By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, April 24, 2002; Page A16
CAIRO, April 23 -- Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia headed to the United States today for his first meeting with President Bush, bearing a swell of Arab indignation over the fate of the Palestinians and growing worries among the United States' Arab allies that their friendship with Washington is becoming a liability at home.
Disturbed by the continuing loss of life in the West Bank and the Israeli siege around Yasser Arafat's West Bank compound in Ramallah, Abdullah, his advisers and like-minded Arab leaders have warned with increasing urgency over the past month that the situation is more than a matter of right and wrong. The Bush administration's identification with Israel, they say, has become so thorough in Arab eyes that the stability of friendly governments is in question, with U.S. allies struggling to justify their stands and radical groups and governments arguing that confrontation is inevitable because of the American-Israeli alliance.
Only a month ago in Beirut, Abdullah received what he regarded as a promise from the Bush administration to lay the groundwork for political discussions over a peace offer that Abdullah had originated and personally lobbied for with skeptical leaders like Syrian President Bashar Assad. The proposal -- a commitment by Arab governments to build normal relations with Israel in return for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- was swiftly overtaken by the offensive against West Bank cities and refugee camps launched March 29 by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
As a result, while Bush calls on Arab states to show "real leadership" by cracking down on terrorist attacks and pressuring Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to do the same, Abdullah is expected to counter that the United States must prove its good intentions by cracking down on Israel. Failure to do so, Abdullah's advisers and other Arab officials argue, will speed what they see as a decline in U.S. prestige and credibility in the Persian Gulf and throughout the Arab world.
Abdullah's message, foreign policy adviser Adel Jubeir said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, "will be that America must be engaged, America must restrain Sharon, America must put the peace process back in its proper track, because American interests and American credibility and the credibility and interest of America's friends and allies in the region are suffering tremendously as a consequence."
According to the Saudis, the perception of the United States as unwilling or unable to control Israel is largely responsible for a new tide of extremist statements coming from Islamic clerics whose voices were largely quieted after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. While Abdullah has told Saudi clerics there is no room for extremism in a modern Islamic state, Israeli attacks in the West Bank have fed the region's most vivid ideological and theological fears about Jewish-Muslim conflict.
"We consider the United States and its current administration a first-class sponsor of international terrorism, and it along with Israel form an axis of terrorism and evil in the world," a group of 126 Saudi scholars and writers said in a letter released this week.
Such sentiments are likely to occupy a prominent place in Abdullah's discussions with Bush. As the two leaders head toward Bush's ranch in Texas, for instance, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan have been forced to deploy riot police to control the streets of Cairo and Amman and protect Israeli embassies there. Even in Saudi Arabia, where demonstrations are usually banned, protests have been allowed this month so the public can let off steam.
The new pressures could not have come at a worse time for the courtly Abdullah. As a result of King Fahd's extended illness, he has assumed the day-to-day rule of a kingdom in the midst of a critical transition, with Islamic and tribal systems being steadily, if slowly, adapted to modern economics and an exploding population. Faced with the claims of a religious elite that often resists change, and a Western-educated middle class that demands it, Abdullah and other members of the royal family will set policies in coming years that are bound to be shaped by their relations with the West.
U.S. policy in the Arab world is woven around Egypt -- the most populous Arab state, with the largest army and a peace treaty with Israel -- and Saudi Arabia, the world's chief oil exporter and steward of Islam's birthplace. While both are important, U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia have been the most tenuous of late and questions about the ability of the House of Saud to endure the most pointed. A collapse of the royal family's authority, or a split among different family lines, could reshape U.S. and Western standing throughout the region.
So far, Abdullah and others in the aging clique of brothers who control the country have offered little insight on issues that seem increasingly important to the outside world: the transfer of power between generations, for example, or a strategy for controlling, feeding and employing a population growing more than 3 percent annually.
The Saudi royals "get an A-plus for surviving," said one Western diplomat in the region. "But . . . "
That "but" has been raised frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks provoked concern about local support for Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Saudi contractor. The reply is far from clear for a ruling family that is at once intimately in touch with its people, but is also seen as distant, aloof and profligate; that has managed to survive several crises, but is seen as in danger of foundering in the future along competing bloodlines and policy differences.
