CHAPTER 5

Brotherhood is Selective

Saudi Arabia has two identities, an Arab identity and a Muslim one. Except for Lebanon, Islam is the dominant religion of all Arab countries, and this dual identity claims all of them. Until the recent radicalization of Islam and the electoral and other successes of Muslim fundamentalists which enabled them to influence state affairs, the rest of the Arab countries, unlike Saudi Arabia, wore their Muslim identity lightly and had no problem placing their national identity above their religion. Saudi Arabia has never been able to do that, and for practical reasons has never tried to. As the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the home of Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, where all able Muslims are commanded to go to perform the Hajj, it has forced upon it a greater Muslim role. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia made religion the foundation of the state.

In Islam there is no clear division between religion and politics - God and Caesar overlap - so the country's religious position is also a political one. Thus Saudi Arabia's commitment to the propagation of Muslim ways means involvement in Muslim politics. In addition, the various kings of the House of Saud have never tried to limit Islam's external claims on them; they welcomed them with relish in order to offset their inherent weaknesses among the Arabs. So, while other Arab countries faced no problems in reconciling their two identities, the House of Saud sought to create a division between the two and always manipulated its bonds with the Muslim world to balance the historic, linguistic and geographical Arab claim.

The dual identity is a reality and a convenience which manifests itself in many ways, including the constant reference to 'Islamic brotherhood' in the texts of all the treaties Saudi Arabia has with Muslim and Arab countries and in King Fahd's adoption of the title of Guardian of Islam's Holy Shrines, which was originally coined for Sultan Selim of Turkey. This exceptional ethno-religious position and power have been enhanced by Saudi Arabia's control of 25 per cent of the world's known oil reserves (by this is meant oil recoverable at a reasonable price). The oil wealth and the relative weakness of the Arabs and Muslims could have led to the country's assumption of a position of true leadership in both worlds. But, much to the chagrin of Saudi Arabia's friends in the West, it has not. The generally accepted Saudi position of Arab and Muslim leadership is superficial. Saudi Arabia feigns it, and it is not accepted by most Arabs and Muslims, and by others only for brief periods of time and because of specific financial needs.

There are obvious traditional reasons for Saudi Arabia's inability to lead and they include its small population, the Bedoum back-wardness of the country and the House of Saud's adherence to Wahhabism. But there are other reasons which are of the House of Saud's own making: its divisive role, a total failure to develop constructive long-range policies, the royal family's corruption and continued commitment to absolute rule, and the weakness and lack of skill of most of its kings. Whether the House of Saud could have done anything about the built-in traditional reasons is arguable, but the family-made reasons began with the conquest of most of the Arabian Peninsula and the proclamation of the Saudi state. Oil, which came later and should have facilitated the assumption of sensible Arab and Muslim positions, did the opposite. It created a distance between the Saudis and the rest. More recently oil has been used to turn the Arabs and Muslims against each other.

But even without much interest in Arabism or the Muslim world, Ibn Saud still could not denounce either. He was unwillingly Arab and Muslim while trying his utmost to keep both from upsetting his personal gains and ways. During the 1920s, soon after the completion of Ibn Saud's conquests, Saudi Arabia, a new state, immediately developed border disputes with all its neighbours (Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, the Yemen and the Trucial States - the latter are now the United Arab Emirates). Ibn Saud accepted British-sponsored solutions for these problems and went further and signed meaningless friendship treaties with some of his neighbours. He did little beyond that and most of the Arab countries were weak colonies fighting for their own independence, hardly in a position to force on him a greater Arab commitment or to sponsor his people against him. But the Muslim context differed substantially. His occupation in 1925 of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina precluded ignoring Islam. In this case infidel Britain stood aloof; Islam and Islamic unity did not threaten it and control of the holy cities might prove useful. The Muslims thought Mecca and Medina belonged to all of them and demanded a say in the way they were governed. They issued specific calls for the institution of a democratic all-Muslim government for Mecca and Medina with Ibn Saud as 'guardian'.

Aware of the non-acceptance of his Wahhabism, Ibn Saud initially attempted to assuage Muslim unease by announcing that his occupation of Mecca and Medina was temporary, to be replaced by a more acceptable religious body to be defined later, but still with him in control. This was not enough to appease the doubters. Protests against Wahhabi acts of terror were vehement and, because the non-Wahhabi people of the Hijaz were in sympathy with the outsiders, dangerous enough to force Ibn Saud in 1926 to call a Muslim conference 'to have fellow Muslims know us as we are, and not as we have been described by our enemies'.

The Islamic conference was attended by kings, presidents and representatives from over 40 countries, but in the absence of a universally accepted Islamic church hierarchy to decide religious issues, it proved to be a non-event. The issues were heatedly debated and calls for religious tolerance and the banning of granting 'any commercial concessions to foreigners' were added to opposition to any change in the nature of the holy cities and Ibn Saud's assumption of the non-Islamic title of king. But, after many threats and counter-threats, the conference produced no results -just the creation of a committee to deal with these things headed by Prince Faisal. Though they were unhappy, there was not a single Muslim country in a position to alter the situation.

Ibn Saud dismissed the Islamic conference after he expanded his promises regarding the sanctity of the holy cities and emphasized that the pilgrimage, which he promoted because it was his only indigenous source of income, was safer under him than ever before. His deportation of the Indian delegation revealed a great deal about how secure he felt. Though Ibn Saud did not renege on all his promises, including the important one of granting foreign concessions, until much later, the pan-Islamic importance of Mecca and Medina was reduced, but they remained under Saudi control.

The border disputes and doctrinal questions made for an inauspicious Arab and Muslim start. Except for promoting the Hajj to safeguard the income it generated, Ibn Saud concentrated on consolidating his internal position. The Muslims of the world stopped looking to the Governor of Mecca and Medina for religious guidance and they and the Arabs had no interest in Ibn Saud's internal policies. Until 1932, except for minor Iraqi attempts at cooperation with Ibn Saud, which Britain's committed stand against Arab cooperation blocked, the only people who paid serious attention to Saudi Arabia were star-struck Orientalists and British agents. But control of most of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam's holiest shrines precluded long-term uninvolvement in Arab and Muslim affairs. Soon three major problems surfaced. A religious dispute with Egyptian pilgrims, a serious territorial dispute with the Yemen and the budding conflict in Palestine represented major issues which forced Ibn Saud to reveal his true position on the Arabs and the Muslims.

The Saudi refusal in 1929 to allow the Egyptians to conduct their colourful ceremony of Mahmal resulted in the death of over 30 Egyptian pilgrims and led to a rupture in diplomatic relations. It sent a signal to all Muslims, particularly to the Shias of Iran, whose ways were more colourful and more offensive to Wahhabi strictures and sensibilities than those of the Egyptians. For the first time in centuries, Muslims performing the Hajj did so under censorship. It widened the schism between the ruler of Mecca and Medina and the rest of Islam.

The territorial dispute with the Yemen in the 1930s was the culmination of a long-simmering enmity between the only two independent countries in the Arabian Peninsula. The Yemen had become independent in 1918 and its borders were determined by the Turkish-sponsored Violet Line Agreement of 1914. But the nature of the Yemen was a challenge to the Saudis: it was a populous country with more than half the population of the whole Arabian Peninsula, had a solid urban history and was more advanced than its new neighbour. It also represented a thorn in the side of British colonialism, a possible springboard for action against their control of Saudi Arabia and all the makeshift tributary sheikhdoms and emirates of the Gulf. In particular, the Yemen represented a threat to the British colonization of Aden, a territory which considered itself part of a greater Yemen which had been dismembered by colonialism.

As usual when Saudi Arabia and Britain had similar interests, Ibn Saud expressed British policies and began making trouble for the Yemen and its rulers. The problems had begun four years before he gained control of the Muslim holy cities, in 1921, when 3000 Yemeni pilgrims who were passing through Saudi-controlled territory on their way to Mecca were slaughtered in cold blood. The extent of this butchery and the feeble Saudi excuse of mistaking the pilgrims for an invading army augured poorly for the future but the Yemen was trying its best to avoid a confrontation with Saudi Arabia and its British backers and it accepted compensation.

