David Hirst, in Riyadh, finds Saudis intensely worried that their erstwhile mighty protector, the US, is looking more and more as a grave threat You won't find the newly published Hatred's Kingdom in any Saudi bookshop, but it is so much in demand among high officials that the government has brought out a reprint of its own. Its author is Dore Gold, a hard- line Israeli spokesman; according to him, the "hatred" in question is rooted in that austere brand of Islamic orthodoxy, Wahhabism, to which Saudi Arabia officially subscribes, and it found its most horrific, world- shaking expression in the atrocity of 9/11. The book has further fuelled that Saudi obsession and widespread Arab guessing game known as "who is next?" Next candidate, that is to say, for the "reform" or "regime change", to which the new-conservative hawks of the Bush administration, in their drive to "reshape" the Middle East, will turn after they dispose of Saddam Hussein. Syria and Iran are perhaps the more probable ones. But the Saudis see very good reasons why they might be targeted too. Oil -- and the US's inexorable thrust towards military and political ascendancy in the Gulf region that is by far the world's most prolific producer of it -- is one. Religiosity -- those Christian fundamentalist tendencies within the administration for which Saudi Arabia ranks as their most obvious Islamic antithesis -- is another. But most important, they think, is the Israeli factor -- and their conviction that, for the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, a right-wing Israel agenda is part and parcel of the American one. "As America's most important ally in the region," said Prince Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki, "we were the Israelis' only serious Arab competitor, on Palestine's behalf, for the ear of American administrations. 9/11 gave them the golden opportunity to break that -- to portray us as the kernel of evil, and fount of terror." Virtually everyone, both rulers and ruled, in this now viscerally anti-American country fear what America has in store for it; the war on Iraq has only brought the fear to a new pitch of intensity. But the rulers' response to the war is profoundly, dangerously, different from what most of the ruled would have liked. The government has sought as far as it dare to placate the superpower of whose protection it is no longer confident, yet cannot risk forfeiting. So it is that while no US aircraft take off from Saudi territory on combat missions, the command and control centre at Prince Sultan airbase near Riyadh effectively directs the air war. It is the culmination of the deference which, since 9/11, Saudi Arabia has exhibited towards the US, submitting to pressures for "cultural" reform in such sensitive areas as "hate-breeding" religious text books, urging a more tolerant discourse on a ferociously orthodox clergy or promoting the most accommodating Middle East peace initiative ever. The House of Saud did not like granting military facilities for a war it officially deplores, but it bought US assurances that the war would be a quick one, and calculated that the Saudi public would be more satisfied by the removal of a despot it fears than aggrieved by the means it was done. But the war is already longer and nastier than anticipated. And even if the end comes quickly, worse might follow it; for what the war has already revealed about the Iraqis' attitude to their "liberators" suggests that they could soon be seeking to "liberate" themselves from their liberators in a classic anti- colonial insurgency. "I see a far graver, Arab Afghanistan ahead," said commentator Abdul-Aziz Dakheel, "and we would be next to it." Like other Arabs, the Saudi public already sees Iraq as "another Palestine". They admire and applaud Iraqi resistance to the Western "aggressors", even though they suspect that, so far, this is conducted more by Saddam loyalists bent on saving their own skins than by patriots who loath him. So a Saudi Arabia which continued to side with an American occupier at war with an Iraq without Saddam would be very unpopular indeed. In contrast with other Arab countries, there has been no public agitation, no street demonstrations, but the government fears that popular solidarity with Iraq, if and when it comes, will take an extreme, violent, religious form. The appeal of Bin Ladenism may have declined since 9/11; but the Iraq war has given it a new lease of life. "From the militant Islamists' standpoint", explained Abdul-Aziz Qasim, a lawyer close to them, "it is time for jihad against the infidel aggressor. They are awaiting the guidance of an authority under which to wage it." That authority, of course, should be the self-same Saudi regime which, on impeccable Wahhabite grounds, once joined forces with America to recruit Saudi and Arab "mujahidin" to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. But