CNN Friday morning carried an interview with the foreign policy adviser to the Crown Prince (Al Jabeir(?)). Already a sign that the regime has to behave differently.
He did not deny the figure of 15 out of 19 highjackers being Saudi. He denied on the basis of their proven evidence a suggestion that the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia to Al Qaida is of the order of at least 10 million dollars a day.
When the mild Jonathan Mann put to him the proposition that perhaps this whole problem is really a Saudi problem that has become globalised, he just said that terrorism is global.
There were no signals about any greater role for any sort of representative democracy. No questions, perhaps by prior arrangement at least in the clip I heard, about the 5000 US troops there, widely seen as an insurance policy for the Royal Family.
The previous night Prof Fred Halliday, left-leaning British Middle East expert was speculating more widely that the oil fields that have to be controlled for the sake of the global economy are all in the eastern province. Saudi Arabia was an artificial creation and could split up again.
My question is what must be the top secret contingency plans being worked out now in Washington and London?
A) Can they put a scenario to the Royal Family that the troop support must be withdrawn say at the rate of 1,000 a year to allow time for a phased introduction of bourgeois democratic norms, to let the society equilibrate about how strong a version of islam it wants? But would that gradualist approach leave the regime and the west vulnerable to a coup?
B) Could US and British troops seize the oil fields and place them under UN protection?
C) Could an international organisation of muslim scholars, take the holy cities of Medina and Mecca under their jurisdiction?
D) could an international settlement build on the fast changing influence of forces like the satellite television channel broadcasting from Qatar, which is essentially creating bourgeois capitalist norms in a region which will have to transcend the confines of small unviable nation states. (Hence the confused and creative implications of "muslim nationalism" which is both a reaction to US led global finance capital, and a struggle to build a trans-national modern capitalist state of a pure and virtuous islamic nature.) Has global finance capital got enough Arab allies and intermediaries to foster a reorganisation of the muslim world to accommodate these economic and political pressures?
E) as well as drastic military contingency plans, are they drawing up plans for running the world in major economic development zones. one of which is obviously Europe, another needing to be the middle east, with Arabia and the Gulf States as a sub-unit?
Chris Burford
London