In 1932, the year that Ibn Saud gave the territory he ruled his name, both countries competed over the control of Assir, now the south-western part of Saudi Arabia, always a neglected territory governed by the most brutal of the House of Saud emirs. The Assiris were Zeidi Shias, the co-religionists of the Yemenis and historically their wards, but the Saudis, even when the disputed territory represented no strategic imperative for them and despite their insistence that the Shias were heretics, wanted to weaken the Yemen and claimed the territory as theirs. The initial military confrontation over this attractive mountainous part of the Arabian Peninsula was settled without any alterations in the territory's status and the two sides signed a friendship treaty.

But neither Ibn Saud nor the British were satisfied with a treaty which left the Yemen relatively strong. Ibn Saud ignored the treaty and sponsored anti-Yemeni cross-border raids until it led to open warfare between the two countries. With British financial support and military equipment, his forces gained the upper hand and the Yemen was forced to sign the 1934 Taif Peace Agreement, which 'leased' Assir to Ibn Saud for a period of 20 years, to be renegotiated on its expiry. The Yemenis knew that they would never get the territory back and it was a humiliation they have never forgotten or forgiven.

The war with the Yemen exposed two articles of Saudi for-eign policy which are still in existence. First, Saudi Arabia was intolerant of the presence of any other powerful force in the Arabian Peninsula. Secondly, particularly in view of unsuccessful Arab attempts to stop the war from breaking out, Saudi Arabia continued to prove itself willing to place its relationship with an outside power above its supposedly brotherly relationship with an Arab country.

The third problem, one which eventually became more impor-tant than the Yemen, was that of Palestine. To restate, the British wish to have a free hand in deciding the future of Palestine was among the reasons they sponsored Ibn Saud, who accommodated them by implicitly accepting the idea of a Jewish state. Internal and regional pressures to speak on behalf of Arab rights in Palestine and Muslim rights in Jerusalem on occasion forced him to make pronouncements which appeared to contradict his original stance, yet he continued to take his lead from Britain.

From the late I 920s and for a decade or so, Ibn Saud's inter-Arab policies on the subject of Palestine consisted of playing the two Arab sides vying for its leadership against each other, while sim-ultaneously trying to bargain away Arab rights in return for British support to expand his domain. He opposed the claim to Palestine of the Hashemite King Abdallah of Jordan and pretended to support his enemy, the militant Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, by giving him limited financial help. Abdallah was a Hashemite rival to be kept from getting strong, but Ibn Saud's support for the Mufti was never wholehearted. He consistently advised the Mufti to negotiate with the various British commissions which were sent to study the Palestine problem. More seriously, in 1936, Ibn Saud tricked the Mufti into ending a 183-day Palestinian national strike which was successful in putting pressure on the British Mandate Government. Ibn Saud promised the Mufti to intercede with the British on his behalf and was explicit in his belief in 'our British friends' intentions'. There is no record of this intercession in the British Foreign Office documents of the time. In fact, Ibn Saud sought to weaken the Mufti as well by establishing contact with leading Palestinian families opposed to him, the Nashashibis and Shawas.

Ibn Saud went beyond using Philby as an emissary to the British Foreign Office and Churchill to negotiate his willingness to accept openly the Jewish claim to Palestine in return for Britain withholding support from his Hashemite rivals, who were now kings in Jordan and Iraq. On 17 September 1939 Philby met with Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of Israel, to negotiate Ibn Saud's overt acceptance of a Jewish state in return for £20 million. Ibn Saud was broke and, as usual, set money above brotherhood and principle.

Ibn Saud's support of the Mufti against King Abdallah of Jordan while sponsoring the Mufti's enemies was one of the earliest exam-ples of a divide-and-rule policy on the Arabs. His acceptance of British policy was a signal that his old subservience to them would continue. His attempt to extract money from Weizmann was very much in character; the reason he was always successful in buying Bedoum loyalty was because he was one of them. But ignoring the Arabs and Muslims was easier in the 1920s and 1930s than it was in the 1940s - among other things the time when the Palestinian problem as an Arab and Muslim issue occupied centre stage.

In 1945 Saudi Arabia unavoidably joined the Arab League, an organization committed to fostering political and economic cooperation between the Arab countries. Joining the League satisfied his people and the rest of the Arabs but he had every intention of keeping it and its cooperation plans at arm's length. By 1947 and 1948, most Arabs looked to this new organization to save Palestine. Ostensibly the League decided on the level and nature of the Arabs' Palestinian involvement. Saudi Arabia, a member of an Arab organization for the first time, had no option but to participate in defending the Arab position in the United Nations and other international forums and to vote for sending Arab armies to help the people of Palestine.

During Ibn Saud's life, Saudi involvement in the most important Arab problem of the century never went further than providing verbal support. In the mid-I 930s he had ignored the calls of King Ghazi of Iraq to form a common Arab front to defend Palestine. Then, in 1948, he sat on the sidelines and refused to contribute forces to liberate Palestine (even Philby admits this) and placed hurdles, such as the denial of transport, in the way of Saudi citizens who volunteered to join Arab forces fighting there. He continued to pay the Arab position lip-service to the extent of publicly instructing his son and Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal, to attack US support of Israel while conducting secret negotiations with the Americans for the building of the huge US airbase in Dhahran. His previous commitment to British policies had been replaced by a new American one and America was solidly pro-Israeli.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War ended in the defeat of the Arabs and Ibn Saud's ensuing behaviour revealed no remorse - only a genuine fear that the popular feeling surrounding the Palestinian problem might infect his kingdom and undermine his position. Ibn Saud withheld financial support from the Egyptian and Jordanian forces still occupying parts of Palestine, but spent money supporting several military regimes in Syria to keep it from uniting with Iraq to create a military counterweight to Israel. According to Glubb Pasha, Ibn Saud was always apprehensive of such a union and how it might engender feelings for Arab unity among his people. The Saudi volunteers who managed to join the Arab forces in Palestine returned home to be harassed and imprisoned by the security forces. Saudi Arabia refused to admit qualified Palestinians who sought employment there because of fear of political agitation. Laws forbidding Saudis to marry Arabs without prior governmental permission, which was seldom given, were introduced for the first time. The Saudi press was ordered to tone down its pro-Palestinian rhetoric and reduce its reporting of the misery which had befallen the Palestinians. Ibn Saud refused to contemplate the possible use of oil to pressure America into a more even-handed Palestinian policy and, according to the Palestinian leader Jamal Toukan, a member of a delegation who visited him to ask for assistance, he was preoccupied with burning what food remained after the feast he gave them, lest it fall in the hands of poor people who might get accustomed to eating meat.

The acts aimed at distancing Saudi Arabia from the aftermath of the Arab defeat, even the smallest of them, amounted to an adherence to a Saudi Arabia-first policy. The Saudi people felt differently, however, and even then Saudi writers and poets wrote about the problem constantly and tearfully. Such a policy in reality meant the House of Saud came first. And a House of Saud-first policy meant financial and political reliance on America, the oil concessionaire who held the purse strings.

Briefly the policy worked. Saudi Arabia's level of political development, Ibn Saud's repression and the rising oil income allowed it to escape the consequent upheavals which beset other Arab regimes. To many observers, this completed the picture. The Saudi attempts to undermine the Yemen, Ibn Saud's aloofness from Muslim independence movements and Arab calls for cooperation, and his intolerance of non-Wahhabi Muslims, were capped by his attitude towards Palestine. This left his country's Arab and Muslim positions both tarnished and weak, and opened the door for America.

In 1953, it was left to the inept Saud to face the consequences of his father's policies. The inevitable internal pressures which Ibn Saud had failed to neutralize were ignited and compounded by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader who assumed power in 1952 and later espoused Arab nationalism and became its leading twentieth-century exponent.

