Before the queen arrived, I was not exactly sure how it would go. After all, this was male-dominated Saudi Arabia. But the queen came and Saudi Arabia's men sailed through the ceremonies with aplomb. Although the Western press reported that the king surmounted the problem of being seen in public with a woman by declaring Elizabeth an honorary man, the story is doubtful. There was no reason that female political figures from the West should not take on the same status as female professionals working in the kingdom. The Saudis simply deal with them on a different psychological plane than other women, which allows them to shuck all of the sexual taboos surrounding fe male chastity. Still, Queen Elizabeth's dress designers were put to a real test to create a wardrobe that respected local tradition without clamping the queen into a veil and abaaya. Her Majesty was swathed in turbans and tulle in her public appearances with King Khalid. And at the horse and camel race that the king held in her honor, I saw the queen step from her car attired in a simple red and white two-piece dress with a long skirt. On her head sat a matching bowler hat with a whispy veil that subtly fell to her chin.

When Queen Margrethe II of Denmark arrived in Riyadh four years later, the demands on female dignitaries had decreased remarkably. Her majesty stood in a receiving line in a knee-length dress with her head uncovered, firmly shaking hands with smiling Saudi men. But when her picture appeared in the newspaper, Margrethe had been discreetly hidden behind a giant pot of tulips.

This grand caravan of foreign visitors was indicative of Saudi weaah, not Saudi power. The ceremonies the House of Saud attached to political hospitality marked the reality that Saudi Arabia was militarily impotent and politically under siege.

King Faisal was the architect of the kingdom's grand scheme of promoting its security by buying off Saudi Arabia's enemies and cultivating the American option. After Faisal's death, Khalid continued his predecessor's policies of staying in the Arab mainstream while pre serving a close, if strained, relationship with the United States. But by 1980 Saudi Arabia was facing a whole new set of strategic problems. As the decade of the seventies was characterized by the challenge of leftist ideologies from within the Arab world, the eighties would be characterized by the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism. Instead of adopting a whole new strategy to meet the added challenges, the Saudis have made military and diplomatic decisions since 1980 on an ad hoc basis. Like a covey of quail startled into flight, the Saudis go scurrying in all directions as every new crisis startles them to action. Yet every action taken by the House of Saud seeks to achieve the same goal of protecting Saudi Arabia's resources and political system. As a result of this crisis diplomacy, the House of Saud has become tangled in a morass of conflicts. These have been created by the essential dichotomies of its present situation: its support of the mystique of the Arab nation and its fear of revolutionary Arabs; its image as the de fender of the Islamic nation and the burden of accusations that monarchy is incompatible with Islam; its practice of buying off the kingdom's enemies and its financial insecurity arising from the oil glut; and, finally, the reality of war in the Arabian Gulf and the threat of rejection by its major arms supplier, the United States. External political forces on the left and right have menacingly joined against the kingdom, which is desperately in search of policies and weapons to shield its vulnerability. From riding the crest of power in the 1973 oil embargo, Saudi Arabia has been reduced, more by circumstances than ineptitude, to a country forced to panhandle for its own protection.

Basic to Saudi Arabia's problems is the issue of Israel, the festering sore on the Arab body politic. To maintain what the House of Saud regards as the kingdom's all-important place in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia maintains a belligerent stance against the state of Israel. This, in turn, enormously complicates the kingdom's relationship with the United States, the guarantor of Saudi security and the cornucopia from which Israel draws so much of its military and economic resources. The struggle to balance the demands of its Arab brothers against the demands of its Western ally consumes prodigious amounts of the Saudis' diplomatic energy, a feat little understood by the United States.

One must understand how Saudi Arabia views the world to appreciate the importance the Saudis attach to their standing among other Arabs. The Saudis see the world as a series of concentric circles, with Saudi Arabia in the center, surrounded by the Arab world, surrounded by the Islamic world. In this scheme, the world is largely bipolar - Moslem and non-Moslem. Central to this concept of bipolarization is an acute consciousness of being a member of the second ring, the Arab nation, a consciousness shared by all Arabs. Yet there exists an enormous gap between the ideal of Arab brotherhood and the national interests and ambitions of individual countries. Consequently, all relations between Arab countries are conducted on the basis of unity and discord. Although profoundly confusing to Westerners, this is not contradictory to Arabs, who view the Arab nation much like a family. Furthermore, the rules worked out for the survival of the Arab family are applied to the Arab nation: I against my brothers; I and my brothers against my cousins; I and my cousins against the world. Within this psychological context, all conflicts are viewed as temporary and any unity as permanent.

From the standpoint of its American ally, a great deal of the confusion about where Saudi loyalties lie (with the United States or with the Arabs) is in the nature of Arab diplomacy. Arabs, to a large degree, deal with their disagreements by mediation and meeting in conference. These traditional patterns of conflict resolution, which for centuries maintained a certain equilibrium, are now applied to new situations that have arisen from the absorption of elements of Western culture, not the least of which is diplomacy conducted in the glare of publicity. A typical summit conference dealing with the Palestinian issue, for instance, opens a day or two late. The participants are usually unable to convene or end the sessions at the appointed time. Arab disunity is expressed by frequent boycotts of one or several countries, walkouts of delegations during the conference, or open displays of animosity. There is fiery and flowery oratory disproportionate to the concrete is- sues being discussed. And the conference often closes days behind schedule. But these conferences should not be viewed by the West as either comic or pathetic. Being Arabs, the parties cannot resist the pull of coming together again and again in the hope that agreement, as happened in the tribal council tent, will come out of what seems to be irreconcilable differences. Therefore, the most fundamental and painful conflicts between Arab nations are regarded as little more than temporary disagreements that will in time give way to unity. While they last they in no way encroach on the principle of Arab brotherhood or the mystique of Arab unity.

