Do We Still Need the Saudis?

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Askar Enazy, a professor of international law in Riyadh and an outspoken critic of the regime, complains that the clerics "are allowed to run rampant. The al-Saud believe if they oppose them, it will undermine their own legitimacy as rulers. They had the opportunity to crush them many times before but chose not to." Mohammed al Odad is a government minister in Abha, but he is dismayed. "The fundamentalists have total control of the masses," he says. "It gets worse and worse." Parents say they are fed up with the Wahhabist school curriculum, which rears students on a diet of intolerance. A typical passage from a sixth-grade history textbook vows that "Arabs and Muslims will succeed, God willing, in beating the Jews and their allies." Even a member of the royal family concedes, "We can't say we didn't know what was going on. People who stood up against it were told to shut up. The government let it get out of hand."

Both countries paid the price on Sept. 11. Yet far from challenging the Saudis' record of breeding extremism, the White House has from the start defended its oil-rich ally. As early as Sept. 24, Bush declared "the Saudi Arabians have been nothing but cooperative." Counterterrorism officials in Washington and Riyadh say they have worked closely together to liquidate al-Qaeda. According to U.S. officials, the Saudis have arrested more than 100 al-Qaeda members inside the kingdom, given American investigators access to interrogations of terrorism suspects and shared reams of intelligence on the Taliban and bin Laden's network.

But some U.S. officials say the Saudis have shown less enthusiasm for American efforts to choke off the huge sums of Saudi money that flow to terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The regime waited until March to put into place new measures that crack down on money laundering and require Saudi-based charities to disclose where their money is going. "There are things we want that they're not ready to exchange yet," says a U.S. diplomat in the region.

The Saudis approved Pentagon use of the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), a multibillion-dollar U.S.-built facility at the Prince Sultan base, to direct the air war against the Taliban but did not offer to allow American bombers to fly combat missions from Saudi bases. If the Administration expected more from the Saudis, it didn't ask for it. On sensitive internal matters—such as the radical indoctrination of schoolchildren by the Wahhabists—the U.S. has not pressured the royal family directly. "There has been no table pounding," admits a senior U.S. official. "When the Saudis get hectored about reform, they get their backs up and say, To hell with it—we're not going to do it."

The festering public anger toward the U.S. gives the Saudis little incentive to cooperate. Only 16% of Saudis have a favorable view of America, according to a Gallup poll taken this spring. Nothing has done more to fuel the antipathy than the Administration's unwillingness to even try to rein in the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians. Says Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud,who is the biggest foreign investor in the U.S.: "The people see their brothers dying in Palestine, and it makes them hate America." The Israeli reoccupation of West Bank cities has handed religious hard-liners an excuse to go on the offensive. In a televised address, Sheik Abd-al-Rahman al-Sudays, imam of the Mosque of Mecca, declared that God turned Jews into "pigs and monkeys," condemned the "poisonous culture and rotten ideas" of the West, and trashed Hinduism.

Members of the ruling family fret that outrage against the U.S. could rebound against them. That's why the Saudis have pleaded with Washington to restart the peace process and put more pressure on Israel. In mid-June, as the White House was drafting the President's Middle East policy speech, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal met with Bush and handed him a letter from his uncle Abdullah urging the U.S. to promote a "clear vision" in the speech, including geographical boundaries and a timetable for Palestinian statehood. Two days later, Abdullah personally phoned Bush to lobby for specifics. The Bush speech ultimately dodged the border issue, and though it did call for a Palestinian state within three years, it made clear that any progress toward that goal would have to come after the removal of Yasser Arafat and the emergence of new Palestinian leaders untainted by terrorism.

In private, Saudi officials have trashed the speech. Last month, after Prince Saud and the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt met with Bush at the White House, the prince tried to put the best face on things, saying he was "much impressed" by Bush's commitment to a three-year timetable for a Palestinian state and an eventual end to the Israeli occupation. Still, says a U.S. official, "our reputation is at a low ebb, and so it's harder for the Saudis to do things in public view with us."

Most immediately, that means Iraq. The royal family would love to see Saddam Hussein gone, but it has no interest in taking the political risk of joining an attack on another Arab country while the Saudi public is agitated over the Palestinian problem. At one stage, the Saudis privately indicated a willingness to support a military campaign—at a minimum, the Pentagon would expect permission to use CAOC—if the region cools off and Saddam refuses to admit weapons inspectors. But Saudi officials told Time that today the government is unlikely to offer even that much help. Says a Saudi official: "We can't have the U.S. military thinking that anytime they go to war Saudi Arabia is the command-and-control center."