Nasser, a former Egyptian Army colonel who saw heroic combat in Palestine, rose to power as a result of the 1948 Arab defeat. His Army group seized power in Egypt from the corrupt King Farouk and was committed to eliminating the causes of the defeat in Palestine and to punishing the ruling social establishment respon-sible for it. Nasser's initial target, the Egyptian royal family and the land-owning Pashas, was expanded in 1954 when Nasser claimed leadership of Egypt's three circles of power: the Arab, Muslim and African worlds. The African role was uniquely Egyptian, but Nasser's claim in the Arab and Muslim arenas, though Nasser was loath to admit it, was an extension of the Hashemite claim of leadership of all the Arabs against which the House of Saud rose to power. And Nasser did not stop there; using as a base Al Azhar, Islam's oldest university and the leading recognized source of Muslim learning, he also presented a Muslim challenge. Because the House of Saud had not permitted anything to flourish in Mecca and Medina except Wahhabi teachings, Al Azhar was an attractive pan-Islamic alternative and its ulemas enhanced their position by adopting the issue of Jerusalem.

Nasser's Arab and Muslim appeals struck a chord with the Saudi people. Their Saudism was new and, despite four decades of attempts by the House of Saud to promote it, an unsatisfactory replacement for their Arab and Muslim identities. Saudi people needed and wanted to express their Arab and Muslim selves. Nasser's threat was not to invade Saudi Arabia, but his ability to subvert its people by appealing to their frozen identities and to their dissatisfaction with the House of Saud. It was a simple case of the external idea depending on internal support and Saudi political groups such as the Arabian Peninsula Peoples' Union supported Nasser and established offices in Cairo. Nasser's attempt to undermine the House of Saud utilized new technology, and the confrontation took the form of a battle between the old and the new. A new Egyptian radio station, the Voice of the Arabs, specialized in telling the Arab people of the misdeeds of their leaders. There was no shortage of material on Saudi Arabia, and the numbers of the King's wives and palaces and the gambling and womanizing of his brothers were recited in the manner of a scandal magazine of the airwaves. Of course, the promise of what Arab unity and Islamic solidarity would bring were exaggerated. The denunciations and exaggerations were combined in the slogan: 'Arab oil for the Arab people.'

King Saud faced a greater threat than had ever confronted his father. The previous Saudi position of safety had depended on the lack of responsiveness by the country's people to outside stimuli and the weakness of its enemies, and Nasser represented a reversal of both elements. The Arab threat was from within and Saudi Arabia's diminished Islamic credentials left it little room to manoeuvre. To avoid being left adrift politically, religiously and culturally, the Saudi Government decided to reclaim its two iden-tities. William Quandt of the Brookings Institution in Washington, in his remarkable Saudi Arabia in the 1 980s, suggests, 'It isn't sentiment which draws Saudi Arabia into Arab politics' to make a point about Saudi Arabia's response to the Arab threats to its safety. Quandt's observation holds true for the Saudi involvement in Muslim affairs. The Nasser challenge brought an end to its Arab and Muslim isolation. The Saudis had either to confront Nasser or to appease him.

King Saud was surrounded by foreign advisers in the manner of his father but the Americans had not replaced Philby with an influential court personality to keep him in line and his weakness and the mixed advice of his Syrian and Palestinian courtiers led to confused policies. In 1955 Saud quarrelled with Nasser over the latter's espousal of socialism, but in 1956 he went as far as to enter a tripartite alliance with Egypt and Syria which, however, he soon allowed to wither away. The resulting deterioration in the Saudi position enhanced the popularity of Nasser within Saudi Arabia and made other Arab leaders opposed to Nasser reluctant to befriend its government.

Suddenly there was Suez. When Nasser failed to secure total American support for his policies, his ambitions to control the Middle East and to eliminate what remained of British and French political influence and economic interests culminated in his 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal and the consequent British, French and Israeli invasion of his country. This time, unlike in 1948, the weakness of Saud and Nasser's popularity and the resulting threat of internal upheaval forced the Saudis to respond to the multinational attack on Egypt. Saud offered Egyptian military aircraft safe haven in his country and, unlike his father in 1948, ordered the cessation of oil shipments to Britain and France. ARAMCO, the American oil-producing con-sortium, encouraged by official American disapproval of the Suez invasion, obeyed the Saudi decision meekly and estab-lished a precedent which came back to haunt the company in the early 1970s, when the USA itself became the target of an oil embargo.

The selective oil embargo and courageous safe-haven offer were followed by generous financial aid to Egypt. Privately furious over Nasser's policies of confrontation, Saud acted to avoid being toppled. But, contrary to Saudi and other expectations that Suez was the end of Nasser, the Suez defeat strengthened rather than diminished Nasser's popularity and his threat to his Arab neighbours. Eventually the shakiness of the Saudi regime registered with the Eisenhower administration and forced it to act to protect its oil interests.

Rather than use diplomats to develop a Saudi-American plan to contain Nasser, America played on Saud's simple Bedoum instincts and in January 1957 invited him to the USA, where he was met on the tarmac by none other than Eisenhower himself. The negotiations which ensued and were followed up in Saudi Arabia produced a declaration of the Eisenhower Doctrine. This policy articulated the so-far secret American guarantees to Saudi Arabia (see The Brutal Friendship) and extended them to cover the safety of other countries friendly to the USA against the expansionist designs of Nasser or communism or both. At long last Saud's mind was made up for him.

As we will see in the following chapter, the Eisenhower Doctrine also formalized the replacement of the Anglo-French hegemony over pro-West Middle Eastern countries with an American one. But, like Britain before it, America had no long-term policy for Saudi Arabia and beyond the threat of military intervention it did nothing to define Saudi Arabia's role in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

In 1957 King Hussein of Jordan, encouraged and aided by the CIA, overthrew his own popularly elected pro-Nasser cabinet. (Contrary to popular history, which alleges that the cabinet tried to overthrow Hussein, the plot was concocted in Beirut and the CIA had a team of agents directing the operation from the King's palace.) This palace coup represented a confrontation between the pro- and anti-Nasser forces throughout the Middle East. America prevailed on King Saud to cast aside the historical Saudi-Hashemite enmity and to support King Hussein. This time Saudi Arabia used money against Nasser and it went further and stationed Saudi troops in Jordan to help stabilize it. It was the first use of Saudi troops in an Arab dispute beyond its borders.

Nasser's threat to the whole Middle East was deeply entrenched, however, and was anchored in the desire of the Arab people for unity. In 1958 Syria, a shaky republic lacking in permanent leadership and prone to coups d'etat, gave expression to this desire and decided to join Nasser and become the junior partner in the union with Egypt which created the United Arab Republic. To counter this threat to their security, Jordan and Iraq decided to merge and form a union of their own. What Saudi Arabia had always dreaded most, the emergence of strong Arab neighbours who could act as a magnet for its people and bring an end to the use of Saud's rule, became a reality. The American guarantee of its national integrity was deemed insufficient protection and Saudi Arabia felt obliged to try to stop both unions from being realized.

Saudi Arabia's attempt to intercept the march towards Arab unity took the form of a sophomoric plot in March 1958 to assassinate Nasser by shooting down his plane as it was about to land in Damascus. This was to be followed by other assassinations of pro-Nasser Syrian leaders, including the Syrian President, Shukri Kuwatly. The scheme was conceived by Yusuf Yassin, a Syrian adviser to Saud, and approved personally by the King. Nasser was nothing if not a publicist, and he got considerable mileage out of exposing the plot and giving journalists copies of the £2-million cheque the Saudis paid his Syrian chief of intelligence to do the job. Instead of eliminating Nasser, the plot played right into his hands and he convinced the Arab people, including many unhappy Saudis, that Saud was a Western lackey and that the West was the plot's real instigator. (Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad and a former Palestinian adviser to King Saud insist that it was a CIA plot but provide no evidence to back their allegation. Others have hinted at CIA-ARAMCO involvement, again without adequate proof.)