Although there is a historical identity among Arabs, the actual concept of the Arab nation did not emerge until the twentieth century. Following four hundred years under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalism was awakened by the promises of independence made by the Allied powers in World War I. Nonetheless, after the war the imperialistic demands of Britain and France dashed the hopes of the Arabs, forcing them once again under the rule of foreign powers. Only after another war destroyed Europe's empires did the Arab states of Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon become independent states. But at the same time, another form of Western imperialism was taking root in the Middle East. Regardless of how anyone else viewed the issue, the Arabs saw Jewish immigration to Arab-occupied and British-ruled.

Palestine between 1920 and 1948 as nothing less than European colonialism, this time packaged as Zionism. The 1948 declaration of the state of Israel by the Jews of Palestine and the displacement of seven hundred thousand Arabs from their land served to stoke the passions of Arab nationalism. Since then, through four wars, multiple domestic economic crises, and persistent territorial expansion, the United States has provided enormous sums of military and economic aid to Israel. In the process, America has become to the Arabs the arch-imperialist of the Middle East. Four decades after the state of Israel was born, whether the issues involve the leftist government of Syria or the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia, Arab intercourse with the United States takes place within the framework of the Arab-Israeli imbroglio.

From the time Franklin Roosevelt brought Abdul Aziz to Cairo in a failed attempt to charm him into supporting the Jewish state, Saudi Arabia has stood, however reluctantly, with its Arab brothers in op position to Israel. Yet unlike the front-line states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia's fight against Israel has been verbal and financial, not military. Abhorring instability above all else, Saudi Arabia sees the threat from Israel in terms of the unrest the confrontation with its Arab neighbors churns up on the kingdom's borders. Consequently, in the frequent flare-ups between Israel and the Arabs, the kingdom seeks whatever course promises it the most security. Saudi Arabia sup ports the Arab cause enough to protect the kingdom against repercussions from radical Arab regimes while being cautious enough not to ignite an Israeli military strike against Saudi territory or an open break with its American ally. Except for the token presence of a few soldiers, the kingdom stayed out of the 1948 war that created Israel. The Saudis also avoided the 1956 Suez war. But with the 1967 war, the six days that so upset the territorial and psychological balance of the Arab world, it became more difficult for the Saudis to distance themselves from the central struggle between Arab and Jew. While the Arabs were humiliated by the scope of their defeat, Saudi Arabia was profoundly affected in another way. Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, passed into the hands of the Israelis. As the self-proclaimed guardian of Islam's holy places, the House of Saud starkly faced the need to confront Israel in the name of Islam. Yet King Faisal's concern about the new Israeli territorial conquests was more political than religious. Faisal saw the Arab-Israeli struggle as one that strengthened the influence of the So viet Union among the Arab states and fueled Arab radicalism in the Middle East.

During the 1950's and 1960's, the Saudis had learned an important lesson about the disfavor of radical regimes. * In 1966 Egypt, using Yemeni expatriates, executed a series of sabotage bombings targeted against various installations of the Saudi government and its American ally. The radicals delivered their message to a defenseless kingdom. The incidents fueled anew the House of Saud's anxieties about internal violence. The fear of what is now called terrorism haunted Saudi Ara bia in the period between the 1967 and 1973 wars.

With the vacuum of political leadership in the Arab world created by the 1967 war, fear of Egypt was replaced by fear of the Palestinians. Charging forth from their refugee camps, the Palestinians declared vengeance on Arab regimes tepid in support of their cause. The Saudis ranked as a special target because of their strong connection to the United States. And the kingdom held the promise of a terrorist's delight because of the logistical impossibility of protecting a highly exposed oil delivery system and thousands of members of the royal family. As if to justify these fears, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was suspected of blowing up on May 30, 1969, a section of the Tapline that carried twenty-three million tons of oil a year to Mediterranean ports.

As the Saudis watched with alarm, the Palestine Liberation Organization captured international attention in the swirl of publicity surrounding airline hijackings and the massacre of Olympic athletes. All the while, Nasser continued to rail against "reactionary forces" within the Arab fold while he imported more and more Soviet arms and advisers. But then Gamal Abdul Nasser died, opening the way for Faisal to pursue his goal of banishing Soviet influence from the Middle East and reining in the radical Arabs. The 1973 alliance of Egyptian man power and Saudi oil forged by Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, and Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz was an alliance to restore Arab honor and open the way for some accommodation with Israel. Although Egypt wanted the return of the Sinai, Sadat's major goal was to be freed of the enormous military costs associated with the Arabs' wars against Israel. What Saudi Arabia wanted in any agreement with Israel was the liberation of Jerusalem from the hands of the Zionists and some agreement between Israel and her Arab neighbors that would protect Saudi Arabia by defusing the radical Arabs.

* In Saudi terminology, a radical Arab state is defined by its political and/or economic system and its level of hostility toward Israel.

The Yom Kippur War in Jewish terminology and the Ramadan War in Arab terminology was a war in which everyone miscalculated. Sadat's army could not sustain its early advances. The Israelis, surprised by the attack, were pushed back from the Suez Canal and lost many of their weapons. The United States, failing to appreciate the political nature of the war, re-supplied the Israelis even in the face of the oil embargo. And Saudi Arabia, suddenly finding itself incredibly wealthy, sacrificed the luxury of staying somewhat aloof from the deadly quarrel between the Arabs and Israel. The oil embargo and subsequent escalation of oil prices threw Saudi Arabia onto the main stage of Arab politics, a role that presented the kingdom with as many dangers as it did opportunities. It quickly became clear that in its new position in the Arab world, the kingdom was expected not only to use its oil as leverage but to bankroll the Arabs' military effort against Israel and perhaps even contribute its meager armed forces. For an action that Faisal anticipated would help stabilize the Middle East, the oil embargo created even more perils for defenseless Saudi Arabia.

From the outset, Saudi Arabia was extremely uncomfortable in its new position of leadership in Arab politics. The conservative King Faisal found himself forced to bend to the hard line Arab forces in the Arab-Israeli dispute, which conflicted with the monarchy's need to maintain its relationship with the United States.

