The Wall Street Journal Europe
Thursday, October 4 2001, p. 1/7

The War on Terrorism Threatens the Pillars Under Saudi Regime
by Hugh Pope in Instanbul, Danny Pearl in Bombay and Yaroslav Trofimov in Manama, Bahrein

(Excerpts)

At the heart of the conflict between the United States and Osama bin Laden is an epic struggle over one of the world's richest prices: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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In Saudi Arabia itself, there will be few outward signs that those are the stakes ... Newspapers have already been ordered to stop reporting about the disaffected Saudis who are believed to have made up the majority of the highjackers in the Sept. 11 attacks. A top Saudi prince is making the rounds of influential clerics, trying to reassure them the country won't help attack a fellow Muslim State.

But ((Mr. Rumfelds recent visit to Saudia Arabia)) does unwittingly help accomplish what was likely one of Mr. bin Laden's hidden goals in attacking the U.S.: building up tension between the two pillars that hold up the Saudi dynasty - a military alliance with the U.S. and a religious alliance with a deeply conservative strain of Islam increasingly determined to rid the land of foreign influence.

"It's a time bomb, " says Nawaf Obaid, a prominent Saudi strategic thinker. "The religious establishment is getting more and more alienated, and the American presence is being felt more. At the same time, the royal family cannot be seen to distance themselves from the U.S. That would be political suicide."
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"Circumstances have changed since the Gulf War. The sense of common purpose that was there then is not there now. The narrower the mission he ((Rumsfeld)) outlines, the broader the support he'll get," says Charles Feeman, who was U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992. "Osama has no hope of overthrowing the U.S. But he does seek that in his own country. What he hopes we will do is attack a broad target in the Middle East, and thus deligitimize both what we do and the Saudi regime."

Saudi Arabia's special ties to the U.S. date back to the end of World War II. That's when Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi Arabias Founder, King Abdulaziz, reached a basic understanding that the U.S. would protect the royal family that runs the country in return for preferred access to Saudi oil - which now accounts for one-sixth of U.S. consumption.

The relationship has benefited both sides. The Saudi elite sent their children at American Universities, and U.S. oil companies poured billions of dollars into developing the country's infrastructure. Rich with 'petrodollars' derived from those investments, Saudis poured money into U.S. markets and bought U.S. products. (In recent years its spent between $6 billion and $10 billion annually on U.S. goods and services.)
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That economic relationship continues today. The Saudis awarded $25 billion in gas and infrastructure projects this summer to three consortia dominated by U.S. firms, with Exxon Mobil Corp. in the lead.

But until the 1991 Gulf War, the military underpinnings of the alliance remained in the background. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq changed that in ways more permanent than many Saudis initially imagined.

Saudi Arabia's ruling elite immediately reached out to the U.S. for help fending off a fellow Arab country nearly at its borders. And the U.S. was only too happy to oblige, basing a huge array of operations from within the Kingdom.

While many Saudis assumed the overt military presence would only be temporarily, the partnership expanded and put down roots. A military command center, built in the scorching hot desert that dominates the Arabian peninsula, has become the lynchpin of U.S. strategy for defending the Persion Gulf and its crucial oil reserves. And Prince Sultan Air Base is owned by the Saudis but manned by U.S. military personnel.
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Almost no Saudis see the Americans on station, which sits about 80 kilometers southeast of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. But few are unaware of the American presence, and in many ways it was the growing U.S. military activity on Saudi soil that put the U.S. and Saudi elite on a collision course with the other pillar of royal Saudi support.

The Saudi royal family, whose 30,000 or so members populate nearly every key post in the government, is no stranger to religious fervor. An alliance since the 18th century with the family of Muhammed Abd al-Wahhab, founder of Saudi Arabia's puritan Wahhabite sect, has supplied the ideology that three successive Saudi regimes have wielded to hold sway in Arabia.

Historically, the sect's strict, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam has made it an ideal tool of the Saudi royal family's ability to rise above Arabia's many feuding tribes. Indeed, the royal family has managed to inculcate a radical notion in Islam: that Saudi Arabia itself, not just the sacred cities of Medina and Mecca (which 1.2 billion Mulsims face to pray several times each day), is holy territory.

But seeking legitimacy through religion has also been a double-edged sword. As early as 1979, when Islamic militants seized control of the main mosque in Mecca in a bloody two-week siege, the royal Saudis began striving to mitigate the problems.

The government slapped long jail terms on open religious dissenters. But it also tried to woo the imams - who lead prayers in the mosques - by increasing funding for the clergy-run schools and charities that seek to export the Wahhabi version of Islam. In a country that outlaws teaching about Darwin and Freud, this means that millions of Saudi youths have emerged from school having memorized the Koran. At least one of the alleged Saudi hijackers, Wail Mohammed Al-Shehri, was a teacher himself. Another, Ahmed Ibrahim Al Haznawi, was an imam in the Baljurashi mosque.
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In the wake of the Gulf War, Mr. Bin Laden gave prominent voice to a strident minority desiring the removal from the country of all non-Muslims - including millions of foreign laborers who have no rights but make the Saudi economy tick. Popular after his exploits with the mujahedeen fighters who forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan, Mr. Bin Laden offered troops to help defend the kingdom against the Iraqis. The U.S. military presence, though, was often the target that resonated, becoming a lightning rod for Arab concerns about the treatment of Iraqi citizens under U.S.-led sanctions and the treatment of Palestinians by Israel.

Though the scion of a prominent Saudi family, Mr. Bin Laden was deported and stripped of his citizenship. He's made no secret of continuing his efforts to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia.
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And discontent has continued to spread within the kingdom. Many ordinary Saudis think big-spending members of the royal family are straying too far from the mainstream.
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An economic downturn has contributed to the discontent. Saudi Arabia had earlier used its huge oil income to build popular support through modernization and economic development, but by most counts, per capita income has dropped 40% since the oil boom of the 1970s. While supermarket shelves still stock a profusion of American goods, oil price downturns and a big rise in the Saudi public debt mean that the Saudi state can't produce enough jobs to keep up with a population explosion.

"Economic growth looks as if it will be flat in 2002, with oil revenue of about $55 billion, $10 billion less than this year. Unemployment is not yet a crisis, but it is of high concern as a social and economic problem," says Brad Bourland, chief economist at Saudi Arabian Bank in Riyadh.
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Since the Sept. 11 attacks, says one local Saudi official ... local Islamic preachers have been more strident than ever in mosques filled with fervent young people ... Osama bin Laden's a big hero, and if he gets killed, he'll be like a prophet, the official says. "The damage is already done. They are rebelling against the status quo, economic inequality, injustices, closed politics. They link themselves to God, and are so dogmatic they can't see anything else. They consider themselves occupied, that the Americans are in control of their daily lives. They want a Taliban regime."

In the end, says Mai Yamani, a London-based Saudi writer on the subject of Saudi youth, "the government thought that people would be pious and obedient if they stuck to learning religion - but instead they suddenly started questioning the system."
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