CHAPTER 6

The Brutal friendship

Without the West there would be no House of Saud. The Saudi people or their neighbours or a combination of both would bring about its end. But the West has always had reasons to support the Saudi monarchy and to guarantee its existence and the West's, particularly America's, continued need for oil will keep this support intact for the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, America's failure to save the Shah of Iran and the consequences of using its military power on holy Muslim soil undermine its ability to ensure the survival of the House of Saud against the internal threats which confront it. America has not been able to devise a substitute for its present better-the-devil-you-know policy, something that would guarantee the continued flow of oil and reflect its commitment to a more democratic Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile all the threats grow stronger, mainly because the House of Saud abuses America's support to continue to ignore the valid demands of its people and its neighbouring countries. This dismissiveness by the House of Sand has turned its internal and external enemies against America and this, in turn, underscores American fears and inability to change direction and perpetuates the explosive stalemate.

The unhealthy political reality of America's inability to disown a dangerous alliance with a backward and unpopular regime governs the way the House of Saud and America behave towards each other. The latter's paralysis, often mistaken for a pol-icy, determines its attitude towards internal conditions in Saudi Arabia and the Arab and Muslim worlds. The de facto alliance with the House of Saud extends itself on momentum and now includes an implicit acceptance of the House of Saud's and its lackeys' personal activities outside Saudi Arabia and the use of Saudi money in illegal sponsorship of unauthorized American covert operations. The uncharted, deepening American commit-ment is sustained by successful efforts by the House of Saud to maintain it through the adoption of a generous pro-American oil policy and attempts to buy Arab and Muslim support for both sides.

Britain created Ibn Saud to protect its Middle East imperial interests and to eliminate those who threatened them. America came on the scene as a replacement in the 1940s and its con-cern was to protect oil-rich Saudi Arabia itself. This too meant eliminating the external threats to Saudi Arabia and its rulers. The result was the same: protecting the House of Saud was the primary consideration.

Britain had it easier. From early in the century until it was replaced by America, it operated according to an old colonial principle of manipulating Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries through their chiefs. Britain designated Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq as the three axes of power in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, made their monarchs dependent on its support, kept them apart and weak and, on occasion and mostly in Iran and Iraq, prevailed on them to follow sensible internal policies to guard against upheavals which might undo its work.

America's late arrival on the Middle East scene coincided with the emergence of new problems. Oil and the anticipated growing dependence on it meant that America was in the Middle East to stay, but its strictly commercial approach precluded deeper neo-colonial interference in the running of the region. America s oil-based involvement did not allow for having to deal with people who had begun to question the ways of their leaders, nor did it foresee the cold war and its threats or the Palestinian problem and its consequences. These elements interacted and produced major subsidiary problems which grew to destabilize the region in ways beyond America's ability or wish to cope with them. For example, Nasser rose to power with America's blessing, if not outright support, but soon afterwards he tried to export his revolution and threatened America's oil interests. It was America's refusal to reconcile his pan-Arab ambitions with its oil interests and support for Israel which ended his brief pro-American revolutionary phase and drove him towards the USSR. Even inside Saudi Arabia, a higher level of education is one of the major results of oil wealth and it has led to greater non-acceptance of House of Saud absolutism and, inevitably, of America as its primary supporter.

America's final answer to Nasser's oil challenge, what eventually turned into a Nasser-House of Saud confrontation, was typical. Its anti-colonial history, inclinations and lack of preparedness ruled out direct attempts to solve the complex problems of the area. Among other things, America viewed advising the House of Saud to behave rationally as an unacceptable interference in its internal affairs; and this despite its willingness to do so elsewhere, as it still does to this day. So protecting its oil interests and refusing to play the puppeteer made America provide the House of Saud with its initial uncritical support, which was eventually extended against internal threats. The refusal to 'manage' the affairs of its wards led to an exclusive reliance by America on the people in power, the House of Saud. With time, and because all attempts to find a workable substitute entailed danger, this delegation of duties became what is now seen as policy.

The American fear of involvement was heightened by the increasing complexity of the problems of the Middle East and produced a policy of running the area through deputies. Naturally the deputies were chosen to deal with specific problems or geographical areas or both. On occasion, Israel, democratic and militarily strong, was the deputy chosen to balance the power of pro-Soviet Arab countries. At other times, Iran under the Shah deputized for America to fill a regional power vacuum, particularly after the British withdrawal from the Gulf left its small sheikhdoms in need of protection. Now, particularly after the Gulf War, it is the House of Saud which deputizes for America on a much broader Arab and Muslim scale.

As with Israel and Iran in the past, the people of the Middle East find Saudi Arabia an unacceptable regional leader and, judged by its military strength, it is inadequate. To maintain its deputy-sheriff position, the House of Saud has used its oil income to pretend it is performing a leadership role and this has kept others from assuming it. It has relied on short-term solutions to perpetuate its pretence while converting its ineffective American-sponsored deputy-sheriff role into a permanent instrument of family survival. The American wish to protect the oil and the House of Saud's wish to perpetuate its rule became one and the same.

America is caught. Israel as a deputy was only acceptable against the Soviet threat and it is unacceptable now for fear of alienating the Arabs and aborting any solution to the Palestinian problem. Former President Nixon described Iran and Saudi Arabia as 'the twin pillars of Gulf stability', but Iran is now Islamic fundamen-talist and anti-American. Iraq is neurotic and dangerous. Egypt, another potential deputy, is impoverished and unable to lead. So the House of Saud has become America's sole deputy by default, though in the 1970s and 1980s America briefly considered relying on Saddam Hussein. All America's misgivings about the House of Saud's backwardness and inadequacy notwithstanding, this has extended and broadened the American support for Saudi Arabia, and for the lazy Fahd and his family. The monster of a child Britain adopted has become an embarrassing relationship for America.

To repeat, the House of Saud pays for America's support directly and indirectly. Keeping the price of oil low is essentially an outright cash payment, and conditional aid to Arab and Muslim countries to keep them from turning too anti-American is an indirect one. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, paying for America s support was expanded in a way which dangerously affected the conduct of US foreign policy. Saudi Arabia's sponsorship of many covert or unauthorized policies of the executive branch of the American Government went beyond aid to the Contras in Central America and the Unita rebel movement in Angola and included indirect military assistance to Siad Barre of Somalia and the supply of oil to South Africa. These situations have no bearing on the Saudi national interest and are nothing but bribes. The deputy has corrupted the sheriff.

The brutal friendship between the House of Saud and America proceeds without constraints because there are no serious chal-lenges to it by accepted Saudi groups, the US Congress or outside powers and the rest of the Western countries, particularly Britain, support it. The resulting blanket support shows itself in other ways. The unattractive, and often ignored or protected, unwholesome behaviour of members of the House of Saud and many of the country's businessmen and other citizens (the Lockheed and BCCI scandals are major examples) has affected the image of the Arabs in the West. The pervasive atmosphere of friendship which has produced a Western willingness to ignore official Saudi corruption, has encouraged the spread of Saudi abuse at the expense of the reputation of the rest of the Arabs.

The original British and American wish to safeguard their interests continues unamended and as such ignores the enormous social changes and political sophistication which have occurred in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. This situation suits the purposes of the House of Saud; and for the foreseeable future means the following:

· The House of Saud will not participate in asserting Saudi, Arab or Muslim rights against the interests of the West. This would undermine the West's present unnatural dependence on and support of it. · As a result, the House of Saud's position with its own people and the Arabs and Muslims will continue to deteriorate. · The deterioration in the standing of the House of Saud internally, and with the Arabs and Muslims, will lead it to resort to greater repression and more divisive Arab and Muslim policies. · To guarantee continued Western support for its policies of repression and division, the House of Saud will continue to offer its services to the executive branch and the secret services of America.

· The elements which brought an end to the Shah of Iran, the abuse of Western support to create a blind, haughty obliviousness by a hated ruling class, are all in place.

A few years before the British adopted him, in 1901, Ibn Saud, wanting an outside sponsor, wrote to the Sultan of Turkey offering 'to accept any terms you impose on me'. The Turks' rejection of his offer produced another Ibn Saud expression of subservience to their British enemies: 'May the eyes of the British Government be fixed upon us and may we be considered as your proteges.' This plea to C. A. Kemball, the British Resident in the Gulf from 1900 to 1904, was one of many such expressions of submissiveness addressed to British officials and emissaries during that- period.