Saud's fate was sealed. His brother Faisal, too shrewd to personally lead a move to force Saud to step down, allowed other members of the family to do it. There was no way for Saud to outlive creating an atmosphere which alienated the Saudi people to the extent of endangering the rule of the family. In 1958 he initially agreed to cede power to Faisal to run the country while remaining a figurehead.

One of the first problems to confront Faisal after his initial assumption of power was what to do about the ostensibly pro-Nasser coup d'etat which overthrew the Hashemite Iraqi monarchy and put an end to unity plans between Iraq and Jordan on 14 July 1958. Eliminating the Iraqi monarchy, always a more substantial establishment than its poor Jordanian cousin, had been a goal of the House of Saud, but replacing it with a revolutionary regime posed a bigger threat. It took Faisal several days to recognize the new regime, since he was reluctant to accept the demise of his more predictable conservative enemies.

As it was, the new Iraqi regime became opposed to Nasser. Later, in 1961, Syria seceded from the union with Egypt and this time Faisal's anti-Arab-unity policies led him to immediately recognize the new regime and provide it with financial help. The regional balance of power was back to square one and Saudi Arabia moved to reclaim its old position, keeping the Arab world divided.

Meanwhile Faisal was uneasy with his de facto position and this encouraged a number of House of Saud moves which culminated in Saud's abdication in 1964. Nasser was faced with a united House of Saud and a worthy adversary who was totally free to follow his own policies and, fortunately for King Faisal, the battleground where the latest Egyptian-Saudi confrontation was taking place favoured him.

In 1962 another pro-Nasser revolution overthrew the monarchy in the Yemen. Whether Nasser personally was behind it remains a subject for debate, but his followers were and his pan-Arab leadership position precluded disowning an anti-royalist coup d'etat. Throughout the Arab world, the nationalist followers of Nasser recovered from the Syrian secession and were euphoric; they and their leader expected Saudi Arabia to follow the Yemen. But Faisal, initially as prime minister and regent and later as king, knew the people and terrain of the Arabian Peninsula much better than Nasser did and responded to the challenge in his backyard with firmness and cool. In this he was supported by President Kennedy, who used the Eisenhower Doctrine by holding joint military manoeuvres with the Saudi Army and provided Saudi Arabia with unlimited material support.

With America guaranteeing his safety, Fa~~al adopted the Yemeni royalists who had escaped the coup and supplied them with money and arms to start a civil war against the pro-Nasser republican regime. Faisal knew the Yemen's new leaders could not stand alone -not when he was buying the loyalty of its fickle Bedoums with salaries bigger than they had ever dreamed of. And he knew that Nasser could not afford to fail in the Yemen and survive. Nasser would have to divert forces to the Yemen which he desperately needed for his on-going confrontation with Israel. Like his father when he attacked the Hashemites in the Hijaz in 1925, Faisal was happy fighting a war he could not lose. America was ready to intervene against any Nasser-inspired move into Saudi Arabia to deny the Yemeni rebels safe haven. In fairness, Kennedy was not enamoured of the Yemeni royalists and knew that the republicans were a more advanced and wholesome lot, but he had no choice. It was war by proxy, an extension of the cold war; Kennedy acted because the USSR supported Nasser.

Emboldened by his early Yemeni success, Faisal expanded his challenge, but in this case initially without the support of the Nasser-admiring Kennedy. Fully aware that Nasser's popularity with the Arab masses precluded winning in the Arab arena, he visited Iran and some North African countries and decided to play his country's Muslim card by convening an International Islamic Conference in Mecca. The main outcome of the conference was the emergence of the Saudi-financed World Muslim League. The league's conservative membership included the anti-Nasser Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its first proclamation left no doubt as to its purpose: 'Those who distort Islam's call under the guise of nationalism are the most bitter enemies of the Arabs whose glories are entwined with the glories of Islam.' At long last the riches of Saudi Arabia allowed it to drive a wedge between Arabism and Islam.

With Nasser behaving unpredictably, this open subordination of Arabism to Islam gained the wholehearted support of America. An open campaign which accused Nasser of being anti-Islamic followed and so did attacks on Nasser's backer, the USSR, for its treatment of its Muslims. This coincided with a generous Saudi aid programme to Jordan and a move by Faisal to create a special relationship with the only Muslim country capable of providing him with military help, Pakistan. The USA was reluctant to commit its troops on holy Muslim soil and instead encouraged the secret agreements between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. On the popular level, Faisal went beyond funding anti-Nasser Muslim groups and sought to counter the substantial and effective Nasser propaganda machine by sponsoring anti-Nasser newspapers and magazines in the emerging communications centre of Beirut. Beirut's pamphlet-eers emphasized the un-Islamic nature of Nasser's socialism and friendship with the USSR (see The Last Line of Defence).

Internally, Faisal, with considerable help from the CIA in the form of operatives attached to ARAMCO, encouraged the formation of anti-socialist Muslim groups, particularly around the oil centre of Dhahran. (There is reason to believe that some of the anti-Saudi and anti-American Islamic groups in existence today are the radicalized successors of these groups.) Faisal's moves represented an entire programme which advanced his country's and the Middle East's Islamic character at the expense of its Arab one and which used the CIA to run internal security in an open way which included direct dealings between the King and the CIA's Arabic-speaking local station chief. The then leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sayed Kuttub, a man Faisal sponsored to undermine Nasser, openly admitted that during this period 'America made Islam'.

Meanwhile the war in the Yemen dragged on, and Nasser 5 troops were hampered by their inability to pursue their enemies into Saudi territory, proving unequal to the task of conquering a mountainous country. After the loss of Syria and the blunting of Nasser's revolutionary momentum in Iraq, where the West, in this case with Britain in the lead, saw fit to support the ultra-radical but local Iraqi regime to halt the pan-Arab Nasser avalanche, the situation became intolerable. (Sir Michael Wright, the then British Ambassador to Baghdad, went as far as to advise his government to overlook the Iraqi regime's unjustified arrest and detention of some British citizens.) Nasser's camp began to show strains and vulnerability. Tellingly, one of the leaders of the new anti-Nasser Syria was Colonel Abdel Hamid Sarraj, the very officer King Saud had bribed to kill his one-time idol Nasser.

Nasser grew weaker and Faisal grew stronger. Nasser was supported by the USSR and the Arab masses while Faisal depended on the West, oil wealth and the rulers of the conservative Arab and Muslim countries. Faisal concentrated everything on the Yemen and limited support to Muslim countries while Nasser was overextended battling in the Yemen, against Iraq, in Jordan and the Sudan and helping anti-French Arab rebellions in North Africa. Nasser was reeling under the financial strains created by his adventures and the USSR, worried by the prospects of a confrontation with the USA, would not provide him with the financial support he needed. But there seemed to be no end to Faisal's financial resources. The Arab people, never steadfast in the best circumstances, began abandoning Nasser's revolutionary bandwagon.

The USSR's failure to match the combined Saudi-Western assault on his Arab nationalism, and accusations of pro-Western Arab governments that he was no more than a paper tiger, prompted Nasser to call on what Time correspondent Wilton Wynn called his 'Samson Complex'. He played his Arab card to its limits and opted for a confrontation with Israel. Either he won the confrontation and with it the Arab world or he brought the house down on himself and everybody else.

Nasser was ill-prepared for war because 100,000 Egyptian soldiers were bogged down in the Yemen and he secretly told the UN that he was not desirous of open conflict, but he stole a march on his enemies. Arabs everywhere began calling for an end to war in the Yemen to free Nasser's hand against Israel. Aware that time was running against it and that Nasser's military commitment in the Yemen afforded it a special opportunity which might soon disappear, Israel, in June 1967, launched a surprise attack on Egypt and Syria and then Jordan. The Arab armies were defeated in six days. Sinai, the Golan Heights and the West Bank and Gaza Strip were occupied and Arab dreams were shattered. Israel's victory was total; and so was Faisal's.

Bowing to Arab pressure, Nasser and Faisal met at a conference of Arab heads of state in Khartoum. There was no doubt as to whose day it was. Nasser agreed to leave the Yemen and asked Saudi opposition groups and former King Saud to leave Cairo. The latter, in an attempt to regain his throne, had gone to Nasser's side and had visited the Egyptian-occupied Yemen to rally the republican faithful against his country. In return, Faisal offered Nasser some economic support. It amounted to total surrender.