The House of Saud's first defensive move was to keep the radicals out of Saudi Arabia. One of the prime reasons for Saudi Arabia's tight visa policy was to control the immigration of the Middle East's political instability into the kingdom. The House of Saud was determined to prevent the kingdom from becoming a haven for Palestinians, dragging Saudi Arabia into the execution of the Palestinians' political agenda. The Palestinian issue had emotional appeal for the Saudis only as long as Israel held Jerusalem and as long as the Saudis were not pulled into direct confrontation with the Jewish state.

Saudi Arabia's insatiable appetite for labor during the oil boom and the Palestinians' high level of skills made some Palestinian immigration inevitable. But the Saudis' apprehensions about the Palestinians they did allow in the kingdom were so acute that few of the Palestinians I knew would readily admit their origins. Not until I became well acquainted with them would they confess that their lineage extended beyond the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. And most Palestinian professionals or managers holding jobs in ARAMCO or the government buried their nationality behind an apolitical facade.

In 1973, in the wake of the Ramadan War, Faisal had reluctantly allowed the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, al-Fatab, to open an office in Riyadh. The move illustrates Saudi Arabia's policy of extending the symbol but not the substance of commitment to the dreaded Palestinians.

By the time I arrived in Saudi Arabia, two hundred thousand Palestinians were working in the kingdom and the PLO was discreetly housed in a two-story white stucco building on a side street at the top end of Wassir. The only outward indication of the PLO's presence in the nondescript structure was the modest quadricolored flag of black, white, green, and red that flew from a short staff on the roof. One hot day in late spring, I dropped in on the PLO to find out how it functioned among its hostile hosts.

I approached the headquarters with a certain amount of trepidation arising more from the uncertainty of what the Saudi government might do to a Westerner making contact with the Palestinians than from any fear of the PLO itself. Just as I passed into the shade of the portico that extended from the building out over the sidewalk, a man in fatigues with a small Palestinian flag pinned to his shirt snapped to attention. Behind him, lolling in the shade on a rather dilapidated folding chair, was a Saudi in a thobe. I assumed the Ministry of Interior had posted him on the site to observe who came and went. Since he made no move to stop me, I walked in the front door, turned left, and popped my head into the nearest doorway. Except for the absence of women and the way in which the men were dressed, the room looked surprisingly

like a campaign headquarters in the West. There were two desks, a large beat-up table, a well-worn sofa, and a collection of mismatched chairs scattered across the room. In the far corner, a young man stood cranking out handbills on an antiquated duplicating machine. Other men sat at the table folding flyers, while others stood in front of a clattering window air conditioner to take advantage of the pitiful out put of refrigerated air. One by one, as they saw me, the men stopped whatever they were doing and fell silent. Standing there with every one's eyes riveted on me, I felt somehow like an apparition of Western imperialism that had suddenly materialized. In time one of the young men sitting at the table recovered enough to rise and greet me. I introduced myself and explained that I was there because I was interested in learning something about the organization and activities of the Palestinians in Saudi Arabia. Still suspicious but conforming to the strong dictates of Arab hospitality, the man summoned the tea boy and I was asked to sit down. A few of the others came within hearing distance, but responsibility for conversing stayed with the young man who had greeted me. In answer to my prodding questions, he told me that most of the men in the room were students at the University of Riyadh, some were Palestinian, some were other Arabs, including a few Saudis. Pressing him further, I asked him what activities the PLO sponsored at the headquarters and what restrictions the Saudi government placed on those activities. He explained that the membership met every other Monday night for commando training. Since the Saudi government forbid them to possess weapons, they trained with wooden guns. Then he nervously added that any type of instruction in explosives was strictly banned.

At this point, a middle-aged, aggressively hostile PLO field organizer blustered into the room and immediately took over. Challenging me in a voice that was just below a scream, he demanded to know who I was and what was I doing there. Assuming I was a spy for the CIA, he launched into a tirade about American policy in the Middle East. Patiently I waited while he ticked off the Palestinian grievances against the United States. Finally, he paused. Before he could collect his thoughts for another verbal assault, I asked him what the PLO hoped to accomplish in Saudi Arabia beyond providing a contact point for Palestinians working in the country. He looked at me, stunned. Becoming totally flustered, he dropped his aggressive demeanor and went on the defensive. Jumping to his feet, he firmly declared that he was not allowed to respond to that, the answer would have to come from higher authority. After repeating this for the third time, he rose and whirled out of the room.

The students took over again. Ushering me to another room, which served as a library, they presented me with a head scarf in the design of the black and white kufiyyah that Yassir Arafat wears, with the PLO flag set in two corners. Remembering Saudi sensitivities, I stuffed it deep in my pocket and bid them good-by. As I passed back through the foyer, the Saudi lookout was on the phone, shouting to someone on the other end that a Western woman was in the PLO headquarters.

In 1978 the Saudis' ability to tiptoe through the minefield of Middle Eastern politics while retaining the American option faltered in the face of the Camp David accords, signed by Israel and Egypt and mediated by the Saudis' ally, the United States. American strategy was to use Camp David as the core of a Middle East peace settlement, drawing in one Arab country at a time until a comprehensive settlement between the Jews and the Arabs was reached. The key to this strategy was Saudi Arabia, which in the first phase of the plan the Americans had assigned the role of bringing the moderate Arabs to the conference table. But because the agreement contained no firm guarantees for the Palestinians or on the future of Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia feared its compliance would open the kingdom to charges from the radical Arabs of being a lackey of American interests. If the Saudis refused, they would incur the anger of the United States.

