, The Oil Drum neglects to mention this tidbit while sententiously intoning

The entire "production cut" may be a public relations exercise to disguise other processes.

So it may be a political move to keep a nasty war in Iraq from expanding, and increasing Saudi influence in the region by enticing the President of Iran to the Kingdom, using the production cuts as an agreed precondition, rather than an elaborate ruse cunningly contrived to cover over oilfield deterioration. A Saudi/Iran relationship automatically increases the influence of the Saudis in any overrall Middle East scenario.

Just a quibble, but one must remember that an entire cottage industry has developed over the decades of those who write like one commenter:

Saudi [sic] went deep into the heart of the Rub al-Khali to find this little patch of oil. The “Rub al-Kaali [sic] represents one of the most extreme areas in the world with summer temperatures shifting from below 0ºC at night to over 60ºC at noon. Dunes can reach heights of more than 300 metres.” Needless to say this is one of the most inhospitable places in the world to drill wells and to lay pipelines. Yet this represents the extremes Saudi will go to in order to produce just a little more oil. But they are said to have 264.2 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Proven reserves means they know exactly where this oil is. To produce it, they would just have to go to a spot they already have plotted on the map, sink a well and produce more oil. Yet they do not do this, they instead go deep into the Rub al-Khali, search for years, (they were exploring the Rub al-Khali when I was there over twenty years ago), until they find a tiny patch of oil, then crow about it to all the world. Something here just does not make any sense.

First of all, the "term of art" is "proven recoverable reserves." Recoverable means at a rate that is within the boundaries of current technology. Second, the tendentious paragraphs above neglect to mention that Saudi Aramco has found dozens of oilfields in the Rub' Al-Khali. The Saudis have another quarter-billion "probable" reserves, according to Al Jumu'ah. And another indeterminate amount of "possible" reserves, so draw your own conclusions. The only thing that doesn't make any sense is making a big to-do about something the Saudis have been doing for decades. [Note the semantics of "crow about it to all the world." The announcements of new finds in the Rub' al Khali have been taking place since the mid-seventies. As well as finds elsewhere in the Kingdom. The only reason the Saudis don't go into production is because of something these cottage-industry Saudi-bashers always overlook: economics.
The Oil Drum neglects to mention that Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where the marginal barrel is the least expensive barrel. It costs around $3/barrel to extract a barrel of crude from Ghawar, which is a lake of oil over 120 miles in width. Why extract from the Empty Quarter at $30/barrel when Ghawar produces it for $3?

This cottage industry regularly churns out alarmist predictions about the Saudis, and by extension, the entire world's oil production industry, on a metronomic basis. Sort of like global warming or global cooling. Back when I was first in Saudi Arabia, global cooling was all the rage. Last time I was there, global warming was the favorite sky-is-falling trope/meme. The metronome again.

Finally, the writer neglected to mention two salient facts about the current industry. The Iranians are losing much of their production capacity due to inefficiency and incompetence and they need higher oil prices to finance their ambitious weaponizing of their developing nuclear capacity. Second, the Iranians have to import refined products, again due to poor planning and incompetent maintenance of their own refineries.

My bet is that the President of Iran might be visiting the Saudis to ask for an allocation of refined product from the Shell Export Refinery at Jubail, which I have visited on a couple of occasions. This would alleviate expensive imports from alternative sources, which are gouging the Iranians in expensive crude/refined product swaps at the moment.

The Saudis may be lowering their production, but they will retain a large cushion of excess capacity and the ability to increase production for decades to come. In any event, the Saudi production cuts are not the result of diminished production capacity, though some eventually will occur.

As for the world running out of oil, the head of the Iraqi Geological Survey at SOMO in Baghdad told me in 1988 that Iraq had 200 million barrels of proven reserves, but not recoverable at present prices [back then in the teens of dollars] and he also told me that the Mesopotamian Foredeep had not been extensively explored because his geological teams did not like going out into the desert! So Iraq could possibly have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, but no one really knows!

New Saudi Ambassador Close to King

Adel al-Jubeir is actually a family relation and is mentored by Abdul Mohsen Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwaijri, who is King Abdullah's trusted alter ego. Adel is the most talented member of, in the words of a senior Saudi official in a private communication:

"the clan who are running the show since Abdullah became king. I am referring to "The Al-Majamaah Clan" or "The Tuwaijri Clan." Adel's family on both his mother and father's side are from this little town, Al-Majmaah in The Sudair Region which a mere 100 miles north west of Riyadh in the way to Qasim."