We know what followed. According to the great authority on the early phases of Saudi-British cooperation, Jacob Goldberg, the British placed Ibn Saud above 'people who were religiously, politically and strategically more important'. The cooperation which followed is best exemplified by the photograph of Ibn Saud and Sir Percy Cox at the signing of the 1915 Darea Treaty, the one which fundamentally reduced Ibn Saud's realm to a British protectorate. In the picture the two men are standing in front of a tent in the middle of the desert. Sir Percy Cox is wearing a top hat, dressed for a formal occasion. Both men are sitting on chairs and Ibn Saud looks obviously uncomfortable. In fact, the British caused him discomfort in more substantial ways, in the restraints they placed on him to curb his ghazzu, or raiding, instinct, their desire to have him abolish slavery and the pressures they applied on him to change his rule from a religious Wahhabi one to a Saudi state one. Overall the British knew that he needed their small subsidies and support more than they needed him; they had alternatives and he did not.

The first pictures of Ibn Saud with Americans showed him with oilmen. Taken sometime during the 1930s, well before the United States established a permanent diplomatic mission in 1942, they dramatically demonstrate the difference between the British and American attitudes. The oilmen are in full Arab dress, Hollywood style, glamorized versions of the real thing, and they are smiling in the manner of actors on the MGM lot. They are acting out a role, playing a trick on the local sheikh, or perhaps he was playing one on them, for he was the one who decreed that American oil men were to wear Arab dress in his presence.

But those photographs from the 1930s tell another, more subtle, story, for the men in them represent the American presence in the country. The businessman-philanthropist Charles Crane, prospector Karl Twitchell and oil man Lloyd Hamilton arrived with the 1933 'American invasion of Arabia', well before the diplomats did, and for a decade America 'handled' Saudi Arabia through its diplomatic mission to Cairo. British business followed British colonialism, but with the Americans it was the oil companies which pressured the State Department into its de jure recognition of Saudi Arabia in 1942 and the first American diplomatic mission was headed by a charge' d'affaires by the name of James Moose. (Interestingly the USSR recognized Saudi Arabia in 1926, but it was a short-lived affair; Ibn Saud kicked them out after discovering their inability to sponsor him.)

In dealing with Saudi Arabia, American statesmen and diplomats adopted the attitude of their pioneers, the oil men who sought to accommodate local leaders to make money. That is why Roosevelt did not smoke during his 1945 meeting with Ibn Saud, when the imperious Churchill refused to bend. The Americans had no experience of dealing with the likes of Ibn Saud and commercial considerations and their coming dependence on his oil determined their behaviour. They were so insecure in their ways, even in the 1950s, that they worried about the intentions of the more experienced colonialists and were afraid that Saudi Arabia might turn to the British or French and award them oil concessions.

Although their reasons for pursuing oil were different, the relationship between the oil companies and the US Government during the 1940s was close. Diplomats became oilmen and vice versa, and a President of ARAMCO, Terry Duce, had been a US Government official and was given his new job by the Government. Even US Minister to Saudi Arabia William Eddy resigned his post and became an adviser to ARAMCO. It was the time when Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull became convinced that oil was too important to leave in the hands of a 'purely' private sector. Reflecting official American Government opinions, Time editorialized: 'the future and disposition of this great reservoir of oil is a matter of incalculable national importance.

In the 1940s the growth of the cold war and the emergence of the Palestinian problem enhanced the importance of Saudi Arabia. The American Government, prodded by the oil companies, who were not yet producing enough oil to do it themselves and who were worried about the poverty and instability of the country, stretched the law and included Ibn Saud in the lend-lease programme. They gave him grants when Britain could not; paid a $10-million fee to build the then useless Dhahran airbase and declared null and void the Red Line Agreement which governed the sharing of concessions between international oil companies and which would have left things exclusively at the mercy of commercial interests. The Americans were 'buying' Saudi Arabia, but even all this official American financial assistance was not enough to satisfy Ibn Saud's profligate ways; in 1942 $190 million of the $292 million America gave him was used by the family. In the words of Philby, 'the till was empty', and Ibn Saud hocked his country's future and invariably borrowed money from the oil companies against future royalties.

The British were no match for the wealthy, accommodating Americans. By British standards the American subsidy, for that is what it was, was colossal and even an attempt to match it would have been cancelled by the American willingness to deal with Ibn Saud on his own corrupt terms. The British continued to protest about the American refusal to prod Ibn Saud to change and reform - to spend less - and the great Arabist Glubb Pasha blamed America's hands-off policy for Ibn Saud's corrupt behaviour. The British Minister in Jeddah, S. R. Jordan, vociferously made the same complaint on the spot, but the Americans dismissed these protests as a ploy or an act of jealousy, and vilified Jordan. Their willingness to take Ibn Saud's orders is something the British would have never accepted: the borrowing of huge sums of money, the doubling of ARAMCO employees' salaries, the building of an unneeded railway and the transmission of a message from Ibn Saud to President Truman to use the A-bomb against the USSR.

The profit motive, Saudi oil as a US national interest, the cold war and the necessity of oil for the recovery of post-war Europe and the need for a voice of moderation within the Arab camp superseded all else.

To Ibn Saud, the American reaction to the cold war was a windfall. He welcomed the increased American dependence on his country with enthusiasm. But the Palestinian problem was a much more difficult matter. Some American officials, citing payments to Ibn Saud, naively expected him to openly support America's pro-Israeli policies, while others, notably Secretary of the Navy James Forrestall, feared angering Ibn Saud and argued for ditching Israel to guarantee his loyalty and his oil. President Truman, desperate to win the 1948 presidential election, opted to offer Israel instantaneous recognition and wholehearted support without listening to his advisers. The Truman move was instinctive, the work of a man who openly spoke of needing the Jewish vote, but Ibn Saud's failure to respond to an anti-Arab move, his continued 'cordial exchanges with President Truman', was a much more complex one. As with Britain before, Ibn Saud placed his relationship with his new sponsor above his Arabism. (General Taha Al Hashimi, who headed an Arab League delegation which asked Ibn Saud to make an empty threat to cut off supplies, reported that Ibn Saud told him: 'Oil has nothing to do with politics.')

Ibn Saud's acceptance of America's friendship was under-standable for many reasons, unlike reliance on a Britain which manipulated things itself. It meant an enhanced regional position, a free hand in dealing with his own people and, above all, wealth. What the American officials, fearing Ibn Saud's reaction over the Palestinian problem, had overlooked was that American diplomatic and financial support and the oil income had created the ideal of what Ibn Saud desired, a rentier state.

Because oil was an unearned income, the result of a stroke of luck rather than economic development, Ibn Saud was able to exercise total control over it and use it for his own purposes. The only party capable of altering this situation was the payer, but in this case the payer was not interested. So, Ibn Saud's loyalty to the payer-sponsor was what mattered and this is what a rentier state is all about.

How Ibn Saud undermined Arab efforts regarding the Palestinian problem and his superficial support of the Arab and Muslim posi-tions has already been detailed in the previous chapter. But because his rentier-state status was unacceptable to his people and the Arabs and Muslims, he treated it as secret Saudi-American covenant and appeased his critics through repeated public condemnation of America. However, this means of assuaging the Saudi people and his Arab critics was easier for the executive branch of the American Government to understand than it was for Congress, journalists and members of the Jewish lobby. How to stop these groups from acting on open Saudi policy and undoing the whole Saudi-American relationship became a problem for both sides. The executive branch of the American Government responded to con-gressional and other disapprovals of statements by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal the same way that Ibn Saud responded to Arab pressure over Palestine: by public condemnation. Both sides were following contradictory open and covert policies.

But the Americans went further. President Truman seconded the guarantee of the security of the Saudi state originally given by President Roosevelt. Then, in an incredible move aimed at circumventing Congress, the Jewish lobby and the press, the Government ceded the conduct of its relations with Saudi Arabia to the oil companies. The presidential security guarantee was in essence a treaty which did not have to suffer congressional approval, supervision and control. Says the Washington Post's Walter Pincas, the maker of the television documentary The Secret File: 'There was a pattern of secret agreements [between the US and Saudi Arabia] beginning in 1947. It was done with Franco's Spain later.' Strangely, Congress has never looked into this aspect of the two countries' relationship and, on the day-to-day level, Congress and the Jewish lobby condemned the oil companies without effect, for the companies were not directly beholden to them and they could indulge Ibn Saud without suffering for it.