In the aftermath of Camp David, opponents of the peace agreement banished Egypt from the Arab countries' political organization, the Arab League. With Syria and Libya in the lead, Arab attention shifted to Saudi Arabia. Did the kingdom intend to stand with its Arab brothers or with its Western ally? As the House of Saud wavered, it was possible to feel the tension of indecision hanging in the air. Finally, the regime, as always, opted for caution and stayed in the Arab fold. In March 1979, shortly after the decision was announced, the news that Crown Prince Fahd had gone into self-imposed exile because of his brothers' refusal to support the United States flashed through Riyadh like an electric current. Fahd had in fact left, and he did not return until mid-May. But exactly what Fahd was doing during this time still remains somewhat a mystery. He was without doubt making a statement in support of the American alliance. At the same time, he was grossly overweight and had been ordered by his doctors to use his home in Spain as a royal fat farm. There was also a rumor circulating in the hareems that Fahd left Saudi Arabia in order to take a Moroccan woman as a third wife. In a period of growing nationalism, it was politically wise for the crown prince, if he chose a foreign wife, to keep her hidden on the Costa del Sol. The story still lives but the wife has never been identified in Spain or Saudi Arabia.

Regardless of the auxiliary reasons for Fahd's absence, the Saudi decision to opt out of the Camp David process has plagued U.S.-Saudi relations ever since 1979. The United States harbors resentment against Saudi Arabia for refusing to seize the chance to break the Arab-Israeli impasse and for expecting American military support while simultaneously sabotaging American peace efforts. The Saudis accuse the Americans of failing to understand their fragile position within the Arab world and of not appreciating Saudi Arabia's efforts during the period of severe shortages to maintain high rates of oil production in order to hold down prices and keep the West supplied with petroleum. As the United States drew even closer to Israel after the Saudi rebuff over Camp David, the Saudis once again intensified their search for an alternative to the American alliance.

In the late 1970's and early 1980s, Saudi Arabia's rulers, driven by the absence of any military strength or political leverage beyond money, hit on the strategy of forging Islamic fervor into a tool to promote Saudi Arabia's own national interests. Not since the days of the evangelical union of the missionaries and the imperialists of nineteenth- century Europe was religion to play such a commanding role in the foreign policy of any country.

The architect of this linkage of foreign policy to religion was Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal. The tall, brooding son of the late King Faisal sought to mobilize Saudi Arabia's resources of oil, cash, and diplomatic influence, and above all the spiritual legacy of custodianship of Mecca, to establish Saudi Arabia's position as a major force in the Moslem world and to assure the kingdom's dominance over the entire Arabian Peninsula.

By promoting universal Islamic solidarity, the House of Saud was striving to escape the specter of pan-Arabism that had haunted it since the 1950s. Through the stormy years with Gamal Abdul Nasser and into the period of the revolutionary ascension of Syria's Hafiz Assad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein and on into the heyday of the PLO, the Saudis had never been comfortable with the concept of Arab unity hawked by the pan-Arabists. The secularism and socialism preached by the pan-Arab movement had little appeal to all but a tiny minority of Saudis. There was either no firm understanding of the philosophy or it was seen as diluting the position of religion. Even more important, though, was the threat the Saudis perceived from the pan-Arab appeals of the Arab socialists. Any political theory that implied that the wealth from the oil-rich Arab states should be distributed among its poorer Arab brothers was appalling to a people who had endured centuries of poverty more severe than most of its neighbors now knew. All the Saudis wanted, royalty and commoner alike, was regional stability that would give Saudi Arabia the opportunity to control its pace of modernization and to enjoy the advantages of its wealth in peace.

The meteoric rise in oil prices following the oil embargo and the political dividend of seeing the Western world crawl on its knees to the oil producers was not lost on the image-conscious Saudis. From this pinnacle of Saudi Arabia's influence and power, the concept of "petro-Islam" was born.* Under this policy, the prestige and money derived from the energy shortage would be used to forge a new alliance among not just Arabs but all Islamic peoples. This would allow the House of Saud to move out from the prison of pan-Arabism with its threats of violence and socialist unity into the broader, safer world of Islam. For as long as the oil boom lasted, Saudi Arabia was determined to shift the balance of power in the Middle East from the forces of thawra ("revolution") to the forces of tharawa ("fortune").

Saudi Arabia's image as leader of the Moslem world was promoted by the sheer circumstance of being the cradle of Islam. The House of Saud believed that by coupling its image as the champion of Islam with its vast financial resources, petro-Islam could mobilize the approximately six hundred million Moslem faithful worldwide to defend Saudi Arabia against the real and perceived threats to its security and its rulers. Consequently, a whole panoply of devices was adopted to tie Islamic peoples to the fortunes of Saudi Arabia.

The House of Saud has embraced the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, as a major symbol of the kingdom's commitment to the Islamic world. Every year the Saudis host over two million foreign visitors making the hajj. These "guests of God" are the beneficiaries of the enormous sums of money and effort that Saudi Arabia expends on polishing its image among the faithful. The Ministry of Pilgrimage and Endowments at the time that Saudi Arabia had more money than it could spend brought in heavy earth-moving equipment to level millions of square meters of hill peaks to accommodate pilgrims' tents, which were then equipped with electricity. One year the ministry had copious amounts of costly ice carted from Mecca to wherever the white-robed hajjis were performing their religious rites.

During the petro-Islam offensive, the goodwill generated by the hajj was followed up. Through its generosity, Saudi Arabia established de partments of Islamic studies at universities throughout the world, which were regularly visited by members of the Saudi royal family on the road as roving ambassadors. Lavish funding for elaborate mosques in places as divergent as Islamabad and Regency Park in London's fashionable West End was provided by Saudi Arabia. In fact, one never knew when one might stumble on another symbol of Saudi philanthropy. I was once standing in the shade of an ornate mosque under construction on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, halfway between the Jewish settlement of Qiriyat Araba and the Arab town of Hebron. As I was glancing up toward the surrounding hills, a handsome brass plaque embedded in the wall of the mosque caught my eye. Simply inscribed on its polished face was "Gift of Saudi Arabia."

* 'Petro-Islam" is a term coined by Middle Eastern scholar Fouad Ajami.