Unlike in 1956, America, the only country capable of pressuring Israel into withdrawing from the occupied Arab territories, was in no mood to do it. After all, Nasser had advocated the nation-alization of oil and had threatened its strategic position in the Middle East. This time Nasser could not claim victory; there was no humiliated colonial Britain or France to talk about. For Nasser, it was the beginning of the end. For the House of Saud, it heralded a deeper involvement in Arab and Muslim affairs. Their recent experience made them accept the obvious, that they could not remain aloof and safe. Instead, they would try to extend their new position to advantage, to use their oil wealth to neutralize all other threatening political movements.

Fortune smiled on Faisal in the person of Denis Michael Rohan, a crazed Australian Christian fundamentalist who in July 1969 set fire to the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Arab and Muslim feelings were likewise inflamed, and theories of conspiracy and Israeli collusion abounded. The question of whether the response to the incident should be Arab or Muslim assumed a critical importance. In a bold pre-emptive move, Faisal called for the convening of the first Muslim heads of state conference in Rabat, Morocco. The response was overwhelming and, except for secular-socialist Syria and Iraq, the conference was attended by all the Arab heads of state. It produced a number of decisions in favour of political and economic cooperation and a declaration of commitment to Muslim rights in Jerusalem. That simple act expressed Faisal's new policy and confirmed the ascendancy of his country's Islamic policies. Faisal followed this by making statement after statement about his desire to pray in Jerusalem; he publicized Muslim rights to the city but said little about Arab rights. Of course, to wrongfoot his pro-Soviet Arab competitors and to please his Western backers, he kept equating Zionism with communism.

If the God-sent problem of the Jerusalem fire provided Faisal with a chance to give the Muslim world priority over the Arab one, then what followed in Jordan gave him a chance to strike a blow against the leading Arab revolutionary movement, the PLO. In September 1970 civil war erupted in Jordan between the then radical but totally secular PLO and the forces of King Hussein. Faisal, according to documents made available to me by one of his former assistants, again with the blessing of the USA, ordered the commander of the Saudi forces still stationed in Jordan to provide King Hussein with all the assistance he needed, and sponsored Pakistan to send units of its air force to attack the Palestinian forces and their Syrian backers. Hussein triumphed, the PLO was driven into Lebanon and Saudi Arabia eliminated another revolutionary threat. Subduing Nasser and the PLO reduced the pull of the Palestine problem as a rallying point for Arab nationalist forces and placed Saudi Arabia in a position of Arab and Muslim supremacy. Instead of acting negatively to frustrate the designs of others, Saudi Arabia was in a strong political and financial position to tell some of them what to do.

The untimely death of Nasser in 1972 expanded the Middle Eastern power vacuum which the West wanted and the rest of the world expected Saudi Arabia to fill. But Saudi Arabia would not move. The Western desire overlooked the very basic fact that Saudi Arabia, though responsible for creating the leadership vacuum, wanted nothing from either the Arab or Muslim worlds except to be left alone. To Faisal, a true position of Arab or Muslim leadership would force Saudi Arabia to respond to the relatively sophisticated demands of the Arabs and Muslims and enhance pan-Arab or pan-Islamic cooperation. Because he was opposed to these things and because Saudi Arabia was not administratively or developmentally ready to assume leadership, Faisal rejected what he considered counterproductive, and expensive. Saudi Arabia decided to limit its act of leadership of both worlds to pretending to lead and to use this pretence to stop others assuming the position. After the selective use of money, it settled for selective leadership without overall responsibility.

With modifications, the decision to pretend to lead governs the Saudi Arab and Muslim policies to this day. It has been applied to the Arab problems of Palestine and Lebanon, the wars between Algeria and Morocco, the various Syrian-Iraqi feuds and, in a more complicated way, to Egypt's decision to sign the Camp David peace agreement of October 1978 with Israel. In the Muslim arena, the same principle was applied to Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree in Uganda, the Philippines, the Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Biafra and in Saudi Arabia's worldwide approach to Muslim problems. In all cases, it did not seek hegemony and its sole purpose was to keep others from achieving it.

Saudi Arabia backed the mainstream PLO headed by Yasser Arafat by affording it financial support of $100 million a year to stop it turning to others. But its fear of a strong PLO was enough to prompt it to bankroll the terrorist Abu Nidal to unbalance Arafat. Abu Nidal's bloody credentials proved no barrier to this expression of Saudi self-interest. In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia pretended that it was playing the impartial peace broker while providing financial help to the conservative pro-West Christian Phalange against the pan-Arabist Mourabitoun and the militant Shias of Amal and Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia mediated in the Algerian-Moroccan war to protect the conservative King Hassan of Morocco against his populist neighbour and it pretended to mediate between Syria and Iraq while providing financial support to Syria to help it resist Iraq's unity calls. Even relatively remote Libya did not escape Saudi attempts to unbalance it. Saudi Arabia saw in Qaddafi a greater threat than was justified and supported his more militant Islamic opponents. These Saudi efforts to maintain an imbalance were continued even when that imbalance, as in the case of Lebanon, called for them to ignore the rights of their co-religionists, the Muslim majority, which had undoubtedly suffered from an insensitive Christian control of power.

Saudi actions in the Muslim world followed the same line. Pakistan was supported so long as it followed a Saudi line and did not try to act independently and lead. Pakistani President Ah Bhutto's refusal to follow this formula saw Saudi Arabia provide his army with financial help and promises of more to overthrow him. Uganda's Idi Amin was provided with financial support because Uganda did not matter and backing the despot afforded Saudi Arabia a chance to manifest phoney Muslim concern at the expense of the country's Christians in a remote, insignificant place. Muslim rebels in the Philippines were supported for the same reason without Saudi Arabia knowing what their rebellion was all about. The Mujahadeen in Afghanistan were funded to a much greater degree because their situation afforded Saudi Arabia a chance to be anti-Soviet and pro-West and because Saudi propaganda, in an attempt to pre-empt militant Iran, depicted the civil war in the country as a Muslim life-and-death issue. In the Horn of Africa, the despotic Muslim regime of Siad Barre in Somalia was supported against Christian Ethiopia despite worldwide recognition that the conflict would lead to tribal chaos, the breakdown of both countries and famine.

Saudi Arabia backed its pretensions of leadership with the only thing it has, money. But because the money it paid was to per-petuate problems and to intercept the emergence of an alternative power fell short of providing lasting solutions, what this policy in reality meant was that Saudi Arabia was in the business of renting solutions, in some places on behalf of itself, in others as a front for the West and in most because it suited both. Neither they nor the West knew what would result from eliminating Arafat but they wanted to keep him in check and, unlike the West, the Saudis could hire a terrorist to do the job. The Saudis knew they could not maintain Christian supremacy in Lebanon for ever, but not knowing how to replace it without creating a regime not beholden to them, they paid to keep it going. Financing Syria against Iraq was a short-term lease-solution which they had to keep renewing, but they could not think of a way to keep the countries permanently apart without destabilization threatening to them and to Israel and the West. Above all, Afghanistan was the classic case of Saudi money serving the aims of America's policy of containing the USSR, and, of course, it was given a Muslim label.

The natural limits on renting solutions were the length of the lease, the fact that rental costs kept going up and the willingness of the party to accept a Saudi offer. The volatile nature of the Middle East meant rental solutions lasted a short time; most of the people who were being paid by Saudi Arabia, in particular the Lebanese Christians, kept demanding more money. But these obstacles do not compare with the three major problems which did not lend themselves to short-term leases and hence either fell outside Saudi reach or forced it into expensive, long-term rentals. These are: the Egyptian decision to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel, the Muslim fundamentalist revolution in Iran and the Iran-Iraq War. In addition, there emerged the problem of many Muslim groups accepting money then turning against their Saudi sponsors.