now that the "infidel aggressors" are American and British, it has enlisted the official religious hierarchy, and even some formerly anti-government sheikhs, to preach against the appropriateness of jihad. It has also arrested hundreds of Al-Qa'eda suspects. But some are said to be among the Arab volunteers converging on Baghdad -- amid forecasts, from people like Qasim, that, given the country's long borders with Iraq, the clan and tribal connections that span them, there will be many more such volunteers in the future, and the government will find it very difficult to stop them. But the immediate fear is a wave of anti-Western terrorism inside the Kingdom itself, with all the political and economic consequences that would bring in its wake. "All depends on the course of the war and what comes after," said Muhsin Awaji, an Islamist and former political prisoner, "but the militants are already a volcano ready to erupt, and I fear that they will target any westerners, not just American and British." That fear has clearly communicated itself to the vast expatriate community. In downtown Riyadh, around the old mud-walled palace with whose capture the Saudi Kingdom was born, the souqs, normally teeming with foreign shoppers, are almost empty. Any such "jihad" will in effect be aimed at the Saudi government, and seen as such by the population at large. For it is not just religious fanaticism and anti- American feeling that gives sustenance to Al-Qa'eda- style militants, and wins them sympathy in a wider public that would otherwise oppose their violence. It is a generalised discontent with the government. "As well as being a continuous source of anger at the West," said a Western diplomat, "Palestine was always a symptom of the Arabs' frustration with their own systems -- and now you have Iraq added to that." In Saudi Arabia that frustration is steadily growing, fuelled by such specifically Saudi conditions as an enormously wealthy country now running a huge budget deficit, turning out hundreds of thousands of graduates who cannot find jobs in an economy overwhelming dependent on foreigners, a spreading poverty that rubs shoulders with the enormous profligacy of princes -- and a lack of modern, representative institutions through which to voice these discontents. Perhaps the regime's central dilemma is that the jihadist militancy which now threatens it is doctrinally justified by the self-same Wahhabism which, as interpreted by the official clergy, simultaneously promotes the notion of the people's absolute loyalty to the Islamically approved ruler. It is hard for it to combat one manifestation of Wahhabism without undermining the other -- and ultimately its own legitimacy. The dilemma was heightened by the last Gulf war, and the clamour for institutional, political and economic reform, from both Islamists and secular modernists, which it provoked; but this time it is more serious because, in the 12 years since, it has, by and large, spurned the reformists' demands. Even so, it is clear that few people in the kingdom want to see the end of the House of Saud, a regime which, for all its flaws, they compare favourably with most others, monarchies or republics, in the region. But, said Tawfiq Zughayir, a moderate Islamist, "it simply must reform -- and build its legitimacy on a new foundation: Democracy." That, he and others say, would contribute to several things; it would rob the neo-conservatives of a key pretext for the externally imposed "reform" what they see as "failed" societies, help emancipate the relatively progressive, temporal branch -- the actual rulers -- of the Saudi theocracy from the constraints of its backward and obscurantist spiritual branch, wean away the large majority of moderate Islamists from the minority of extreme, Bin Ladenist ones, and enable Saudi Arabia -- like Turkey -- to defy America where necessary on the ground that, being a democracy, it cannot go against the popular will. Crown Prince Abdullah has clear reformist inclinations, and is popular for it. But he stands alone, blocked by the rival clan, centred round the mentally incapacitated King Fahd, whose leading members seem to fear that any serious change, whether demanded by the people or the Americans, will lead, deliberately or inadvertently, to the demise of the whole regime. "This," said columnist Daoud Shyrian, "is a very dangerous attitude, and, after Iraq, at least a start to reforms has become an urgent necessity." Otherwise, many fear, the country risks an internal destabilisation that would arouse the neo- conservatives' interventionist instincts. Seize the oilfields and partition the Kingdom, as some of them have suggested? "For the Saudis," said a Western diplomat, "invasion is not a serious prospect yet -- though it is certainly among the specters and poltergeists that haunt them."