In addition, a steady stream of Islamic political figures both famous and obscure passed through Saudi Arabia's elaborate hospitality routine. Ghazi Algosaibi, minister of Industry and Electricity at the time, tells the story of a visit to Saudi Arabia by the infamous Idi Amin Oumee Dada, President for Life of Uganda. With the endless procession of personalities coming through Saudi Arabia, cabinet ministers hosted the visiting heads of state on a rotating basis. When Amin arrived, it was Algosaibi's turn. The welcoming delegation, made up of the crown prince, the chief of protocol, various ministers, and the military band, was standing on the tarmac when Amin's plane rolled to a stop. As soon as the engines shut down, the cabin door opened and a steward stepped forward. He reached for a hook just above the opening and pulled down what looked like a giant window shade on which was painted a life-size portrait of the Ugandan leader. Not knowing what to expect next, the Saudi chief of protocol ordered the band to strike up its music. As if on cue, the portrait rolled up and out stepped Idi Amin. In an attempt to impress his hosts, the tall, rotund Amin was clad in what he thought were Saudi clothes. On his ample body was a tight nightshirt split around the bottom every six inches, creating long strips that extended above his pudgy knees. And on his head lay a big white handkerchief with a knot tied at each corner. Fahd, the crown prince, went into paroxysms of laughter. Pulling the end of his gutra to hide his face from the television cameras, he turned to Algosaibi and said, "Take this man and find him some real Saudi clothes!"

Heads of state like Idi Amin stay in King Saud's old palace, which has been turned into a guest house. Decidedly theatrical, it looks like a Hollywood version of an Arabian villa. Down the street, the government built a multimillion dollar center for international conferences of Moslem leaders and organizations. In a style that can best be described as "Arabesque modern," the impressive complex contains a multi story hotel, with an interior atrium paneled with rich, dark wood, an imposing mosque, and a vast round conference hall, wired with all the most advanced audiovisual technology and dominated by a heavy crystal chandelier that cost more than a million dollars. But the opulence of the hall pales in comparison to the dining facilities in the hotel. There are banquet halls and tearooms everywhere, all furnished with sleek chrome tables and Arabized Louis XIV chairs embellished with overwrought damask and heavy fringe. In room after room, elongated dining tables seating dozens are lined up and dressed in silky cloths, fine china, pristine crystal, and the gold-toned flatwear that the Saudi taste so much admires. The only credential required for leaders from Bangladesh to Senegal to share in the grandeur is that the visitor be Moslem.

During the petro-Islam blitz, Saudi Arabia mobilized its oil revenues to sponsor a multitude of political and financial organizations aimed at proving that Islam is a cohesive force that transcends nationality and culture to unite all believers in brotherhood. Bypassing the Arab League, Islamic diplomacy was carried on through the thirty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) and the Moslem League, created and nurtured by Saudi Arabia. Through these groups, the Saudis channeled financial aid to the poorer Islamic states, making Saudi Arabia the major financier of the Moslem world. Unilateral government-to-government funds were dispersed through the Saudi Development Fund, which granted loans totaling approximately $557 million during the 1979 fiscal year alone. In addition, Saudi Arabia was a highly visible, generous contributor to the Islamic Development Bank, which between 1975 and 1980 financed projects totaling $930 million in thirty countries, to the Islamic Center for Trade, to the Islamic Chamber of Commerce, to the Islamic Industry and Commodity Exchange, and on through an entire collection of Moslem associations.

All the while, members of the Saudi royal family constantly moved through the Islamic countries, pouring oil and its golden residue on troubled waters. Through petro-Islam, Saudi whims and desires could, for a time, make or break the designs of many leaders. The Saudis used their leverage openly with every country from monarchist Dubai to leftist Syria. But the Saudis were never able to control the Arab League.

The Arab League, composed of twenty-one member nations plus the Palestine Liberation Organization, not only exerts the most pressure within Arab affairs but also dominates the Organization of Islamic Conferences. The challenge to Saudi Arabia's preeminence within the League and its whole Islamic foreign policy came from the infamous, mercurial, and violently antimonarchial Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Riding his own wave of 011 wealth, the diminutive Qaddafi, bemedaled and bedecked in a multitude of uniforms, whirled out of North Africa. Everything that Qaddafi would stand for was anathema to the House of Saud. Brandishing an irresistible charisma among the lower classes throughout the Arab world, Qaddafi proclaimed himself the new Moslem messiah. In his rhetoric, he summoned forth a new pan-Arab movement that would merge the Arab states, rich and poor, under some form of Islamic socialism with himself at the helm. To the horror of the House of Saud, Qaddafi succeeded in promoting his own foreign policy by combining the emotion of Islam with the economics of socialism. In essence, he not only challenged the Saudis with the very threat they were trying to escape, pan-Arabism, but he had done so by capturing the al-Sauds' own platform - Islamic unity.

Even though relations between Libya and Saudi Arabia were strained, Qaddafi was a frequent visitor to the Guest Palace. In July 1979 he prayed at Riyadh's al-Maadhar mosque, prominently stationed between King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd. It was a grand act in the House of Saud's constant struggle to hold Arab animosities toward the kingdom in check. But Qaddafi would not be checked. When the early- warning surveillance planes provided to Saudi Arabia by the United States arrived in October 1980, Qaddafi launched a vituperative verbal assault on the House of Saud. He claimed that the idea of American- owned planes manned by American crews flying over Mecca was in tolerable to the Moslem nation and urged the Saudi people to rise up against the House of Saud to restore their honor. In response, Saudi Arabia broke diplomatic relations with Tripoli.

Each using its own combination of oil money and religion, the House of Saud sought to stabilize the Middle East and Qaddafi sought to foment conflict. Through the rhetoric of Muammar Qaddafi, Saudi Arabia trembled at the possibility that Libya would disrupt the Middle East, which was tantamount to destroying the political stability that was the whole goal of petro-Islam.