Adel's father was the local "Shaykh" or mayor and it is notable that the Sudair is where Hassa bint Sudairy, the mother of Crown Prince Abdullah [and former King Fahd] and five other brothers called "The Sudairi Seven" have family connections. And in Saudi Arabia, family and family connections are the single most important vector in power relationships.

Bandar bin Sultan's grandmother, obviously, would have been the macro-mom Hassa bint Sudairy.

I have actually driven from Riyadh through al-Majamaah on the road to and from al-Qassim where I went to a thousand-person family reunion in Rass, in the company of the French Charges' lovely daughter, a medical doctor at King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh [too much info!] I believe it is on the southeast edge of the Nafud desert, a beautiful red-sand beauty of gorgeous mountainous russet dunes extending a hundred miles until al-Qassim and Buraida and Unaiza on the other side Parenthetically, Unaiza could be the eponymous origin of the Unaiza Tribal Confederation and its Mesalikh clan that rules the Peninsula [KSA, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain] and the Syrian Desert, as I noted in previous posts.

Sheikh Tuwaijri ran and perhaps still runs the Saudi Arabian National Guard on a day-to-day basis and could sign official document on behalf of Crown Prince Abdullah when Abdullah was the Guard's Commander. The Saudi National Guard is a sort of Carabinieri parallel which protects the Royal Family and is comprised of tribal elements. The Saudi National Guard protected the American Embassy in Jidda, for instance, rather than Saudi Armed Forces personnel.

Tuwaijri was and perhaps still is so important that one day on a first-class trans-Atlantic flight, he found himself suddenly having the person next to him move to another seat and the new occupant was none other than Henry Kissinger, then running Kissinger Associates, who rode the trans-Atlantic flight with the influential advisor and engaged him in avid conversation. The Embassy checked later with the airline and US intelligence and found that Kissinger did that often with VVIPs.

It is the Tuwaijri connection that gives Adel the complete trust of the King, and parenthetically Prince Bandar's very close relationship with Adel.

Adel also studied in Germany and speaks fluent German. His brother Na'il aced Stanford Business School in record time and had a high-entry job at Morgan Stanley until he was summoned by his older brother to work at the Saudi Embassy in DC.

Cross-posted at Redstate

Saudis Jockeying for Post-US Withdrawal Era: The BackStories Part Three

A Slate article by Christopher Hitchens puts the quandary in which the US finds itself in the Middle East by polemically putting Saudi Arabia and Iran as the Sunni/Shi'ite bad cops waiting in the wings. This plague-on-both-their-houses typifies the polemic approach many Americans have towards the Arab/Persian world in general and the contestants in Iraq more specifically. But let's back up again and look at the Saudi side of the ledger.

Remember the Dynasty TV metaphor, and how the vast Saudi Royal Family is sort of that Carrington/Ewing Texas family bulked a thousand times as large and the Saudi fortune the Carrington/Ewing's fortune times a million [counting the Saudi proven crude oil reserves in the ground amortized at at least 25 trillion dollars, maybe $50 trillion in present-day terms.] The Saudi Royal Family is acutely aware that the value of its oil wealth will vastly diminish if the US, EU and its other major customers suffer large and sustained economic recession/depression as Japan did after its real estate crash in the late '80s. If the dollar collapses, the resulting instabilities that ensue might be worse than OPEC and the Saudis shifting into alternative currencies and stock/bond holdings would warrant. So just as the Carter Doctrine and Reagan Corollary were US pledges to uphold Saudi political security/stability under its present leadership, the Saudis conversely should consider keeping the US as its primary protector, unsatisfactory as it may appear given some US policies in the Middle East. That protection has been the template until now, but King Abdullah is sending signals that the US should alter its set-in-stone policies vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians---even though the Hamas semi-insurgency has put that process on hiatus.

Much more important to the Saudis and their Peninsular family brethren [remember that all the ruling families save Oman's is from the same Mesalikh branch of the Unaiza tribal confederation] is the ascendancy of Iran. The Arabian Peninsula has significant Shi'ite minorities [and in Bahrain a majority] who have in the past demonstrated their unhappiness. They have been mollified, but Iran has always from the days of the Shah and nowadays even more, attempted to meddle in peninsula affairs. Recall that the Shah sent troops to Oman to suppress the Dhofar insurgency in the '70s and that the present Iranian leadership allows its citizens to use Dubai as a vast shopping mall for luxuries unavailable in Tehran.