To help the oil companies manage Saudi relations sensibly, during 1947-8 the American Government prevailed on ARAMCO to expand its Government Relations Department and transferred a number of diplomats and CIA agents to staff it - Ellender, Elliot and Barracks - in addition to the highly placed Duce, Davis and Thornburgh. The major result of this attempt to support Ibn Saud in a way which circumvented Congress was a tax break which was called 'The Golden Gimmick'. In the autumn of 1950 the diplomat-oilmen resurrected a 1918 tax law and used it to exempt the payments made to Ibn Saud from US tax. This increased the oil companies' income, and the royalty share of it they paid to Ibn Saud. The price of his pro-American loyalty was raised to meet his ever-increasing financial demands, without having to go through Congress to give him direct aid. As usual, money prompted him to ignore all other considerations. He died in a state of pro-American bliss.

The idea of America's Minister to Saudi Arabia, William Eddy, of pleasing his hosts consisted of two things: making strong anti-Israel statements and collecting the stories of Juha, the mythical Arab joker. Ridiculous as it sounds, this represented the overt American policy on Saudi Arabia when Saud became king in 1953. Washington's contradictory Middle East interests consisted of guaranteeing the flow of Saudi oil while maintaining its support of Israel. To reconcile the two, the State Department allowed its field officers considerable leeway to criticize Israel while Washington assured Israel of its full support.

The American presence in Saudi Arabia in the early 1950s grew with the increase in the production of oil, the expansion 6f its Dhahran air base and the building of an oil pipeline to the Lebanese port of Sidon, TAPLINE, or the Trans Arabian Pipeline. This ran through Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and represented the increasing economic influence of Saudi Arabia on its neighbours. The Saudis were now realizing enough money to use it regionally. The sub-stantial American military presence in Dhahran was matched by an increase in CIA activity through such organizations as the inter-Arab TAPLINE Government Relations Department and AFME, the American Friends of the Middle East. Washington-based senior CIA agents such as Kim Roosevelt and Harry Kern visited the kingdom and the King and advised on everything from the use of fly killers to hiring the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. On occasion, to appease the King's desire for big-name emissaries, they used people like former Secretary of Treasury Robert Anderson, a close friend of President Eisenhower. Interestingly, this was also the time when the Americans started sponsoring Saudis to go to college in the USA, to them a way of making the Saudi people pro-American, though inevitably a danger to their interests because educated people tend to act independently. (Saudi Arabia's first Oil Minister, the anti-American Abdallah Tariki, was a product of this policy and so were most of the Saudis who conspired to overthrow their government in the 1960s and early 1970s.)

What the Americans did not take into consideration during the critical 1953-7 period was the changing nature of Middle East politics and the character of King Saud. The presence in Washington of the two Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Chief Allen Dulles, facilitated and extended the use of oilmen and CIA agents as crypto-diplomats. The oilmen and CIA agents were committed to two wrong precepts: that Saudi Arabia was immune to popular regional movements and that King Saud was as dedicated to and capable of maintaining Saudi Arab separateness as had been his father. In fact, Juha was no substitute for Nasser and Saud was instinctively more Arab than his father. Saud accepted the Arab claim on Saudi Arabia.

Saud saw Nasser as a new Saladin, and naively thought that he could march under his banner without threatening the House of Saud's supremacy in his country or its source of income. Saud was a raw Bedoum without wile and saw the formation in 1954 of British-sponsored CENTO, the military alliance of Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and (Hashemite) Iraq, as threatening because It included the House of Saud's traditional enemies. Above all, Saud thought that he could join the Nasser camp without undermining the oil-based special Saudi-American relationship.

In 1955 Saud contracted to have a 200-man Egyptian military mission train the Saudi army. The following year he responded to CENTO by joining Egypt and Syria in an alliance. Egyptian teachers and engineers arrived in his country in their thousands and Egyptian newspapers and magazines became extremely popular. The country's official and popular love affair with Nasser was so strong that Nasser's 1956 visit to Riyadh produced the largest demonstration of support in its history.

Saud was not alarmed, but Washington was. In fact, it was America's friends in the Middle East who rang the alarm bells. Prime Minister Nun Said of Iraq and President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon led the way in calling attention to the danger of the merger of Saudi money and Nasser's popularity, and they were supported by anti-Nasser Syrian and Egyptian elements and Britain's Foreign Office. President Chamoun was so incensed at America's lack of response to the Nasser problem that he attributed the Americans' inaction to the local embassy and began dealing with CIA agents.

The gap between the anti-Nasser British attitude and the reaction of regional leaders and the Americans was the product of divisions within the crypto-diplomatic CIA. Having helped Nasser attain power in Egypt, major CIA operatives, including Miles Copeland, Kim Roosevelt and Jim Eichelberger, continued to believe that he was essentially pro-American and that his revolutionary rheto-nc and flirtations with Russia could be contained. Following American tradition, they avoided playing the puppeteer and were distrustful of traditional leaders. They believed that only a popular Arab leader could make peace with Israel, and hence there was no alternative to Nasser. On the other hand, another CIA group, headed by William Crane Eveland, believed that American support should go to those who were openly pro-American, and Eveland strongly supported his friends Said of Iraq, Chamoun of Lebanon and Hussein of Jordan. These two CIA camps competed so openly that they divided the American press corps in the Middle East along similar lines; Time correspondent John Mecklin led a pro-Roosevelt group while New York Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer took his lead from Eveland. More importantly, both CIA sides operated against a background of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's Bible-based anti-communist policy (he always read the Bible before meeting the USSR's Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko).

Why Dulles and his brother Allen, however briefly, accepted the argument of the Nasser advocates remains a mystery. Certainly Kim Roosevelt, who had helped restore the Shah to his throne in 1952, Copeland, who 'knew' Nasser well before the latter overthrew King Farouk, and Eichelberger the supreme espionage intellectual, were more accomplished strategists, power-game play-ers than Eveland. They managed to convince the Dulles brothers that supporting unpopular traditional rulers would require greater anti-Israeli concessions to make it possible for them to make peace with Israel, and that, in any case, opposing Nasser would lead him closer to Russia and make him a bigger threat.

By early 1956 the reasons for supporting Nasser were exhausted. All the promises he had made during the CIA's covert contacts with him, and they were frequent and with many agents, produced no results and the popular momentum of his movement was clearly anti-American. The undoing of the pro-Nasser CIA group had the support of the ARAMCO and TAPLINE CIA, which had gone anti-Saud and anti-Nasser in 1954 when the King sanctioned the creation of a tanker fleet in partnership with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis to break the ARAMCO monopoly of transporting oil. (See Oil, OPEC and the Overseers.) America changed direction overnight and decided to face Nasser directly, in the place which mattered most, Saudi Arabia. It withdrew its offer to finance the huge Aswan Dam, Nasser's pet project, and instructed its emissaries, including Robert Anderson, to tell King Saud to distance himself from Nasser.

One of the consequences of the withdrawal of the offer to build the Aswan Dam with American money was the nationalization of the Suez Canal, which resulted in the 1956 Angl~Franco-Israeli attack on Egypt. The Americans and Saud were caught unprepared. Saud responded by overtly extending his honeymoon with Nasser and helped him, and America, still adamantly against colonial solutions, condemned the tripartite attack while organizing to totally replace Britain and France and to contain the Nasser movement through the Eisenhower Doctrine. This approach called for protecting friendly countries against the communist threat, in this case personified by the USSR's ally Nasser.

In 1957 Saud went to America to see Eisenhower and accept the Eisenhower Doctrine. The machinations which preceded his trips revealed a split between America and its allies, confirmed that oil came before supporting a popular leader and exposed the inadequacy of secret diplomacy as a substitute for long-term policy. The trip itself demonstrated the division between an in-the-know executive branch and the popular and congressional attitude towards Saudi Arabia. In response to the open known policies of Saudi Arabia, Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City refused to greet Saud and accused him of being anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish and, among others, Senator Wayne Morris of Oregon objected to US financial support for Saudi Arabia, the King's backward ways and the nature of his rule.

Despite these irritants, the trip, on the surface, was a success. Saud renewed the lease of the Dhahran airbase, accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine, settled the oil-tanker issue and enjoyed the attention afforded him and his infirm seven-year-old son Ma'shur. But beneath the surface, the bankruptcy of America's Middle East policy was exposed. Eisenhower found Saud lacking and unfit for leadership, the decision not to support the traditional regimes was still in place and America gave up its policy of using Nasser to make peace with Israel. Once again, America's concern with protecting its oil interests decided its approach and trapped it into supporting an unfit king.