Since some accommodation to Israel was central to any kind of stability, Crown Prince Fahd launched a new peace initiative among the Arabs in 1981. The Fahd plan would replace the Camp David accords as the basis for negotiation between the Arabs and Israel. Requiring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and to accept a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital (terms considered impossible by the Israelis), the plan nevertheless implied more clearly the recognition of the state of Israel than any previous Arab position. Saud al Faisal as well as Jafar Allaghany, Saudi Arabia's representative to the United Nations, both stated that Saudi Arabia was willing to recognize Israel under the terms of the Fahd plan. As the plan originally escaped the condemnation of Syria and appeared to be acceptable to the PLO, the possibility emerged that Saudi Arabia might deliver the PLO and the United States might deliver Israel to the conference table. Then everything began to fall apart. Syria and Iraq, recipients of massive amounts of Saudi economic aid, went on the offensive against the plan. The acquiescence of Yassir Arafat fell victim to his own radical wing. And the United States, after originally endorsing the plan, began to back off in order to mend relations with Israel. Frightened, the Saudis failed to press ahead, allowing the plan to be sabotaged by the radicals. It was finally laid to rest after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Saudi Arabia's main problem in its excursion through Islamic politics was that its push for regional stability left an ideological vacuum that petro-Islam was not capable of filling. Islam standing alone, unsupported by either a charismatic figure or a message of rage against the corrupting influence of the West, could not mobilize the Islamic world or bypass pan-Arabism. Petro-Islam was not so much a viable policy as an entrenchment of a conservative moral and political ideology backed up by little but oil money. And because petro-Islam depended as much on money as religion, the oil glut effectively ended Saudi Arabia's attempt to weld the Islamic world together in its own defense. Over the ashes of petro-Islam, a new Islamic crusade began to push into the Middle East from Iran.

When the Iraq-Iran war began in 1980, the Arab world was divided into the familiar pattern of the moderate camp versus the radicals. Egypt, shepherded by Saudi Arabia, had tenuously returned to the Arab fold to join Jordan, Kuwait, and the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf to form the moderate bloc. Allying themselves with leftist Iraq as common enemies of Khomeini's ideology, the oil states would bankroll the Iraqi war effort. Syria, leading the opposing camp, supported Iran be cause of Hafiz Assad's long-standing rivalry with Iraq's political regime. Libya's Qaddafi, touting Islamic revolution, joined Syria. Saudi Arabia as the richest of the oil states directed policy toward its own ends. Iraq would be supported with enough money to stop an Iranian victory. At the same time, the House of Saud would continue to purchase a measure of security by its time-honored mechanism of funneling monetary grants to the leader of the opposition, Syria, and to Yas sir Arafat's Fatah, the most moderate of the politically viable factions of the PLO and one under heavy attack from Syria.

The Saudis had no hesitation in pulling out all the stops to support Iraq, its former adversary. The threat from Iran under Khomeini is proving far greater than the somewhat limited territorial ambitions of the former shah. Khomeini and his Shiite followers are pushing a religious and political revolution that recognizes no national boundaries. It aims to wash away established governments, especially Iraq and the gulf monarchies, and to replace them with Islamic republics or "societies of the just" and to drive Western influence out of the world of Islam. Saudi Arabia is a particularly vulnerable target of Khomeini's fanaticism because it is a monarchy tied in an alliance with the United States. Major plots by Khomeini disciples to destabilize Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were uncovered in 1981. By 1983 the Saudis were compelled to sell anywhere from 200,000 barrels of oil per day (by Saudi government estimates) to 800,000 barrels a day (by the estimate of an American intelligence agent) in support of the Iraqi war effort. Even the hajj, the linchpin of Saudi Arabia's Islamic strategy, came under attack by Iran. On the eve of the 1983 hajj, Prince Naif, the minister of Interior, charged that since 1980 Iranian pilgrims to Mecca had engaged in "political and demagogic activities," distributed pro- Khomeini pamphlets, called for revolution against the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and even attempted to carry concealed weapons into the Holy Haram, the sacred area around the mosque. Saudi Arabia was facing the grim truth that militant Iran intended to pursue its revolutionary goals in the Arabian Gulf by means the Saudis had always dreaded: the combination of external pressure and internal subversion.

Saudi Arabia, baffled about how to combat an assault from the right, organized the 1983 military maneuvers, the first ever held with its partners in the Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC). The military exercises fulfilled more a symbolic than a military function by serving no tice on the West that the Saudis and their gulf neighbors were prepared to stake out their own position, free of the menacing American connection. The Gulf Cooperative Council, an alliance of the sheikhdoms of Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in concert with larger, richer Saudi Arabia, is the culmination of the Saudis' latest plan to defend themselves. The organization was originally constituted in 1976 in an effort to pool information on criminals and political dissidents in the gulf region. As strategic considerations in the area changed, it would become the framework for a defensive alliance that was outside the Arab League and its radical politics and outside the sphere of either superpower, East or West. In 1981 the GCC was formalized and expanded. Although the council has moved forward to free up the movement of capital and manpower between its members, Ito create its own trade zone, to connect its members with roads and bridges, and even to talk of unifying its currencies, its prime objective is to provide a security shield in the gulf. Members of the GCC coordinate their armies through training, strategic exercises, integrated weapons systems, and their own light arms industry. But can they actually protect themselves?

In December 1983 a Lebanese Shiite group loyal to Iran set off a series of bombs in neighboring Kuwait, just to the north of Saudi oil fields.* Consternation reigned in Saudi Arabia as Saudis clustered around television screens unreeling films of the destruction. Government pronouncements about Saudi Arabia's ability and determination to defend itself filled the newspapers. The night following the incident, I was changing planes at the airport in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia's major air facility on the gulf. With the level of alarm the attack had set off in Riyadh, I expected to find security forces of the military on full alert and conspicuously placed. Instead, as I walked through the terminal I saw nothing beyond the usual number of unarmed airport guards watching the normal movement of passenger traffic. It was 2:00 A.M. when I emerged from the unattended door of the terminal. The area outside was largely deserted. The only clue that anything out of the ordinary was happening was that the incandescent lights that usually flood the parking lot had been dimmed. Otherwise, there was stillness. And then Out of the dark, humid night, a jeep quietly approached. One soldier, with the gutra under his military helmet drawn across his mouth and nose, sat behind the wheel. Another man faced the rear, his arm slung across an M16 mounted on a tripod. They slowed then crept on, leaving me once again in the hushed stillness.

