A crude oil tank in Saudi Arabia
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Anti-Saudi hawks hope that once the U.S. installs a friendly regime in Iraq—the Administration says it is still merely considering such a plan—Washington will end its alliance with the kingdom, its oil and bases no longer critical to U.S. interests. "If we sort out Iraq and Detroit develops a hydrogen engine," says a U.S. diplomat, "Saudi Arabia will go back to being a fascinating, benighted part of the world that people don't visit."
Isolating Riyadh, though, carries risks. Western diplomats warn that the al-Saud clan, which has ruled the kingdom for the past century, is the only Western-leaning institution left in a fundamentalist state that is growing younger, poorer and more radical. "Let's say we decided to split sheets with the Saudis. What would replace them would not be a pretty sight," says a U.S. diplomat. "You could see another Taliban. There's no moderate group that could come in and take over."
Nor is Riyadh necessarily inclined to go its own way. In the past two months, it has been worried enough about its relations with America to launch a P.R. blitz modeled after a U.S. political campaign, with issue ads, town-hall meetings, focus groups and overnight polling. The goal: to improve the image of the Saudis in the U.S. Only 32% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Saudi Arabia, down from 60% during the Gulf War. The point man for the campaign, Adel al-Jubeir, a top aide to Crown Prince Abdullah, says that after Sept. 11, "we discovered Americans don't know us. So we decided to explain ourselves to them."
Speaking to Time in Jidda, al-Jubeir laid out the Saudis' case: "We play a moderating influence in terms of regional stability, oil markets and financial markets. And Saudi Arabia is the center of the Islamic world; 1.2 billion people around the world face Mecca in prayer. Wouldn't you want to have strong ties with a country that has this position?" Perhaps. But it's worth asking, At what cost?
A generation ago, vast swaths of the Arabian Peninsula lacked the basic infrastructure of a modern society—roads, running water, electricity. Today nearly half the country's 22 million people live in Riyadh or Jidda, and Saudis make up the biggest market for U.S. consumer products in the Middle East. When they're not fighting city traffic in Cadillac SUVs, middle-class Saudis frequent gleaming shopping malls lined with designer brand names from the U.S. In a country where women are required to wear full-length abayas in public, you can catch Sex and the City on satellite TV every Friday night.
But social frustration is mounting because of pressure from the country's exploding young population. More than 60% of the Saudis are under 25, and the birth rate—37 births for every 1,000 people—is among the highest in the world. Because of falling oil revenues and the country's spiraling debt, per capita income has plummeted from $28,600 to $6,800 in the past 20 years. Though one-third of all Saudis are unemployed, the kingdom imports 6 million foreign workers to fill the low-wage jobs Saudis don't want. Restive and jobless young Saudis have nowhere to turn in an antidemocratic society governed by puritanical social norms: Saudi authorities ban dance clubs and movie theaters, forbid women to drive and prohibit men and women from mixing in public. "That adds up to a fragile situation," says a U.S. official.
Islam is central to the identity of the Saudi state, whose influence in the Muslim world is based on its stewardship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. The al-Saud family has held on to power by placating the kingdom's religious establishment, which is dominated by descendants of the 18th century Muslim cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab. To defuse the religious leaders' hostility to modernization, the Sauds gave the Wahhabists broad power to dispense their forbidding brand of Islam in the country's mosques and schools and to regulate daily life in the kingdom. During the five daily prayer times, official morality squads roam streets and shopping malls, ordering businesses to close and bystanders to head to the nearest mosque.
Many Saudis resent Western attempts to blame Wahhabism for Sept. 11; they say the Saudis who ultimately joined bin Laden's brigade learned their trade not in Saudi Arabia but by fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan—a war supported and funded in part by Washington. But some Saudi elites have begun to argue that something is basically rotten in their homeland. Says a Saudi journalist: "Wahhabism breeds extremism. It was building up, and bin Laden used it. The government should have said, 'Enough is enough.'"