The temptation to enmesh itself in Saudi internal politics, something America had sought to avoid, presented itself when the House of Saud wanted to replace Saud. Faisal was available and interested in the position. Faisal transmitted a letter to Eisenhower and Dulles which could not have been more explicit, in which he said: 'I know Americans think Saud is friendlier to America, this is not true.' In fact, Faisal and America had the same objective, the use of Saudi Arabia and its increasing wealth to unbalance Nasser's Arab nationalist movement and to establish regional hegemony, but neither side had a plan to do it.

It is true that it was members of the House of Saud who forced the unprecedented and dangerously unbalanced steps which produced the change from Saud to Faisal, but the background to them reveals a remarkable oneness of purpose between Faisal's and the US's approach. It was during the 1958-60 period that the US State Department began to exaggerate the communist threat to the Middle East, and the ARAMCO CIA, and indeed the Beirut and Cairo CIAs, began supporting Islamic fundamentalist groups as a counterweight to Nasser. In part, this was an extension of Kim Roosevelt's earlier successful use of Muslim elements (Fadayeen Islam) against leftists in Iran. The anti-Nasser Muslim Brotherhood was funded, religious leaders were prodded to attack the USSR and its anti-Muslim ways and the Egyptian magazine Al Musawar wrote an expose' of ARAMCO'5 support for small religious cells in eastern Saudi Arabia. (One of the men named in the article, CIA agent James Russell Barracks, confirmed this to me in 1961 and described it as 'an extensive programme', but he refused to elaborate.)

This is when Faisal began to promote his country's Muslim identity at the expense of its Arab one, to confront Nasser. The secular Arabs who opposed Nasser, as shown by the anti-monarchy Iraqi coup of 1958, were unpopular and could not hold the line against him. To historians, promoting Islam was a dangerous long-term solution, but in American terms it was a broader, sounder approach than the previous efforts of the CIA's crypto-diplomats.

'I urge my descendants to maintain the friendship of our American brothers and to renew this agreement.' This advice, written in the margin of the original Dhahran airbase agreement signed between Ibn Saud and Roosevelt in 1945, governed the Saudi attitude towards America. The sons of Ibn Saud never strayed far from it except to mould it to fit their survival strategies; in a way it was left to America to define the relationship between the two countries and give it content.

The accession of Faisal, undoubtedly a more capable man than his brother, afforded America a chance to transform the relationship and elevated America's dependence on Saudi oil to a policy. Faisal's personal behaviour, his domestic policies and his regional and international strategy, misguided but clever, made it easier for America to depend on Saudi Arabia to deputize for it. America approved of his austere ways, helped him balance his 1964 budget, intermittently used him against threatening Arab nationalism and joined him in trying to create an anti-communist Islamic front.

The Americans were not blind to Faisal's brutal internal sup-pression, his land give-away schemes and his refusal to curb the misdeeds of his family and encouraging them to enter commerce. Yet his ways were clever and his overall policies meant that the oil and Israel were safer. Nobody in the American Government foresaw the consequences of adopting Islam; nobody, that is, except President John F. Kennedy, who, totally in character, tried to superimpose true American ideology on Middle East politics.

Kennedy instinctively liked Nasser. They were the same age, rep-resented a break with the past and Kennedy appreciated Nasser's hold on the Arab masses. Very early in his administration, Kennedy conducted a secret correspondence with Nasser in which the US President warned against border incidents with Israel 'pending a final solution of the Palestinian problem' and remarkably there were very few. This strengthened Kennedy's pro-Nasser attitude and produced a rare American attempt at balancing its oil interests with a sensible policy which accommodated the popular movements in the Middle East.

There were a number of occasions during the Yemen civil war, the major confrontation between the traditional and progressive forces, when Kennedy took Nasser's side. In 1962 he not only rec-ognized the republican pro-Nasser Yemeni regime, while making it clear that Saudi Arabia would be protected, but followed it by accepting the 1963 plan to settle the problem developed by his emissary, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. All this was masterfully balanced by keeping Nasser in check, for it was the same Kennedy who, also in 1963, dispatched American fighters to Saudi Arabia to stop Nasser from going too far.

But the Yemen was not Faisal's only confrontation with Ameri-can ideology. Kennedy, though totally opposed to a Nasserite penetration or destabilization of Saudi Arabia to the extent of overlooking the imprisonment of many educated pro-Nasser Saudis, was deeply concerned with conditions within Saudi Arabia. He refused to accept the advice of the advocates of a continued hands-off policy and pressured Faisal to make internal changes as a way of protecting America's long-term interests. Kennedy used Faisal's visit to Washington on S October 1962 to question America's policy in the Yemen to make three points of his own. He wanted the slaves freed, called for the inclusion of non-royal Saudis in the conduct of their country's affairs and went as far as to demand the lifting of restrictions against American Jews working in Saudi Arabia. His letter of 20 October to Faisal, following the trip, is explicit: America would support Faisal on the basis of 'a new chapter in American Saudi relations based on people's right to self-determination, progress and freedom'.

Faisal, confronted with conditional American support, acted to please Kennedy, for he could not turn to others for help and was unwilling to adopt Nasser's Arab nationalism. In November 1962 he formed a new government which adopted a ten-point programme that abolished slavery and called for the creation of a consultative council of religious people and commoners. Sadly, the Saudi-American relationship of productive friendly tension came to an end with Kennedy's death and the emergence of the Vietnam problem. President Johnson, who was wont to make fun of the Arabs, their dress and their ways, had to deal with more pressing international concerns. Faisal had a free hand.

The Johnson years were the golden years of the Saudi pan-Islamic policy. The Secretary General of the World Muslim League, Muhammad Sabbah, was elevated to the post of minister; Saudi Arabia invited Pakistani troops to protect the oilfields and Johnson's open-ended support led to the equipping and training of the Saudi National Guard to protect the family and, more importantly, the short-lived 1968 attempt to form a pro-American Muslim alliance between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan (it was the brainchild of presidential adviser Walt Rostow).

Because the Kennedy approach was a brief, personal one, it was as if it had never been. Faisal could not re-enslave the 4000 people he had freed, but he did nothing about creating a consultative council. There was nobody to stop his Yemeni policy, which contributed to the 1967 War, nor was there anyone to question his Muslim schemes and the consequent divisions in the Arab camp. Internally, Faisal went beyond the intelligent theft of land and greater involvement in commerce. He allowed his brother-in-law and security adviser, Kamal Adham, to realize a whole 2 per cent of the income of the oil concession Faisal gave the Japanese in the Neutral Zone. However, the increase in oil income made this gift of hundreds of millions of dollars possible without causing the internal problems that had beset Saud.

The defeat of Nasser by the Israelis in 1967 completed the picture; it brought to an end Nasser's propaganda war against Faisal - sadly, indirect and marginal as it was, the only outside instrument available to attack his abuse of power. It was left to the Saudi people alone to try to curb Faisal's ways and this, from 1967 to 1973, produced the greatest number of attempts to overthrow the Government in the history of the country. The attempts failed because America had helped in the creation of the sophisticated Saudi internal security apparatus by selling the country equipment and lending it personnel. But these manifestations of internal unrest, ignored, dismissed and hushed up by the Americans, were taken seriously by Faisal. This determined Saudi policy on the war of October 1973.

The question Western governments, and indeed individuals, ask about the 1973 oil embargo, 'How could a friend of ours do this to us?' is the wrong one for the circumstances. It totally ignores Faisal's sound decision that doing nothing would lead to serious internal and regional turmoil. The more appropriate question is whether or not the oil embargo was the least damaging consequence of the inevitable march to war which exploded in October 1973. The answer is yes, but the reasons deserve close analysis.

By 1973 Sadat had reduced his links with the USSR and was following a pro-Saudi, pro-American policy. Wrongly, he assumed this would lead to American pressure on Israel to end the occupation of Egyptian territory it had conquered in 1967. But America did nothing and Israel showed no signs of planning to leave the Sinai Peninsula and had allowed the building of some settlements there. Faisal, determined to keep Egypt from reverting to a radical stance, time and again made statements to the press and pleaded with the United States to apply pressure on Israel. In the summer of 1973 Faisal transmitted a personal message to ARAMCO president Frank Jungers pointing out the danger to the flow of oil of the continuing Egyptian-Israeli stalemate. All this got nowhere. America was preoccupied with Vietnam and Watergate.