The terrorist attack on Kuwait was only one episode in a steady progression of events that have shaken the Arabian Gulf since 1980. Weary in the war, Iran threatened to close the vital Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage in the gulf through which all oil tankers must pass. And Iraq and Iran both bomb and strafe gulf shipping with impunity. To protect its markets from these potential bottlenecks in the gulf, Saudi Arabia has stored oil at various times in critical locations in western Europe and the Caribbean. Forty million barrels of oil are believed to have been in floating storage in 1985. By 1986 Saudi Arabia's trans-peninsula pipeline was carrying Iraqi as well as Saudi crude from the Arabian Gulf to Red Sea ports, bypassing the dangers of the gulf. Through these measures, Saudi Arabia has ensured that a level of oil shipments will continue as long as the vulnerable fields and the delivery system do not fall victim to Iranian encroachment.

*This is the group suspected of holding the American hostages in Lebanon

Iranian testing of the oil fields defense system began in the spring of 1984. In May a Liberian tanker was attacked by an Iranian fighter in or very near Saudi Arabia's territorial waters. Although the Saudi defense ministry was loath to admit the incursion, before the week was over a U.S. Air Force unit was in residence at the Riyadh Marriott Hotel and the United States had shipped the Saudis four hundred Stinger missiles.* In June, one, possibly two, Iranian planes skirted the coast line near the Ras Tanura oil-loading facilities. Picked up on the sophisticated radar of the AWACS, one plane was downed over the gulf by an F-15 of the Royal Saudi Air Force. This time the government had to admit that its territory had been violated. That night I stood on my small balcony, watching as planes, in a continuous circle, took off and landed from the direction of Dhahran. After years of successfully staying out of armed conflicts, it seemed that Saudi Arabia might now be threatened with war at its frontiers. A tension that I had not felt since the uprising at Mecca permeated the atmosphere. Westerners once more wondered how much longer they might be able to stay.

The crisis passed. The shipping lanes were still being assaulted, but the Strait of Hormuz stayed open. The land war bogged down once again in the marshes of the Shatt al-Arab. Iraq, as long as Saudi money held out, appeared to be holding the Iranians at bay. Then in the spring of 1986, two years later, Iranian troops broke out, crossing the Shatt al-Arab to occupy the Faw Peninsula. Iran was sitting on the doorstep of Kuwait. Across the city-state is the open plain to Riyadh.

Short of intervention by the United States, the only defense the gulf states have is the arsenal of weapons the members of the GCC buy in prodigious amounts from the West. In 1985 Saudi Arabia alone spent $17.7 billion on defense, nearly a third of all government spending. The kingdom and its GCC partners have bought sophisticated aircraft, missiles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, air defense systems, and surveillance planes. Yet so short is manpower that together they have been able to assemble only one five-thousand-man force, which is stationed at the King Khalid Military City near the border with Ku wait. There they wait in case the Iranians come. Although the GCC, led by Saudi Arabia's American-made fighter planes, probably has better equipment than Iran, the unknown is how well the Saudis and their partners would perform under fire. Except for the 1984 air skir mish over the Arabian Gulf, the GCC forces have no combat experi ence, have a cultural tradition that shuns military discipline, and lack the revolutionary fervor that has sustained the Iranians through six years of grueling war. Now they have another grave problem: access to the hardware that would give them any chance of fending off at tack.

*The Stinger is an ideal weapon for Saudi Arabia. It can be carried and fired by one man, maximizing Saudi manpower, and it is particularly effective in use against low-flying aircraft.

The United States, the Saudis' supplier of first choice, appears by the actions of Congress to be shutting down arms sales. The 1981 sale of the AWACS surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia was a political donnybrook. The Saudis' request to buy additional F-15s in 1985 was mired down. The arms package the Saudis sought in the spring of 1986 was originally voted down by Congress. Later when the arms sale proposal was stripped of the Stinger missiles, President Reagan's veto of the Congressional rejection was sustained with just enough votes.

Congress and the president sidestepped the issue of whether or not the AWACS Saudi Arabia was given permission to buy in 1981 could be delivered. It is not only weapon supplies that are at issue. The Saudis' public humiliation at being forced to grovel before the American Congress strikes at the heart of Saudi honor. Begging for the arms to protect itself from Iran, an enemy that Saudi Arabia shares with the United States, offends the sensitive Saudis as nothing else in the long, difficult relationship between the two countries. Nevertheless, a combination of diminished dependence on Saudi oil, the domestic political reality of Israel's allies in the American electorate, and the misconception in the American mind of all Arabs as terrorists is straining the American alliance as it has never been strained before.

Much of the current difficulty between the Americans and the Saudis lies in how each perceives the power of the other. The United States throughout the history of the alliance has expected the Saudis to deliver something concrete in the way of Arab willingness to accept the existence of Israel. Misled by the kingdom's ability to influence oil markets with its vast petroleum reserves, the United States deludes itself that the Saudis can effectively moderate Arab opposition to Israel. Ever since the Camp David accords were signed, the Carter and Reagan administrations have shared one miscalculation. Both have overestimated what the House of Saud can actually deliver. Defenseless, threatened by opposing political philosophies, custodians of a society still emerging from the feudal era, Saudi Arabia does not lead, it muddles through. It is folly to count on the Saudis for what they cannot be - a powerful force within the Arab political constellation.

But the misconceptions in the alliance are by no means one-sided. The Saudis have as little appreciation of what the United States can extract from Israel as the United States has of what the Saudis can extract from the Arabs. Barry Rubin of the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies has said, the local actors in the Middle East expect the United States to provide a solution [for the area's problems), and they invariably overstate American power. They expect the United States to do all the work, make the concessions, and take the blame. In this game, questioning American credibility is simply a bargaining chip. *

Thus the alliance stands, each partner trapped in its own myths.