Before he journeyed to Jerusalem to seek peace, Sadat's relations with Saudi Arabia had been good. Unlike Nasser and Farouk, he had been happy to concede a leading role to Saudi Arabia and align his policies with its rulers. He even coordinated the October 1973 War with King Faisal and convinced Saudi Arabia temporarily to embargo the sale of oil to the West (see The Brutal Friendship). Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia felt compelled to respond to the Arab reaction to the 1967 defeat, the explosive popular wish to avenge it, and both saw and planned the October War as a relief valve and a way to prod the West to solve the still-simmering Ara~Israeli problem. The cooperation between the two sides worked. The ensuing oil embargo and shortages of petrol and other fuels, though they accidentally almost got out of hand, sent a chill through the West's body politic and prompted a search for a permanent solution to the Palestinian problem.

But Sadat was determined to go forward to finalize his plan while Saudi Arabia, as usual, moved slowly. It wanted to start a peace process without suffering the consequences. Faced with the prospect of rupture with Saudi Arabia but unable to delay, Sadat acted alone, but only after using Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham to relay his decision to Crown Prince Fahd. The Arab people and most Arab governments reacted to the Sadat trip to Jerusalem with anger and called for the punishment of traitorous Egypt. The Saudis were caught in the middle. Supporting Sadat would please America but it meant the possible emergence of a new radical regional leadership and the prospect of internal turmoil.

The House of Saud, after heated debates which saw the pro-Sadat Crown Prince Fahd go to Spain to an angry self-imposed exile, decided to oppose Sadat. Simultaneously, the Saudis assured the Carter administration of their true intentions and moved to contain Arab attempts to punish Egypt and its leader. (They went as far as trying to bribe my journalist father to write a story about their commitment to the West.) The Arab censure of Egypt was comparatively mild, but the Saudi decision to support it was a tacit admission that, unlike in the past, there were internal and external pressures which precluded following the West blindly.

This example of helplessness exposed the limits of the policy of rental solutions. This major problem was followed by a more serious one which found the House of Saud unable to pretend. Iran - Shia, independent, strong and pro-West under the Shah -was the Middle East country where Saudi Arabia had the least influence. In 1979, when disturbances broke out against the Shah, Saudi Arabia rallied to his support and described them as 'minor. Later, alarmed at the apparent strength of Khomeini s movement, they resorted to calling his movement un-Islamic. Even for some time after the Shah was overthrown and replaced by Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalist regime, the Saudis continued to speak of 'the legitimate government of the country' to describe the exiled Shah and sponsored some feeble attempts to overthrow Khomeini, including a repeat performance of the Nasser assassination debacle, and in 1981 a publicized $10-million bribe to Iranian Air Force Colonel Raed Rukmi to stage a coup. But Iran's new revolutionary government proved permanent and it was against monarchies, alliances with the infidel West and the Saudi policy of maintaining low oil prices. In addition, the new Iranian leadership showed special concern for the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia.

The various manifestations of Iran's Islamic stance amounted to a single policy: the West and its friends were the enemies of Islam and their hegemony over the Middle East and the Muslim world should be brought to an end. This revolutionary call was the exact opposite of King Faisal's use of Islam as a conservative pro-West counterweight to secular revolutionary ideas. The foundations of the Saudi Islamic policy began to crumble, but Saudi Arabia could not go back on its Islamic posture. Instead, it began to compete within a Muslim framework; now it was revolutionary Islam versus traditional Islam.

As with Nasser, Iran was trying to use Saudi Arabia's own people against it. Even non-Shia Muslims, many of them groups hitherto supported by Saudi Arabia, sympathized with happenings in Iran and the 1979 uprising in Mecca was stimulated by the success in Iran of the ayatollahs. The Saudis were caught in their own Islamic folly. But, militarily weak and restricted by its supposed leadership of the Muslim world from waging war against another Muslim country, Saudi Arabia eventually changed direction and hid, albeit temporarily, behind an Arab identity.

Iran and Iraq have been enemies since time immemorial. In modern times this enmity was encouraged by a West which desired to control the Middle East and which saw in the con-tinued bickering between the two countries a way to weaken them and to keep them from acting against Western strategic interests, particularly the West's oil-producing satellite states. When Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power there were a number of border and navigation disputes between the two sides which were exacerbated by his emphasis of religion at the expense of national identity. Iraq, run by the socialist and pan-Arabist Ba'ath Party, championed nationalism and, however misguided both sides were, the confrontation and eventual war between a theocracy and a secular nation-state was one of the few wars of principle this century.

But the Iraqi march to war was aided and abetted by Saudi Arabia, with the United States behind it. Unable to deal with Iran militarily, Saudi Arabia, with considerable American encour-agement, sponsored Saddam Hussein to do it. The negotiations between the Saudis and Saddam to find ways to face the common Iranian threat lasted a long time and in August 1980 they concluded a secret agreement whereby Saudi Arabia guaranteed to provide Iraq with 'all the financial aid required to undertake all the necessary moves to protect its national honour'. States ABC Chief of Correspondents and Middle East expert Pierre Salinger: 'There is no doubt about it, both countries [Saudi Arabia and America] wanted Saddam to attack Iran.' In fact, before opting for 'the Iraqi solution' in 1980, President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, made a public threat to use force against Iran. Later the United States had satellite pictures which showed that Iraq was preparing to attack Iran but did nothing to intercept the outbreak of hostilities. The assertion that 'the Iraqi solution' had US backing is confirmed unattributably by a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a former US Undersecretary of State and openly by Saddam Hussein's adviser Sa'ad Al Bazzaz, the author of The Gulf War and the One After. Says Bazzaz: 'We told them we're going to attack Iran; they knew.'

The following month, foolishly thinking that an attack on Iran would lead to its disintegration rather than to a gathering of support behind Khomeini, Iraqi armour thrust into Iran. Saudi Arabia made an initial payment to Iraq of $4 billion. It was another war by proxy; certainly an example of a grand-scale rentals policy and of fronting for the West against militant Islam.

The outbreak of hostilities between the second and third largest exporters of oil led to mutual aerial attacks on their production facilities and a serious decline in their output which, under normal circumstances, should have led to an increase in the price of oil and consequent American attempts to settle the conflict to restore prices to their pre-war level. But nothing of the sort happened. Saudi Arabia was prepared and it pre-empted the anticipated sequence of events by doubling its oil output and keeping the prices down. There was no urgency to end the war and Henry Kissinger bluntly encapsulated the Saudi-American attitude by stating: 'Too bad both sides can't lose.'

In 1984 there was a real threat that the Iraqi military lines might break under the numerical weight of their Iranian enemies. Saddam Hussein panicked and pleaded with Saudi Arabia to reduce its oil production as a way of prodding outsiders to try to bring the war to an end. The Saudis refused to do it. Says Bazzaz: 'We knew they wanted the war to continue, but we were too dependent on them for financial support to complain out loud. They were following an American policy which called for weakening both countries.'

Yet playing Arab against Muslim through sponsoring a savage war was not a permanent solution to a threat posed by either and the longer the Iran-Iraq War lasted the greater was the threat of exposure of Saudi and American plague-on-both-your-houses intentions. To guard against the unpredictable outcome of the war, Saudi Arabia in 1981 capitalized on both sides' preoccupation with it to strengthen its immediate surroundings against both. It created the Gulf Cooperation Council, with Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates as its other mem-bers. Ostensibly the GCC was a loose economic grouping of rich countries but in reality it dealt mostly with the areas of defence and security and its creation undermined the already weak Arab League. From the very beginning there were GCC voices which expressed Saudi fears and warned that the eventual victor in the Iran-Iraq conflict was likely to turn their attention to them and their wealth. Because subversion was considered a greater threat than an outright military invasion, the security apparatuses of this grouping employed a staggering 100,000 people, compared with a total of 137,000 in their uncoordinated armed forces.