To Faisal, refusing to help Sadat meant reigniting regional radi-calism and endangering his Muslim position and re-creating the atmosphere of conspiracy which led to so many attempts against him within his country. When his attempts to get America to act failed, he accepted Sadat's decision to go to war and promised the use of oil to support him.

What followed came close to strangling the West economically, but it was the result of a series of mishaps rather than of a clear Saudi policy aimed at that end. A total oil embargo was the last thing on Faisal's mind. The war started on 6 October and Faisal immediately offered Egypt $200 million worth of aid. On 12 October, hoping to prevent America helping Israel, Faisal and fellow Arab oil producers announced a 5 per cent reduction in their output. On 16 October the reduction was increased to 10 per cent and a promise of a further 5 per cent cut every month. Until this point, Saudi Arabia was the primary mover behind the cuts in production and there is no doubt that the promise of incremental reductions was more of a threat than a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile, on 18 October, President Nixon received Faisal's special envoy, Ambassador Omar Saqqaf, who asked Nixon to make an Arab-pleasing announcement that would diffuse the confrontation. Nixon, beset by Watergate, the threat to his presidency and the forced resignation for corruption of Vice President Agnew, was in desperate need of domestic support and did not respond to the Saudi request. He opted instead to supply Israel with $2.2 billion worth of arms to woo Jewish voters. Faisal's response was forced on him. Sheikh Zayyed of Abu Dhabi's answer to the Nixon move to resupply Israel with arms was to announce a total oil embargo. Faisal's attempts to modify his demands daily came to an end; he had no option but to follow the Zayyed lead.

After the embargo was in place, Saudi Arabia went to work to lift it as soon as practicable. The records of the Faisal-Kissinger meetings during the following three months reveal an unmistakable Saudi desire for a face-saving measure to end the impasse. In February 1974 America tried to bribe Saudi Arabia by agreeing to sell it more tanks, aircraft and naval vessels than it had ever done, but it made it clear it could not go further. Meanwhile, during the same month, Faisal journeyed to Pakistan to attend an Islamic conference and was received as a hero. Feeling that the embargo had served his Islamic leadership purposes and that nothing more could be gained from maintaining it, on 19 March 1974 he gave orders for it to be lifted.

Faisal got no American concessions for the Egyptians or the Palestinians. What Faisal got was a quadrupling of the oil price- basically the increase in the price of oil due to shortages was maintained - an enhancement of his position in the Arab and Mus-lim world which was unearned and American arms to protect his country. The people who ask how a friend could 'do this to them' should wonder, if Faisal was an enemy indeed, why the Americans agreed to arm him? The suffering of the Western consumer and the signal of how things might be under a truly anti-Western Saudi leader, were more the doing of Richard Nixon than they were the child of Faisal bin Abdel Aziz. Even Henry Kissinger accepts this and speaks of the situation being mishandled, without elaboration. Certainly the Nixon administration knew enough of what had happened to continue its relations with Saudi Arabia without any alterations to the basic relationship an embargo by an enemy would have created, and Nixon visited Saudi Arabia in 1974 and was received as a friend by none other than Faisal himself.

When Faisal was assassinated in March 1975, the Saudi propa-ganda machine had made so much out of his announcements regarding praying in a Muslim Jerusalem, and his courage in imposing an oil embargo, that the House of Saud found it easy to label him a martyr. The Arab masses took this a step further and decided Zionism and America were behind his murder. In fact, it was America which lost a reliable ally and had most to fear, though the income from high oil prices guaranteed the smooth succession of Khalid and Saudi stability.

Though Saudi Arabia has no bars, the 1975-9 period was undoubtedly its 'happy hour'. King Khalid ruled a country where the oil-propelled GDP increased by 85 per cent and the country's income grew faster than its ability to use it to show annual surpluses of between $6 billion and $32 billion. All Saudi college graduates were absorbed in highly paid jobs; the private sector flourished and the number of expatriate workers more than doubled; there was a shortage of Chevrolet pick-up trucks, hotel rooms to accommodate visiting salesmen and cement for building. The ports of Jeddah and Dhahran were so congested that bribes equalling the value of some goods were paid to obtain priority customs clearance.

In the field of foreign policy, renting solutions and leaders became an affordable Saudi habit, and axiomatically most rentals were aimed at keeping the lid on problems common to Saudi Arabia and America, a form of fronting for America. Yasser Arafat visited frequently, got more money each time and was told to 'cool it' and not get too radical; Assad of Syria was kept happy with money and Saudi Arabia had America pressure Israel into accepting his dominance in Lebanon to stop its radicalization; Siad Ba rre of Somalia received a check for $200 million to eject the Soviets from Barbera seaport in his country and always got another check for himself; Mobutu of Zaire was given $50 million to fight pro-Soviet Angolan rebels; and Filipino Muslim rebel leaders were kept in Jeddah hotel suites and afforded a lifestyle which made them forget the reason for their being there. Riyal rentals became the essence of Saudi diplomacy. (This was the beginning of the Saudi invasion of the world, the time when manifestations of Saudi wealth became a topic of everyday conversation.)

It was also the period which saw the smallest number of internal attempts against the Saudi monarchy. Jimmy Carter's commitment to human rights was still applicable, but only in an absolute sense. The number of Saudis involved in political activity or agitation was small indeed; they operated against a background of a proven old maxim that people with full bellies do not start revolutions. Says former National Security adviser Robert Komer, 'Doing something would have disturbed a scene which wasn't so bad.'

In reality, even the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David agreement of 1978 failed to disturb the Saudi state of internal and external bliss. It is true that a family split resulted and that the then Crown Prince Fahd wanted to support Sadat and America, but the Saudi decision to boycott Egypt should have been predictable. Supporting Camp David entailed some danger of internal upheavals, making the rest of the Arabs and Muslims unhappy and provoking external threats. Opposing Camp David had few costs. According to Jimmy Carter's memoirs, both King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd assured him of 'their unequivocal support for Sadat', but they would go no further, not openly. What Carter wanted meant assuming a leadership posture and fronting dangerously for America. The history of Saudi Arabia reveals an unwillingness to do either. As has been shown, they have never really led and fronting occurred only when it could be done without endangering the House of Saud or when it could be presented as a Muslim or Arab effort. The wise Saudi decision was to stop others from radically opposing Sadat and to proceed as if nothing had happened. They bribed all of Sadat's needy opponents.

This honeymoon came to an abrupt end in 1979. In January of that year, Khomeini took over in Iran; in November there was the Mecca Mosque rebellion and in December the USSR invaded Afghanistan to support the puppet government of Barbak Kemal. The shock to the House of Saud was immeasurable. Suddenly King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd were confronted with external and internal dangers which money could not eliminate. They could not understand America's inability to save the Shah, and coupled with America's lack of response to the invasion of Afghanistan and its helplessness regarding the Mosque rebellion, it underscored the limits of America's power and threatened to make America an unreliable ally. The Mosque rebellion signalled the transfer of the internal opposition to the House of Saud from an Arab to a Muslim mould. The House of Saud, loath to admit that years of prosperity had not eliminated all opposition to its ways, de-emphasized the political nature of the rebellion and described it as the work of a fanatical Muslim monk intent on emulating outsiders. Without meaning it, this, with what was happening in Iran and Afghanistan, was an admission that the Muslim policies begun by Faisal had come to naught. To make things worse, a group of Faisal's sons presented King Khalid with a 33-page document calling for across-the-board political reforms covering the country's internal policies and external relations. In addition, an Islamic group, the Islamic Revolution in Arabia, was allowed by Sadat, who was angry over lack of Saudi support, to use Radio Cairo to beam anti-House of Saud broadcasts.

America tried to allay Saudi fears through the transmission of reassuring private messages to the King and Crown Prince, but that was not enough. Finally, on 13 September 1980, a State Department spokesman announced that the United States was committed to protecting Saudi Arabia against 'all internal and external attempts to destabilize it'. This was followed by extensive military manoeuvres by American Air Force units stationed at Dhahran and American threats again Iran. Saddam Hussein's attack of September 1980 on Iran took place against a background of a Saudi Arabia in panic and an open articulation of America's commitment to protect it. Since relations with Egypt were still suspended because of Camp David, Saddam Hussein was the only viable Arab card the House of Saud could play against a resurgent Islam, and America, unprepared to face the new dangers, accepted the premise and supported it.