The value of the American alliance has already split the House of Saud. The family has been long divided between the pro-American faction led by King Fahd and Prince Sultan, the defense minister, and the nationalists who rally around Crown Prince Abdullah and Saud al Faisal, the foreign minister. The pro-American faction believes that no matter how much the kingdom seeks other defense strategies, in the end America is its only option. The nationalists, whom many would claim are simply anti-Western, fervently believe that Saudi Arabia al ways has been in a one-way alliance with the United States. While the Saudis produced enough oil to sustain Western economies during the years of the oil drought and risked their own political well-being by serving as the counterweight to radical Arabs, the United States did nothing to wring concessions from Israel. Furthermore, the United States, instead of moderating its policy toward Israel, has become increasingly supportive of it during the years of the Reagan administration. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of the PLO headquarters in Tunis, American acquiescence to Jewish colonization of the West Bank, the bombing of Libya, and the denial of arms to Saudi Arabia on the grounds that the Saudis support terrorists have all combined to con vince the nationalists that the interests of the House of Saud lie in opposing the United States. To bolster the argument of the nationalists, Saud al-Faisal frequently discusses the Saudis' option of seeking Soviet support. But although the Saudis periodically vent their frustrations with the United States by threatening to improve relations with the Soviet Union, the Russians are even more unpalatable to them. The Soviets are socialists politically and atheists religiously, neither of which is compatible with a conservative monarchy that functions like a Pseudo-theocracy. Riyadh and Moscow may exchange ambassadors in the near future, but as long as the House of Saud rules, relations are likely to stay at arm's length.

*Barry Rubin, "Two Years After, Lebanon's Lessons," New York Times, August 29, 1984.

Instead, to balance the factions in the royal family and to return to the tried-and-true practice of buying off their enemies, Saudi Arabia is the scurrying to mend its fences with the radical Arabs. The primary beneficiary of the Saudis' latest diplomatic stance is Syria, ally of Libya, supporter of Iran, and major destabilizer of the Middle East. In a pe riod of severe economic strain, Saudi Arabia is providing Syria with perhaps as much as half a billion dollars a year in aid. Stopping short of subjugating themselves to Hafiz Assad's leadership, the Saudis are gambling that they can moderate Assad's actions toward Israel and his sponsorship of the anti-Arafat faction of the PLO. Most important, the House of Saud seeks to win Assad's intervention with Iran to convince the ayatollahs to stay clear of Saudi territory.

Unless the House of Saud falls to a radical political regime, the United States remains the ultimate guarantor of the kingdom's security in spite of the Saudis' alternative defense pacts. Despite the opposition of the nationalists, the House of Saud also largely accepts this truth. As a result, the Saudis have built military facilities and purchased equipment with an eye toward the use of friendly forces in an emergency. Military bases have been built large enough to accommodate Pakistani mercenaries as well as a Jordanian rapid deployment force to fill the role that Iran was to fill under the shah, to hold off a hostile attack until the United States arrives. Airfields have redundant runways to handle the aircraft of the U.S. Air Force. Military hardware, including radar and communications equipment, has been bought for its compatibility with the equipment of an American intervention force.

The United States in its current relations with Saudi Arabia is also forced to face the hard truth that the kingdom falls within its vital interests. Commanding oil reserves of ioo billion barrels, Saudi Arabia has as much oil as the total proven reserves of the United States, the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Venezuela combined. Those reserves will loom even larger when the next cycle of want and plenty in the petroleum market hits the Western industrial nations in the 1990$. Cur rent American policy is simply making the task of safeguarding Saudi Arabia more difficult. Because of the political pressures within the United States, Saudi Arabia is being forced to turn to the British and French for military supplies. And the Europeans are happily filling the void. While the Saudis secure their weapons and Congressmen and presidents gauge the domestic political scene, Saudi Arabia and its gulf allies are acquiring a hodgepodge of incompatible equipment that can not be easily supplemented by the Americans in case the United States does have to intervene.

Ironically, the crisis in American-Saudi relations is coming at a time when the two countries share a remarkable compatibility of interests in their defense against the insidious hatred fanned by Iran's Islamic rev olution. The oil monarchies of Bahrain and Kuwait have both been victims of a war of subversion from Iran. Nor in all probability has Saudi Arabia escaped. In the spring of 1985, Riyadh, the physical, historic, and visceral center of the kingdom of the al-Sauds, was hit by two terrorist bombs. Little damage resulted, but the symbolism was profound. The House of Saud had been struck at its heart, its inland capital. And the targets were manifestations of the Western presence: a compound housing American advisers for the Saudi Arabian National Guard, and a nearby pizza parlor, one of the more odious icons of Westernization. The perpetrators escaped and responsibility was never assigned. No one seriously believed it was the work of either Saudi liberals or religious fundamentalists. This left the whole range of Saudi Arabia's foreign opponents to consider: radical Palestinians, terrorist groups under the sponsorship of Muammar Qaddafi, or Shiites under the sway of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. The most likely source was any one of a number of opposition groups answering to the ideology of the Islamic revolution. Appealing to the significant numbers of Shiites and other disaffected Moslems scattered through the gulf region, Khomeini and his followers cry out for revolution against the evil, Western-tainted monarchies. These calls to battle in the name of Islam carry with them an acrid condemnation of the West, especially the United States, the "great Satan."

Western passions in the Arabian Gulf have waned in proportion to the rise in oil supplies. But the peninsula remains one of the most strategic regions in the world for Western interests. Any interruption in the flow of gulf oil would generate a major Western economic crisis that would carry over into the military, affecting the viability of NATO. The present threat to Western oil supplies lies with the fomenting revolution against Westernization that is stoked by the rhetoric coming out of Iran. "It is in the Gulf that the Iranian revolution will either be contained or will receive the fuel it needs to spread." * Consequently, the West is facing a new battle of ideologies. The major East-West conflict in the Middle East has ceased to be the struggle over Marxist ideology between the surrogates of the superpowers. The new East- West conflict is between the traditions of Islam and the cultural imperialism of the West. As a result, the Western nations, especially the United States, can no longer conduct their relations with Saudi Arabia solely in terms of the Arab-Israeli dispute.