Saudi Arabia created the GCC while trying to justify the Iraqi war effort in Islamic and Arab terms. King Fahd advertised his constant contacts with Saddam Hussein and described him as 'the sword of Islam' and wired him to say: 'We're with you every step of the way.' Saudi Minister of the Interior Prince Nayef stated: Iraq is protecting the Arab nation.' But the evaporation of the initial Iraqi successes and the possibility in 1982~ of an Iranian victory prompted Saudi Arabia to seek a precautionary accommodation with Iran. Fahd eventually toned down his anti-Iranian rhetoric and exchanged emissaries with the country's leadership, but he continued to help Iraq.

Saudi Arabia not only paid the Iraqis huge sums of money; it allowed them commercial passage to circumvent the threat to their narrow Gulf coast by the Iranian army, helped them to pump oil through a pipeline which ran through their territory and allocated 200,000~00,000 barrels a day from the Neutral Zone to support the Iraqi war effort (the oil production moves also helped keep the price down.) Eventually it prevailed on the West to assist Iraq militarily and to waive its strictures on the use of arms it sold to Saudi Arabia and permit the Saudis to transfer military planes and other hardware to Iraq. (In 1984 Newsweek reported the Iranian capture of a considerable amount of Western-made and Saudi-supplied equipment.) It was Saudi envoys, including the Ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar, Crown Prince Abdallah and Defence Minister Prince Sultan, who met with Margaret Thatcher and members of the Reagan administration, including Vice President George Bush, to convince them to look the other way while embargoed arms and electronic gear reached Iraq. And it was King Fahd and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal who identified Iran as the greater danger to the stability of the region.

Britain and America obliged. The former supplied Iraq with a sophisticated electronic command centre made by Plessey and followed this by permitting the sale of NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical warfare) suits, guidance systems for their radar and many other military items that were embargoed. America provided Iraq with interest-free credit to buy wheat, sold them parts for their chemical weapons plants and, through Jordan, supplied them with sophisticated electronics. (See The Brutal Friendship for the author's personal involvement in this effort.) According to veteran ABC correspondent John Cooley, America went as far as to order units of its Gulf fleet to jam Iranian radar to help Iraqi aerial attacks on Iranian oil terminals (Cooley was not able to file the story at the time). Meanwhile, because fears of the consequences of the victory of either side were growing - the prospect of a victorious Iraq becoming Arab leader or Iran claiming Muslim leadership - several meetings between Saudi Arabia and Iran took place, including a visit to Iran in 1985 by Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal. The Saudi assessment of the situation was correct: trouble was on the way.

The eight-year Iran-Iraq War ended in 1989 in a stalemate. Iran's numerical superiority was balanced by Iraq's possession of more modern equipment. But because outside help to Iraq forced Iran to sue for peace, Iraq claimed a psychological victory. The perceived way the conflict ended created a shift in emphasis by Saudi Arabia. Suddenly the Iraqi danger loomed larger than the Iranian one and talk about Saddam's ambitions and one-million- strong army assumed more importance than everything else. (See The Brutal Friendship.)

The end of the war and the danger which followed coincided with a belated Saudi awareness of the rising cost and short life of their rentals strategy and its inadequacy, and forced the evolution of a hybrid new Saudi policy. What emerged was a combination of the old one of non-involvement and an amended pre-emptive rentals approach. Saudi Arabia decided its minor involvements were creating some problems, opted to remain aloof from them whenever possible and to limit itself to actively dealing with the broad problems rather than their manifestations. This meant sponsoring some countries to stop impending unfriendly develop-ments, rather than actual events, in others.

Beyond the Iran-Iraq War and the GCC, in the general Arab arena, with the desire for political unity long gone the Saudis were faced with the choice of supporting a loose federation, various forms of cooperation which fell short of that or of opting for policies which perpetuated the existing divisions. This time the Saudi decision against federation or cooperation was an active, deliberate one. Saudi Arabia followed policies which would not interfere with its relationship with the West and its ability to act independently even in the smallest matters.

Politically, the Saudi response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was hardly audible. Fahd coordinated his moves with Ronald Reagan more than he did with the beleaguered Yasser Arafat, even when Israeli armour threatened to destroy Beirut and eliminate the PLO. The era of encumbering Saudi-American friendship with internal and pan-Arab considerations came to an end during the Israeli siege of Beirut.

There were other, less dramatic, signs which underscored the Saudi refusal to commit itself to an Arab stance. By refusing to channel aid money through established Arab organizations such as the Arab League, Saudi Arabia, by omission, produced a divisive policy. In the past the sum total of their mostly ad hoc case-by-case acts amounted to the same divisive policy. Now creating, maintain-ing and even encouraging divisions was deliberate and it touched even the most innocent acts of inter-Arab cooperation.

For example, Saudi Arabia undermined the AACO (Arab Air Carriers Organization) by refusing to pool their spare-parts pur-chases or maintenance operations with other Arab airlines. The acceptance of this scheme would have saved the participating Arab airlines, including their flag carrier, Saudia, a great deal of money. It was a political vote against pan-Arab economic involvement helped by the desire of members of the royal household to realize commissions from monopolizing the Saudia maintenance and spare-parts business. Saudi Arabia was a founding member of Arabsat (Arab Satellite Project) and owned 26 per cent of its outstanding shares, but it held back funds earmarked for this project when it became apparent that it could not dictate the type of programming to be telecast. To the House of Saud even scientific and literary programmes were to follow the restrictive local diktats rather than a pan-Arab approach and it was a vote against Arab cultural integration. Saudi Arabia refused to entertain an Arab League suggestion to create an Arab High Court to deal with legal problems in accordance with the Sharia laws of Islam. It would not allow a broad Arab interpretation of the Sharia to replace its narrow, Wahhabi-based one. And even the rebuilding of the Hijaz railway linking Saudi Arabia with Jordan, something which existed during the time of Lawrence of Arabia, was not approved lest it lead to economic interdependence between the two countries. There are many more examples.

Naturally enough, this active negativism aimed at perpetuating Arab divisions extended to the already mentioned attempts to stifle progress in the political sphere: the moves towards democracy by neighbouring Arab states. Several Kuwaiti decisions to hold par-liamentary elections were rescinded after Saudi Arabia expressed its displeasure with them by thwarting Kuwaiti moves towards closer security cooperation within the GCC. Kuwait needed Saudi Arabia more than before because it was beginning to worry about Iraq. On occasion Saudi Arabia refused to participate in any GCC discussions until Kuwait made appeasing pronouncements which amounted to delaying elections. On one occasion when no 'appro-priate' Kuwaiti response materialized, the Saudis postponed their decision to participate in the creation of a GCC customs union.

Bahrain was more vulnerable than Kuwait, and Saudi threats to close the lifeline causeway linking the two countries and stop hundreds of thousands of Saudis from visiting Bahrain were made to stop it proceeding with the idea of holding parliamentary elections. Notice was served on Jordan that the Saudis viewed its plans to hold parliamentary elections with unease and that Saudi Arabia would 'respond' to any results which it did not like by, for example, cutting off economic aid. Rumours persist that the Saudis, having failed to stop the elections, went further and sponsored some 'safe' candidates for the Jordanian parliament. If this is true then they have nothing to show for it because most members of the Jordanian parliament are anti-Saudi Islamic fundamentalists.

In the Sudan, the gateway to Africa for the Saudis, the new stable government of the country is suffering the results of their attempt to strangulate it economically and destabilize it politically because the Sudanese Government refuses to accept the role of a satellite coun-try and preaches a militant rather than an opium-of-the-people Islam. Not only have the Saudis withheld much-needed economic aid, but they have supplied Sudanese anti-Government rebels with 400 Tow missiles and other arms. Beyond supporting the Karnak and Inkath Watani Sudanese separatist movements, as with Iran and Egypt before, the Saudis got themselves involved in several assassination attempts, including one against Hassan Turabi, the country's religious leader. The Saudi policy has prolonged Sudan's destructive civil war and there is a danger that it might turn the country into another famine-stricken Somalia.