Beyond adopting Iraq as the first line of defence of Saudi Arabia, there is no evidence whatsoever that a Saudi, American or Saudi-American strategy was ever developed to cope with the consequences of the Iran-Iraq War. There were some small moves : the negative one of creating the Gulf Cooperation Council, pro-viding Jordan with $200 million to create a military contingency capability to help Saudi Arabia in case of internal need and the beginning of the mending of the fences with Egypt. But how to live with a victorious Iraq or Iran was beyond Fahd's thinking and, more dangerously, Reagan's.

In 1980 America became the world's biggest importer of Saudi oil (it was tenth in 1970). Reagan understood this simple fact and little else. The ensuing Fahd-Reagan partnership (Fahd had been the strongman even before Khalid's death in 1982) was one of the most destructive alliances of this century and its consequences will haunt us for years to come. Their combined and complementary policies amounted to support for the Saudi policy of active negativism. For its part, America depended on Saudi Arabia to provide financial backing for executive branch adventures, and welcomed a Saudi decision to place most of their $100-billion-plus surplus funds in US banks and certificates of deposit. In return, the Americans indicated a willingness to interfere in regional and Muslim disputes beyond Saudi Arabia's reach and capability.

With Muslim Iran and Arab Iraq at each other's throat, this was the heyday of illegal activity in Nicaragua and Angola, the sponsoring of divisions among the Palestinians, the creation of the GCC, the building of bridges with Sadat, the perpetuation of war in Afghanistan, the support for despots like Siad Barre and the shipping of oil to South Africa. In return the United States unsuccessfully tried to stop the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, contained Libya's Qaddafi, supplied Iraq with arms and kept the Egyptian and Israeli positions in balance and refused to allow either to replace its Saudi deputy.

Meanwhile Saudi money was kept in America, Saudi Arabia was buying more arms and a Saudi alliance with American business was developing. There was so much Saudi money in American banks, according to Anthony Sampson and others, that it led to a rush to lend money to Third World countries and eventually to the debt crisis. Some American banks, such as Irving Trust Company and Morgan Guarantee Trust Company, turned down excessive Saudi deposit money and refused to indulge, but the rest did.

Saudi Arabia bought F-lSs, Stinger Missiles, C-130 transport planes, M-60 tanks, leased AWACS and extended and expanded the contract of the US Army Corp of Engineers and the US Military Training Mission. But the Saudi involvement with American business went further and AT&T borrowed $650 million and IBM, Proctor and Gamble, TWA, FMC Corporation and United Airlines felt so dependent on Saudi business that they lobbied the US Government to approve the sale of arms to the country. And the Americans' love of Saudi money went so far that the door was opened for promoters of Saudi interests to try to affect American public life, directly or through individuals. The Saudis contributed money to Reagan's second presidential campaign and to some senators and congressmen. Former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford worked with them and so did former Vice President Spiro Agnew, former CIA Chief Richard Helms, former superspy Miles Copeland and a slew of former US Ambassadors to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

In fact the House of Saud and Americans were having fun while the Iranians and Iraqis were killing each other, and they paid no attention to the Saudi people. Meanwhile a few voices sounded a note of warning. Former Ambassador James Akins kept up his attack on Saudi corruption, former Assistant Secretary of State William Quandt studiously pointed out the eventual Iraqi danger to Kuwait and former President Carter advocated wealth sharing with the country's poor neighbours, but nothing could stop the avalanche created by the Fahd-Reagan amity of ignorance. In the UK, there continued a strong business connection with Saudi Arabia, if not in the arms trade. This was evidenced by the activities of Mark Thatcher and the current Minister of State for Defence, Jonathan Aitken, the latter with King Fahd's son Muhammad.

Between 1981 and 1987 there were no reports about inter-nal conditions in Saudi Arabia - not even by human rights organizations - but the Saudi Ambassador to the USA Prince Bandar's $500,000 party received full media coverage, Boeing bragged about King Fahd's flying palace, Saudi businessman Ghaith Pharoan made news when he put champagne in the fountain of a Paris nightclub and 52 journalists attended the multi-million-dollar coronation of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi as King Adnan I. Saudi money, even when used in this stupid fashion, gave the impression that all was well in the Middle East.

But it was not: political conditions within Saudi Arabia and the Arab and Muslim worlds either had not changed or had wors-ened. Certainly the behaviour of the Saudi royal family had got out of control. The one major thing which had changed went unnoticed: as in refusing to support the Palestinians in Lebanon, Fahd was no longer willing to appease his people or the rest of the Arabs by periodically going anti-West. The Fahd-Reagan alliance, given the simplicity of the two men, foolishly ignored Saudi Arabia's other circles of power and left the country totally, and extremely dangerously, dependent on America.

Trouble lurked beneath the apparently calm surface bequeathed by Ronald Reagan. It was left to George Bush to deal with the impending trouble in the Middle East created by the Fahd-Reagan short-term policies of active negativism. The end of the Iran-Iraq War left the Middle East with a militarily strong but economically wobbly Iraq and an angry Iran forced by military failure into a reassessment of its expansionist militant Islamic policies. Saudi Arabia's policy of active negativism had failed and come to an end; the House of Saud prayer 'Allah vanquish Khomeini without making Saddam victorious' had not been answered.

All this coincided with a continued weakness in the oil prices which had begun in 1982 and which was beginning to interfere with Saudi schemes for supremacy through money. Between 1982 and 1988 Saudi Arabia suffered seven years of budget deficits and the Saudi treasury was empty enough for the country to float internal debt bonds. This undoubtedly affected its ability to try to help Iraq on the scale required. On the sidelines, Egypt, which had been readmitted to the Arab fold, was desperate to reclaim a leadership position within it; Syria feared Saddam's growing popularity with the Arab masses and Israel eyed the impressive Iraqi army uneasily.

With Iran looking inwards, the threat to the Gulf was Iraq and its new regional ambitions. Unlike Britain after the Second World War, Iraq was not a cohesive enough society to accept the idea of being victorious and broke (it came out of the war owing $40 billion) and Saddam trapped himself by claiming victory to a people who wanted its benefits. Beyond that, there was an ominous sign of trouble which America and Saudi Arabia ignored. Unlike Iran, Saddam would not demobilize his massive army.

To the average outsider, Saddam Hussein of Iraq was an unknown quantity. But to official America, Britain, Saudi Arabia and others, he was a man who had been a serious part of the Middle East equation for some time. A brief review of American-Iraqi rela-tions, with Saudi-American relations as background, is in order.

The American encouragement of Iraq to attack Iran had occurred after secret flirtations in the 1970s and was followed by more secret contacts between the two countries between 1981 and 1984. Both phases had the blessing of Saudi Arabia.

The first phase of secret diplomacy was aimed at prising Iraq loose from the USSR's grip in return for allowing Iraq to acquire American and other Western technology. The second opened the door wide for direct American support against Iran which included sharing intelligence data gathered by AWACS planes supplied to Saudi Arabia. (I was personally involved in both phases of this rapprochement. Acting on behalf of Iraq, I held negotiations to get a major American bank to open an office in Baghdad and, in the middle of the war with Iran, I carried an American message telling the Iraqis that the USSR was providing Iran with satellite pictures and later an American offer to maintain Iraq's technological edge by supplying them with the ultra-sophisticated Harpoon missile.) In 1986 U~Iraqi relations were strained by the Irangate scandal, the supply of arms to Iran in which Saudi Arabia participated. And in 1987 an Iraqi warplane accidentally attacked the American destroyer Stark, killing 37 sailors. But these major developments produced no long-term repercussions because both sides avoided them. By the end of 1987 economic and technical agreements were reached, including the extension of billions of dollars worth of American credit for the purchase of grain. In 1988, in a protest over Iraqi use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and renewed accusations of Iraq's sponsorship of terrorism, the USA embargoed the sale of agricultural products to Iraq but Secretary of State George Schultz still had a friendly meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, Tariq Aziz. The diplomatic visits between the two countries in 1989, aimed at stopping a budding deterioration, were followed in 1990 by the visit of a congressional delegation led by Senator Robert Dole. A month after Dole's visit, while on a visit to Amman, Jordan, Saddam Hussein attacked US policy in the Middle East and demanded the withdrawal of the American fleet from the Gulf. The fleet was and is there to protect the oil supplies, above all from Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein was making his first move; to the Saudis, he was challenging their special relationship with the United States. These manifestations of an uneven American-Iraqi relationship over a period of two decades took place within a framework of regional strategic considerations. These considerations did distance Saddam from the USSR and managed to stop the march of Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalism, but they left Saddam in possession of unconventional weapons and able to threaten the Gulf and Israel. (The blueprint for the first Iraqi chemical warfare plant came from Pfaulder Corporation in Rochester, New York.)