Looking to the north, as the Turks see their hopes of joining the EU put in stasis, or even receding, they will predictably perceive their eastern "Mountain Turks," i.e. Kurds, as their most significant internal/external security problem. The Turks and Kurds are Sunni, so at bottom, they are unlikely to succumb to Iranian subversion or blandishments. But the Saudis would do well to regard Turkey as a new player/ally in the region whose assistance might help the KSA and its peninsular allies achieve equilibrium in an era of diminished US presence in the region.

The Saudis look at the world as an onion-ring House of Peace surrounded by a House of War with many gradations of hostility or friendship between themselves and various countries, but the House of War [Dar al-Harb] appears dangerously near to being turned into a Sunni-Shi'ite struggle rather than a Muslim-Kafiir problem. And despite the US's current difficulties, including a new Congress some of whose members believe that Okinawa is a good offshore base for the Central Command and are ignorant of Al-Qaeda being a Sunni-based terrorist outfit, America's role will remain, even if diminished. And even thought the Democratic Party has a large number of members who feel the Saudis may be too close to the Bush family dynasty, the previous Democratic administrations have all regarded the Saudi Arabia as a central player in the Middle East and a reliable ally throughout Central Asia and Africa.
Although both the US left and the US right both harbor elements with an intense distrust of Saudi Arabia, the NYT and its MSM pilot fish do accord the Saudis a measure of respect as a dependable ally.

But that respect and support may be waning as the consequences of the post-Gulf War decision to base US troops in Saudi military cities still reverberate today. In hindsight, that policy appears to have been a colossal blunder that stirred up more religious opposition to infidel troops based in the Kingdom than the benefits of proximity to the Middle East heartland and Saudi security conferred. King Abdullah should bear this new American outlook in mind in selecting his new foreign minister, as the Saudi-American relationship should not be lightly tampered with even though some aspects have not worn well with time.

Although I have followed events in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia closely for over thirty years, I can't begin to fathom some of the intricate familial, tribal social, religious, and economic relationships that are the underlying dynamics of political processes in the Kingdom, let alone the region as a whole. I suspect that very few, if any, observers do.

As I said in my previous pondering about this Foreign Minister succession, Saud al-Faisal may be asked or ordered by the King to remain in the position if there is no consensus on a successor at the top of the Royal Family. But if King Abdullah gives the job to Saud's brother Turki, the King could anger Bandar's father, Crown Prince Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz. Saud was in the job for over thirty years and Turki may become a permanent fixture as well. As Crown Prince, Sultan might think that appointing a Foreign Minister other than his son Bandar would impinge on his own forthcoming kingship, as Abdullah is over eighty and has a heart condition. So leaving Saud in as a figurehead, although he might still wield a lot of power, would be the compromise solution.

Okay, I know some readers, if they even get this far, will say it's how many angels on the head of a pin and what is the difference in who is selected except in some marginal fringe benefits not central to the underlying relationship between the two countries.

But for what it's worth and it's an extremely close call, I would make the final judgment that the US-Saudi relationship might be better off if Bandar bin Sultan succeeds Saud al-Faisal as Foreign Minister, talented as Turki Faisal is and well-disposed toward the American "umbrella" of protection as he and other senior Saudis have been. More later on this.

And it bears repeating that the US umbrella appears even more necessary as a nearly-nuclear Iran starts to swagger and throw its weight around in the region.

Saudis Jockeying for Post-US Withdrawal Era: The BackStories Part II

Back when I was Political/Military Officer for the US Embassy in Jidda in the '70s , I was sent to study the political situation in Eastern Province, and in particular, the Shi'ite minority who actually comprised the majority in the Al-Hasa Oasis, and towns like HufHuf, where pious Shi'ites refused to allow me to photograph them. As a sort of perverse joke on the ninety-percent Sunni Saudi population [at that time], the Shi'ites occupy the real estate where a huge amount of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves are located.

While I was in Dhahran to check on the Shi'ites [as a sidebar political officer for internal affairs to my main job as Pol/Mil], the US Consul General said that I had to meet a Saudi Prince who was an actual commander of a Fighter Wing for the RSAF, an unparalleled achievement for senior Saudi Royals, who normally existed at that time in otiose languorous oisivete, French for being layabouts with money.