The government of populous and populist Yemen, in the mind of the House of Saud still the one country capable of denying it hegemony over the Arabian Peninsula, has been subjected to a clear attempt to destabilize it. The Saudis initially resorted to the old successful formula and tried to bribe the tribes of the Yemen to rise up to stop parliamentary elections and the union of North and South Yemen. Though they paid out huge sums of money and there were several bombings which killed many innocent people and caused some minor disturbances, the union took place and so did parliamentary elections.

Now Saudi Arabia is trying to impede the Yemen's progress by supporting the Hadramout separatist movement through a more sophisticated terror campaign which includes the use of letter bombs. It has gone further and resurrected an old border dispute, claiming that oil discoveries in the Yemen are in territory which belongs to it. It has openly threatened the 40-odd oil companies operating in the Yemen with economic reprisals including acts against their interests in Saudi Arabia and in 1987 went as far as to mount a military raid against the country which left 500 Yemenis and Saudis dead. The Yemen has complained about all Saudi acts against it, especially its resort to state-sponsored terrorism, but without success. The countries which campaign against international terrorism, including the USA and Britain, do not want to hear about Saudi-sponsored terror. Says a bitter Yemeni President Abdallah Ah Saleh of the vicious, unchecked attacks on his country: 'The royals are behind it all.'

This Saudi policy has gone further than intercepting Arab cooperation and destabilizing countries committed to democracy and Saudi Arabia has seen fit to increase its support for pro-Saudi despotic regimes. Before the rise of the present regime in the Sudan, it supported the safe President Ja'afar Numeiri, a man accused by the present government of being corrupt and a drug addict. Saudi Arabia has backed Syria's divisive intervention in Lebanon to guard against the emergence of an independent Lebanon not to its liking. It has mended its fences with an Egypt at peace with Israel to create an Arab counterweight to Iraq. The key word is 'anti': anti-democracy, anti-popular government and anti the emergence of a strong regional power. In reality, in the Arab arena, the new Saudi policy is not new at all, but simply a more active, broader approach to the old anti-union, anti-cooperation, anti-democratic and anti-progress policies of Ibn Saud. In fact, the House of Saud seems unable to pursue positive ideas, and King Fahd's 1981 peace plan for the Palestinian problem, although it had received consid-erable Western and Arab support, was abandoned for no reason. However, in the Muslim sphere this active negativism rep-resented a total reversal of an old policy. Fahd's leadership shortcomings coincided with the emergence of a militant Islamic Iran and the growing threat of the Muslim fundamentalist move-ments in Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, the Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This has meant that the previous policy which supported Islam at the expense of Arabism was no longer viable. Fahd's personal behaviour and his open commitment to America make him unacceptable as a Muslim leader. For the first time in centuries an inflamed Islam is on the march to confront the conservative Muslim regimes and the West. At present the only Islamic movements which receive Saudi support are those in far-away places which pose no threat to its security, even if they become radicalized, and a few nearby ones which they use to undermine more immediate threats. This is why the Islamic Palestinian movement Hamas, which represents a clear danger to Palestinian Christians, is financed to challenge the PLO and Yasser Arafat. It is why Islamic movements in Turkey are supported to keep that country from growing strong enough to assume a leadership role in the Middle East and with the new Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. Simultaneously, Muslim Bosnia and Kazakhstan can be supported because they are preoccupied with problems which do not affect Saudi Arabia and represent no danger to it.

It is true that Iran acts as a new magnet for militant Islam, but other fundamentalist movements, many of which owe their rise to Saudi support, have turned and now follow Saudi-threatening militant policies. These movements represent another failure of the short-term rentals policy. The Algerian Islamic Front, known by its French acronym, FIS, was provided with Saudi financial support to undermine the moderately socialist government of the country. It grew strong and militant and more threatening to Saudi Arabia than the government it was supposed to keep in check. Algerian fundamentalists have become openly opposed to their previous sponsors; they find their views incompatible and Saudi corruption unacceptable. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, an old fundamentalist group which goes back to the late 1920s, received Saudi support to keep the Egyptian Government from outgrowing its Saudi-chosen role. The movement has produced some militant offshoots which, as witnessed by recent attacks on tourists, threaten the overall stability of Egypt and call for the violent overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. It was the puppet regime of Sudanese President Numeiri which began the shift towards Islam in that country, and now the country has become radically Islamic fundamentalist and out of Saudi control. Islamic movements in Pakistan such as Jama'at Islamiah were supported to keep the country from following secular policies that were not to the liking of Saudi Arabia, but now their opposition to the Saudi regime is open and uncompromising. The Pakistani Muslim cat is so far out of the bag that the Islamic movements there are actively supporting anti-House of Saud Muslim fundamentalist groups in Saudi Arabia such as Hezbollah of the Hijaz. Even the anti-Arafat Hamas is beginning to create problems for Saudi policy makers because it opposes the Middle East peace process which Saudi Arabia supports and it has begun to accept assistance from Iran. There is very little conservative Islam left to support, and one of the reasons for that is the Saudi, and Fahd's, claim to its leadership. Most of Islam, including groups created by Saudi Arabia, has turned militant and the rest are heading in that direction. Contrary to superficial analysis, the Arab masses who supported Nasser, Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein and other movements have not disappeared and they still oppose the House of Saud through the adoption of radical Muslim politics to achieve their old aims. The Muslim identity Faisal developed to undermine the Arab nationalist movement of Nasser has backfired. In fact, the new Islamic threat is larger and more radical than the old threat of Arab nationalism. Certainly Islam has captured the imagination of the people inside and outside Saudi Arabia in a more serious, harder-to-oppose way. Among other things, it was easier to discredit Nasser and his followers by underscoring their un-Islamic socialism or referring to their close ties with the USSR than it is to undermine people who claim all they are doing is following The Book.

Even now, with the Muslim threat staring them in the eye, there is no way for the guardians of Islam's holiest shrines to shed their Muslim identity and the responsibility which goes with it, nor is today's Arab identity strong enough to replace it. So Saudi Arabia, once the pretender to the leadership of all of Islam, has become its captive. It continues to pretend it leads the Muslims through small, innocent acts which have little effect on Muslim politics: in addition to those already mentioned, the causes of Filipino, Kashmiri and Somali Muslims. It sponsors Russian and Chinese Muslims to visit Mecca, gives aid money to new Muslim republics~, builds mosques for Muslim communities in far-away places, donates money to restore the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and joins fundamentalist Muslims in condemning the writer Salman Rushdie. But it does not lead; leading the Muslims means leading Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, North Africa and places nearer home and this would mean subscribing to a new Islam and undermining Saudi relations with the West. The House of Saud certainly cannot lead the Muslim world when even its Wahhabi co-religionists, the people who openly criticized the policies of King Fahd in a 1992 petition, accuse it of being too pro-West, too corrupt and too un-Islamic.

In late 1993, Saudi Arabia's Arab and Muslim policies look like a failure. Libya, Algeria, Iraq, the Sudan, the Yemen and Jordan oppose them. Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are always unhappy with their policies because they want Saudi Arabia to give them more money or to employ their citizens and the Saudis cannot do the first and have decided against the second (see The Brutal Friendship). Kuwait and Bahrain object to Saudi interference in their internal affairs and relations between them are cool. Qatar is upset over Saudi attempts to annex some of its territory (the Saudis have gone so far as to attack the Qatari border post of Khufus). The Arab masses think the House of Saud's rule is obscene and resent it. The only good Arab relations they have are with far-away, despotic and unpopular King Hassan of Morocco and, though they are already complaining about Saudi attempts to dictate to them, perhaps Oman and the United Arab Emirates. In the words of former American Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins: 'None of their Arab neighbours like them. The Saudi Muslims' position is no better. Saudi Arabia is opposed by Iran, looked down on by secular, democratic Turkey, kept at a distance by Pakistan and, because of an oil policy which calls for accommodating the consumers at the expense of the producers, resented by Indonesia. Even the Afghanistan Mujahadeen, now that they are in power, scoff at Saudi attempts to continue to buy them and have turned against Saudi Arabia to the extent that there was an armed attack on the Saudi Embassy in Kabul in October 1992.