The end of the Gulf war would have forced a disclosure of enormous Saudi-approved Western complicity in arming Saddam Hussein and making him a regional threat. But this natural course of events was intercepted by Kuwait. A few days after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Kuwait, in violation of OPEC agreements, decided to increase its oil production by pumping oil from the disputed Rumailla oilfield, which is partly in Kuwait but mostly in Iraq. Coming on top of cheating by other OPEC members, this sent the price of oil tumbling from $22 per barrel to $16, and for brief periods even lower. So Iraq, which depended on oil for 90 per cent of its income and desperately needed to rebuild and please its people, found Kuwait infringing on its sovereignty and reducing its income by over $4 billion a year, a development which threatened the country with financial collapse and undermined Saddam's position with his people.

Was the Kuwaiti decision and its timing as much of a mystery as it has been made out to be? Did Saudi Arabia refrain from objecting to Kuwaiti moves because the Saudis wanted to divert attention from their past role and to cripple Saddam? One thing is clear : Kuwait did not need the money it was realizing from increasing its oil production. A nation of one million people including expatriate workers, it had reserves of over $90 billion and producing oil in accordance with its OPEC share was more than enough to meet its needs. Followed as it was by a Kuwaiti denial of air rights to Iraqi civilian aircraft, a Kuwaiti hesitation to congratulate Iraq on its 'victory', the deterioration in relations with America and a Saudi refusal to lend Iraq more money, it led Saddam to conclude that a conspiracy to topple him was in the making.

Kuwait did not stop there. It demanded the immediate repay-ment of the $8 billion it had lent Iraq during its conflict with Iran. And it secretly invited Iranian Foreign Minister Velyatti to visit Kuwait and began a strange unexplainable series of contacts with the CIA. (During the first five months of 1990 CIA Chief William Webster secretly visited the Emir of Kuwait three times and the reason for these visits is still unknown.) When, after dismissing the initial demands for debt repayment as pro forma, the Iraqis responded to a strongly worded repeat demand by truthfully stating that they had no money, Kuwait initiated contacts with Lloyds Bank in London to sell the Iraqi debt notes at a huge dis-count. Had it happened, this would have added to more defaulting in the payments of debts by Iraq and destroyed its ability to borrow desperately needed money on the international market.

For sixteen months the Iraqi-Kuwaiti confrontation, despite its serious implications for the stability of the whole Middle East, was viewed as a minor local problem. One month after the cessation of Iraqi-Iranian hostilities, in Casablanca, then later during the visit of Iraqi Foreign Minister Saadoun Hammadi to Kuwait and finally during the May 1990 conference of Arab heads of state in Baghdad, the Iraqis tried to discuss their border problems with Kuwait without success. The Kuwaitis, despite long-standing international recognition that the Rumailla oilfield and the area around it were in dispute, simply would not budge. In June 1990, in an attempt to overcome Kuwait's intransigence, the Iraqis unsuccessfully tried to convene a heads of state conference of Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but Kuwait saw fit to receive the Iranian Foreign Minister instead. The culmination of the Iraqi efforts was a regional agreement to reduce oil production and raise prices which was reached on 17 July 1990 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. An hour after this 'settlement', the Kuwaiti delegate unexpectedly announced that Kuwait would abide by it for a mere three months. This produced a run on the Iraqi dinar which saw it lose 50 per cent of its value. It amounted to a Kuwaiti declaration of economic warfare.

There is little doubt that part of the reason for Iraq's keeping the Kuwaiti-Iraqi problem an Arab one was its distrust of America. But why the latter, which was meeting with the Iraqis regularly to discuss many outstanding problems between the two countries, accepted this exclusion despite some open Iraqi threats to Kuwait's sovereignty, is impossible to understand. America's mysterious inactivity was exacerbated by an equally unexplainable Saudi wish not to be involved.

Some analysts state that Saudi Arabia had shied away from involvement in the territorial dispute between the two countries because it was based on a historical Iraqi claim and to accept that principle would render questionable Saudi Arabia's very being. Also Saudi Arabia was committed to low oil prices to help America. Even if true, these two factors are less important than the Saudi belief that Saddam should suffer and his power be reduced. Certainly, even if we take into consideration the straitened circumstances of the country, the Saudi failure to bribe Iraq into silence went against tradition. So, Iraq, unable to turn anywhere, began threatening Kuwait openly and the Iraqi threats created an atmosphere of crisis which, under ordinary circumstances, the Americans would not have ignored.

The record of the meeting on 25 July 1990 between Saddam Hussein and US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie is now available. Saddam initiated the meeting, at which Glaspie thought she was going to see Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. Still Glaspie gave Saddam something he had not expected. She told him, in clear terms, that America did not object to raising the dollar price of oil to a figure in the mid-twenties and described the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border dispute as an inter-Arab affair in which America did not wish to interfere.

The Saddam-Glaspie meeting was followed by considerable inter-Arab activity which culminated in a meeting in Riyadh between Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia on 31 July 1990. Iraq, emboldened by Glaspie's green light and a friendly letter of 27 July 1990 from George Bush to Saddam, made much of the fact that it was being bled to death economically. America's explicit friendly intentions preceded Iraq's interception of a message from British Prime Minister Thatcher to the Emir of Kuwait in which she promised him 'reject Iraqi demands and we will back you'.

Saddam's conspiratorial instincts betrayed him and he inter-preted Kuwaiti actions in the light of the Thatcher message. To him it was colonial Britain which was trying to undermine Iraq and not America, and America was what mattered. This emboldened him to act.

The meeting which took place on 31 July in Riyadh, the last hope to stQp an invasion, had had four things going against it: the Glaspie-Bush green light, Iraqi belligerence, Kuwaiti stubbornness and King Fahd's lack of interest. The Iraqis demanded billions of dollars worth of compensation for the oil from the Rumailla field proceeds and a permanent border adjustment. The Kuwaitis would not give on either point and Fahd, behaving oddly, spent half an hour with the delegations and left his brother, the gentle but incompetent Prince Abdallah, to mediate. When news reached Fahd that the Kuwaiti and Iraqi positions appeared irreconcilable, all he did to settle the issue was to make a gesture the Iraqis were sure to refuse: he offered Iraq $1 billion in aid. The Iraqis, now angrier with Kuwait and smarting over Fahd's unattentiveness and the deliberately insulting offer, left without accepting it. War was 36 hours away.

A few hours after Iraqi armour thrust into Kuwait on 2 August 1990, King Hussein of Jordan received a telephone call from King Fahd. The Guardian of Islam's Holy Shrines was agitated.

He kept repeating the same question: why had Saddam Hussein done this without waiting for the results of Arab mediation? Amazingly, however, Fahd had nothing concrete to suggest; even the traditional Saudi bribe was withheld. To King Hussein and Yasser Arafat, the two Arab leaders who had repeatedly tried to mediate the dispute with very little at their disposal, the wrong person was asking the wrong question. Nobody had expected anything from the perverse Kuwaitis, but Saudi Arabia was the only country which could have forced Kuwait to change direction and which was capable of doing something about oil prices, and Fahd had had a year and a half to do something about both. The Arab house was bitterly divided: Saudi Arabia and the rich oil sheikhdoms came out against Saddam; Arafat and Hussein did not accept the occupation of Kuwait but saw Saddam's action as justifiable in the circumstances; the Yemen supported Saddam out of enmity for Saudi Arabia; and the other Arab countries, including Egypt, occupied the middle ground. But, because of its geographical position, oil wealth and special relationship with America, it was Saudi Arabia which mattered most and the decision as to what would happen next rested with Fahd as much as it did with Saddam and George Bush.

Between the invasion date of 2 August and the conference of Arab heads of state on 10 August, King Hussein of Jordan, Yasser Arafat of the PLO and President Mubarrak of Egypt met each other and Fahd and Saddam. As a sign of his willingness to effect a total withdrawal from Kuwait, Saddam accepted a pledge from King Hussein that an Arab solution was in the offing and on 6 August ordered the withdrawal of 10,000 Iraqi troops from Kuwait, and another 10,000 were pulled back to the Iraqi border the day after. Arafat got an initial agreement by both Saddam and Fahd to meet somewhere along the Iraqi-Saudi border and another for a five-way meeting in Jeddah with Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the PLO participating. Fahd initially agreed to both suggestions then turned them down without explanation. Meanwhile, Mubarrak insisted that an Iraqi acceptance of the principle of withdrawal must precede all else and worked for an Arab solution based on this principle.