When I met Bandar bin Sultan at his spartan office, he invited me to his home for dinner and after meeting his pregnant wife Haifa and their kids, we had dinner and then retired for orange juice and cigars for what turned out to be seven hours of what diplomats call a "tour d'horizon." Bandar is voluble and incredibly street smart with a charismatic charm that is virtually irresistable. He told me very late that evening the fact hitherto unknown to the US government that there existed a Saudi National Security Council, told me who was on it, and finally told me that he wanted to be king someday. I forwarded this to Washington in an airgram, and former Saudi and Egyptian Ambassador Hermann Eilts began a correspondence with me that turned into a friendship recently terminated by his death in Wellesley. Bandar famously went on to be a fabulously successful Saudi Ambassador to the US for over twenty years.

But that was then and this is now. Bandar himself now sits as the head of the Saudi NSC and jumping forward, the recent rapid return to Saudi Arabia by Prince Turki al-Faisal while his brother, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal lies ill means perhaps that Turki is lobbying to succeed his brother, while Bandar vies to supplant the Bani Faisal [sons of King Faisal] in the line to highest levels of internal Royal Family power and influence While I doubt that a more mature and seasoned Bandar still aspires to become King, one can surmise that his becoming Foreign Minister would be a steppingstone to the highest royal status---and I will eventually get to why that's something that may be important to the US.

[Background digression: skip if you want to cut to the chase] When you talk about the US-Saudi relationship, Saudi Oil Minister Zaki Yamani used to call it a "Catholic marriage,' full of broken hurled crockery, but fundamentally stable. However, three decades later Catholic marriages aren't what they used to be, and neither is the relationship once affirmed with the so-called Carter Doctrine, which pledged defense of Saudi Arabia if attacked, and the Reagan Corollary, which pledged defense of the Saudi Royal Family. King Abdullah has departed slightly, more by nuance than by policy, from supporting the US in every eventuality that King Fahd appeared to follow.

But King Abdullah has heart problems, and may soon be succeeded by Bandar's father, Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, which would escalate Bandar's ascendancy in the Royal Family and perhaps put the sons of King Faisal, a talented group who must live more by their wits nowadays than by dynastic connections, in a permanent backseat to the chief policymakers of the KSA.

So what, you say. I beg your forbearance in letting me develop the backdrop a bit more with another digression.

And indeed, the influence of the Saudis in particular and the Arab Middle East in general is receding as Turkey is being backpedaled back into the region by its apparent rejection by the EU and its nervousness about the independent Kurdish polity in Iraq. And of course, the advent of Iran as a nuclear power would put Saudi Arabia's favorite enemy [KSA and the Shah's Iran had no diplomatic relations while I was there] in a hegemonic regional position. So the Saudi coalition of Egypt, Jordan, Sunni Iraq, the Gulfies and the Arab League becomes relatively diminished in the overall weight-class in the political boxing matches afflicting the region. But the Saudis have another weight-class when it comes to economics.

Economically, the Saudis control to a large extent the price of oil through its role of swing producer in Opec. The Saudis can and have in the past frequently moved the price downward and then let the price rise by lowering production, often at the behest of the US as in the mid-eighties and again for GHWBush's '88 election. Now King Abdullah has changed this relationship with the US dramatically as he is now allowing Opec to move out of the dollar where all oil purchases are denominated in US currency and into a "basket" of currencies which are not losing value, as the dollar is and appears set to continue to do. This is happening slowly, but a rapid withdrawal from the dollar could cause harm to the US economy. Parenthetically, the Saudis also allowed a higher oil price at the recent OPEC meeting in Abuja.

And Abdullah appears vexed by the US performance in Iraq. I recall reading that the Saudis and Gulfies and other Arabs reluctantly agreed to the US unilateral invasion of Iraq, but in a Shakespearian "if it is to be done, let it be done quickly" mode.
Three and a half years later, Abdullah sees Lebanon [where King Abdullah has close family ties] and Iraq appear ready to revert to anarchy. The Saudis would have preferred Saddam to anarchy or an absolute Shi'ite paramountcy, which could ensue if the US leaves before some final agreement or cessation of hostilities.

So is Abdullah going to revert to the Saudi semi-neutral position when it signed on to the '73 Oil Embargo to punish the US for supporting Israel? Or will he decide that the Saudis cannot depend on the US, or that US support will be too radioactive in the turbulence ensuing from a "non-precipitous" withdrawal?

Finally getting to the point, I think an interesting tea leaf to the answer may lie in who is appointed to the Foreign Minister post, Bandar or Turki. There is also the third alternative, to leave Saud acting-FonMin for as long as it takes to hammer out a decision on the candidates among the members of the senior Royals, who will finally decide.
[I have to run now, but am going to put up this post while I finish the second half and the bizarre reasoning processes one goes through when "wearing one's Saudi hat."]