Abdullah is a half-brother to King Fahd, born of the same father -- the late King Abdulaziz, founder of the modern Saudi state -- but a different mother. That sets him apart from Fahd and Fahd's full brothers, the so-called "Sudeiri Seven," named after their mother's powerful Sudeiri tribe. They include such figures as the interior minister, Prince Nayef, and the defense minister, Prince Sultan.
In recent interviews in the kingdom, Saudi princes from three eras rebuffed any talk of dynastic conflict, contending that the West has been predicting the Sauds' downfall for decades. Upcoming decisions about royal succession and other issues will be no more tumultuous, and no less manageable, than earlier ones, the royal family members said.
"The whole system will collapse. No one can hold the balance of power. The tribal state will fall apart," said Prince Faisal bin Salman, 31, recounting the assessment British diplomats forwarded to London in the 1950s, just after the death of Abdulaziz.
Abdulaziz's son and successor, King Saud, was a spendthrift who after a decade in power was deposed by an alliance of tribal and religious leaders. His replacement was his brother Faisal. Faisal was assassinated in 1975. That, along with the Islamic revolution in Iran four years later, prompted U.S. analysts to echo the British conclusions of 20 years before.
"Saudis are now talking almost openly about the end of the House of Saud, and the inevitability -- even the desirability -- of a bloody revolution," former ambassador James Akins wrote to the White House in 1979.
The path to the throne is intended to run through all the sons of Abdulaziz, and there are more than 20 remaining. Upon Fahd's death, Abdullah, 77, will almost certainly become king. After Abdullah, Saudi analysts and diplomats in the country say that only a few of the remaining sons are considered credible contenders, including Sultan, 74, Nayef, 67, and the longtime governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, 65 -- all full brothers of the Sudeiri line.
By law the king is allowed to appoint a crown prince with no restrictions, a fact that could let any of Fahd's successors promote a member of the next generation. Jockeying has already begun. Sultan and Nayef have positioned their sons as successors over the interior and defense ministries, while one of Fahd's sons, Mohammed bin Fahd, has become prominent as governor of the Eastern Province.
The choice comes through what bin Salman calls a process of "inter-family social Darwinism," an informal and little understood competition that weeds out those considered less capable. While influenced by issues like matrilineal bloodlines and rivalries, he said, the process as it has worked in Saudi history puts a premium on consensus and the family's endurance as a governing institution.
"If you are born to the family, you have a certain status, but it does not guarantee political power," he said. "Some wash out." From the top job down, he added, "there is an acceptance that competition stops when it affects the coherence of the state."
The House of Saud's 5,000 princes and princesses have become academics and astronauts, financiers and fighter pilots, philanthropists and diplomats. But they have also skipped out on bills, wasted public funds, killed one another and slapped around the domestic help, with little public accountability exercised over how their power and money are used.
Nayef, Abdullah and others regularly open their homes and offices to petitioners, to people seeking a job, a chat or a meal, but hundreds of less influential relatives have, through family influence, insinuated themselves into public commissions, private boards and other institutions. So extensive is the family's grip on the country, one young Saudi professional quipped, that the options for career advancement are either "to become 'khawy' " -- slang for a royal sycophant -- "or a terrorist."
The military also has provided an important instrument of rule. Along with a U.S.-trained army and air force under Sultan's command, there is a national guard under Abdullah's direction, a tribal militia run by the families that helped unite the country under the Saud banner and Nayef's Interior Ministry. According to a recent U.S. Embassy analysis, the government spends about 40 percent of its approximately $50 billion annual budget on defense and security.
A burgeoning protest movement in the early 1990s, spawned by bin Laden sympathizers and others, lost momentum after the arrest of a few dissident clerics. Some observers saw its demise as evidence that the unease Saudis may feel about the royal family's alliance with the United States and unquestioned control over the country's resources is difficult to translate into mass political action.
The fact that those issues are being revived by U.S. support for Israel is a concern, Saudi officials argue, that the Bush administration should share equally with them.
If the Israelis would pull back in the West Bank, "the peace process would pick up and we wouldn't have to listen to views like this," Jubeir, the foreign policy adviser, said, referring to the anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric that has been pouring from Saudi mosques over the past month.