What nobody had counted on were the results of the 6 August meeting between US Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and King

Fahd. Cheney went to Saudi Arabia accompanied by General Norman Schwarzkopf, two intelligence personnel and one Middle East expert, and the Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar, the son of the Saudi Minister of Defence and a favourite of his uncle, Fahd. The American Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman joined the American group. The King met Cheney and his group accompanied by Crown Prince Abdallah, Defence Minister Sultan (the father of Bandar) and several members of the royal family.

There was no discussion of any initiative to solve the problem short of war, nor were the Americans, or Fahd, interested in the results of the efforts of Arab intermediaries. Using satellite maps, Dick Cheney showed King Fahd that 200,000 Iraqi troops were poised to attack Saudi Arabia. Cheney said nothing about the extremely important facts of the small withdrawal of Iraqi troops and the pull-back of other Iraqi units from the Saudi border. Cheney asked Fahd to invite US troops to Saudi Arabia, 'to protect our friends', and the King nodded agreement, but Crown Prince Abdallah wanted to hear more about the disposition of Iraqi troops, the intended use of the American troops after they arrived and the conditions under which they would leave the country.

Cheney's answer to the points raised by Prince Abdallah was vague. Instead of answering them directly, he is reported to have addressed himself to Fahd and told him that there was a strong possibility that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was part of an Iraqi-Yemeni-PLO plot to destabilize the Arabian Peninsula and divide it among themselves. He added that, at that moment, there was nothing to stop the Iraqi army from marching on Riyadh. Cheney added that it was difficult to determine whether King Hussein was part of this sinister partition plan.

This unbelievable story was told to me by two former American Ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, a former member of the National Security Council and a disaffected member of the House of Saud. At this point, there are no documents to confirm it and it is impossible to establish whether the official US record of the meeting alludes to it, but there is little doubt that Cheney's total presentation reflected America's intentions to destroy Saddam. Even if the satellite pictures had not shown the Iraqi withdrawal and the fact that Iraq had no more than 80,000 soldiers left inside Kuwait, this information had been transmitted to Washington by King Hussein, who had personally given it to President Bush to allay his fears over an Iraqi thrust into Saudi Arabia. Judged against the background of the Glaspie meeting and Bush's letter of 27 July, the American attitude amounted to capitalizing on a situation they had created and forces the question of whether or not Saddam had been set up and the whole war was nothing more than a plan to eliminate the only Middle East power capable of challenging America's hegemony over the Arab world. Certainly Saddam's demand for the withdrawal of the American fleet from the Gulf should have produced something different from Bush's friendly letter and Fahd's billion-dollar offer - a response in proportion to the threat.

Fahd took the decision to invite American troops to his country without the concurrence of Crown Prince Abdallah and other important members of his family, and before consulting the religious ulemas or others. The constructive contacts he had kept with King Hussein and Yasser Arafat became erratic and he was no longer in the mood to listen to them; hence the failure of more attempts to convene a meeting including Fahd and Saddam.

When the Arab heads of state met in Cairo on 10 August, King Fahd had very little to say and refused to meet Taha Yassin Ramadan, the head of the Iraqi delegation, who was there in Saddam's place. The surprise Arab League decision against mediation and for the use of force against Iraq was sponsored by President Mubarrak of Egypt and, unusually for an occasion which required a unanimous decision, it was carried by a simple majority. When King Hussein protested to Mubarrak and claimed that this violated a telephone agreement they had reached regarding a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal, Mubarrak, without ever explaining his statement, revealed that someone had 'held a gun to his head'. Whatever gun had been held to Mubarrak's head, and undoubtedly it was a threat to cut off Saudi or American aid, or both, had led him to behave strangely. He had housed the Iraqi delegation to the meeting in the Andalus Guest House, a small hotel with an unreliable telephone switchboard from which they could not contact other delegations, and he cut off the microphone of the Iraqi chief delegate as the latter was trying to make a statement guaranteeing the safety of Saudi Arabia and the acceptance of the stationing of Arab troops on its soil. But Mubarrak would not have done any of these things without Fahd's approval and before, during and after the meeting with Cheney Fahd had behaved as if he had known what was coming.

What followed outside the Middle East consisted of a number of UN resolutions and attempts at mediation. The original UN demand for Iraq t6 withdraw from Kuwait kept getting expanded. There were cries about the stupid Iraqi act of holding Western hostages and an embargo on Iraq was deemed insufficient and not given enough time to work. King Hussein, the USSR, France and UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar indulged in official media-tion efforts and dozens of others such as former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, former Governor of Texas John Connally and Jesse Jackson were self-appointed mediators. But the die was cast. Iraq, convinced that it was the subject of an America n-Saudi-Mubarrak conspiracy, refused to move, and the USA and its allies, faced with Iraqi stupidity, kept enacting ever more punitive UN resolutions which left Saddam little room to manoeuvre. Fahd did absolutely nothing; a shooting war was a foregone conclusion.

The prelude to the Gulf War produced a propaganda war the like of which had not been seen since the First World War. The man who took the lead in creating the atmosphere of a sick carnival was George Bush, one of the architects of America's friendship with Iraq even under Reagan and a man who never learned to say Sud-am but insisted on calling him Sa-dam. But the man whose behaviour made war inevitable was Fahd bin Abdel Aziz.

The Saudis' acceptance of foreign troops saw hundreds of thousands of them descend on the country. The Council of Ulemas had approved the measure without knowing its extent and under considerable pressure and with considerable reluctance, and King Fahd issued a large number of debt notes to Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Britain, France, America and others to join the holy war against Saddam. It cost him between $55 billion and $62 billion, but, in this case, he accepted the cost of his fronting act with no apparent reluctance.

The very few voices which saw the coming war and the exaggera-tion of Saddam's military capability as unjustified made no dent in the atmosphere of war hysteria which enveloped most of the world. (I stopped appearing on television after some friends told me it was a bad idea which jeopardized my presence in Britain.) On 16 January 1991 aerial attacks of unprecedented intensity were unleashed against the Iraqi army and civilian targets by a joint allied command which made its decisions without consulting King Fahd or his commanders. For over a month, Iraq was pulverized while its air force and aerial defence system were unable to defend it. Saddam managed to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia with some Scud missiles, but their effect was minor - more psychological than real.

Besides some makeshift military bunkers, the only Saudi with an underground bunker was King Fahd, and like Saddam's in Baghdad, it had all the comforts money can buy. King Fahd resurfaced on 27 February 1991, the day the Iraqis signed a truce agreement tantamount to surrender. In less than a year, the Middle East and his country had changed beyond recognition.

The Gulf War achieved its real purpose: it protected the oil and eliminated Iraq as a regional power capable of threatening it and the security of the producer countries. But by destroying the strongest secular power in the region, it created an ideological vacuum in the area which only Islamic fundamentalism can fill. Because the Saudi brand of sponsored, conservative fundamental-ism is no longer acceptable, radical fundamentalism is sweeping the area and it has already won elections in Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait and the Sudan, and is threatening Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and other countries. Naturally Islamic Iran looms large as a regional power and magnet for the disaffected. The prospect of a dramatic switch to another short-sighted policy aimed at re-creating Saddam Hussein to confront the new Islamic challenge is a real one.

The Saudi purchase of the support of countries like Egypt, Syria and Turkey has come to an end because the Gulf War left it broke and unable to renew the rent. Saudi Arabia is incurring a budget deficit for the twelfth year running (see Oil, OPEC and the Overseers and Too Late?) and the total disappearance of its reserves and its $60-billion-plus debt burden means that it cannot reactivate this policy even as a stopgap measure. Saudi Arabia too was eliminated as a regional leader.

The American and other armies, true to the promises made during the crisis, have left Saudi Arabia, but their brief stay created problems which refuse to disappear. Beyond frowning on their government's decision to allow female GIs clad in shorts in their country, all Saudis are questioning the expenditure of more money on procuring more useless military hardware, the ulemas have served notice on the King 'never again to invite foreign troops on Muslim holy soil', and, above all, Muslim fundamentalists within the country, people who saw and see Iraq as a Muslim country deserving of their loyalty and affection, have grown stronger and are demanding wide-ranging reforms.