Saudis Jockeying for Post-US Withdrawal Era: The BackStories

Saudi Arabia has told Dick Cheney that an American drawdown of troops or withdrawal will result in the support of the Saudis [and left unsaid, other Sunni countries in the region like Egypt and Jordan] of the beleaguered Sunni tribal elements left stranded in a Shi'ite hegemony. The New York Times column by Helene Cooper says:

The Saudis have been wary of supporting Sunnis in Iraq because their insurgency there has been led by extremists of Al Qaeda, who are opposed to the kingdom’s monarchy. But if Iraq’s sectarian war worsened, the Saudis would line up with Sunni tribal leaders.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who told his staff on Monday that he was resigning his post, recently fired Nawaf Obaid, a consultant who wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post two weeks ago contending that “one of the first consequences” of an American pullout of Iraq would “be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.”

Mr. Obaid also suggested that Saudi Arabia could cut world oil prices in half by raising its production, a move that he said “would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today’s high oil prices.” The Saudi government disavowed Mr. Obaid’s column, and Prince Turki canceled his contract.

But Arab diplomats said Tuesday that Mr. Obaid’s column reflected the view of the Saudi government, which has made clear its opposition to an American pullout from Iraq.

Okay, are you ready for an even weirder apercu into what is going on?

The fact is that the al-Saud family, the Sabah family in Kuwait, the ruling family of Bahrain, and the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates are all, are you ready for this? These families are all relatively junior:
MEMBERS OF THE MESALIKH BRANCH OF THE UNAIZA CONFEDERATION which is the main congeries of Sunni tribes in the Syrian Desert stretching all the way down to the Yemeni and Omani borders, more or less. By the way, there are other tribes, other confederations, and many "tribeless" Saudis and other Arab affiliations.

But when I was political officer in Saudi, my Arabic language skills and other assiduous strokings of the local greybeards allowed me a peek into what really drives the dynamics of this ancient group of inhabitants living there since the times of Sargon, the first Semitic conqueror of Mesopotamia 4200 years ago.

The dynamics are tribal, and the senior elder graybeards told me that the most senior tribal groupings to whom the Al-Saud, Al-Sabah, Al-Khalifah, and other peninsular rulers are in Iraq, way up at the head of the notional tribal table. And despite the trillions of dollars among the rulers of SAG, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar: They all owe fealty and allegiance and BayH [my Arabic is rusty] to the tribal leaders of Iraq. That's how it's been for thousands of years and although the tribal ethos has diminished, or some say disappeared, there is evidence that the exquisitely conservative and traditional King Abdullah still upholds those tribal traditions of honor and allegiance.

So there is the backstory, in part, of why the Saudis must come to the aid of their Sunni tribal elders in Iraq if summoned. It's an oath of a concept long forgotten in the West and even throughout the rest of the world, the Middle East included.

And there is more to the Turki al-Faisal story:
Prince Bandar bin Sultan was the natural son of Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz and a Sudanese slave woman [or let's call her a household retainer]. He had no royal standing in the family because of his mixed origins until he proposed to Haifa, the sister of Turki Al-Faisal and Saud Al-Faisal, and she accepted, which was extraordinary since parental permission was usually requested before the girl accepted the proposal. This happened in the late '60s and Bandar sealed his newly-acquired royal status when at a majlis he asked King Faisal, father of his bride, what he should be called from now on, since he was married to the King's daughter. Faisal answered, "Prince" Bandar bin Sultan, conferring him with legitimate birth denied him by his own father.

Bandar thus gained parity with his two brothers and went on to become the Ambassador to the United States, while Turki headed Saudi intelligence and Saud the Foreign Ministry. Now Bandar is head of the Saudi National Security Council, which he revealed the existence of to me back in the mid-'70s after a long dinner and evening at his home in Dammam. I wrote it up in an Airgram to the State Dept and was commended for discovering something even the CIA had not known. Personally, by word of mouth, which is the only way to find out what is really going in Saudi Arabia.

So now Bandar, the consummate brash arriviste upstart, and Turki, the suave polished diplomat, are contending for the post that their brother is departing.

Remember the TV series Dynasty, back in the days of J R Ewing and Joan Collins and scheming and manoeuvering? Multiple the stakes by a thousand and the consequences of the outcomes by ten thousand, and then what is happening among the countries in the Middle East comes into perspective.