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Does Prince Saud mean it, or was the statement made in pique? Credibility, these days, is a central issue between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Republican Senator Richard Shelby, former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, says he sees the Saudis taking positive steps since May 12 but notes, "If history is a judge, I don't know how long the intensity of their effort will last."
For many in the U.S., including in the halls of government, patience with the Saudis is running thin. "More and more people are saying, 'It's time to sit on the Saudis; it's time to hit them hard,'" says a State Department official. Frank Gaffney, a conservative foreign-policy analyst, has some ideas on how to do that: "You put them on notice that this kind of behavior is completely unacceptable. You can break off diplomatic relations, you can impose economic sanctions, and you have, ultimately, the option of seizing the oil fields militarily if you have to."
That's easy to advocate when you're not in office. The hard-liners in the Bush Administration, most of them neoconservatives, would like to put greater pressure on the Saudis to reform, but they don't go so far as to propose regime change. The fall of the House of Saud is too scary to contemplate, because any alternative regime would probably be more regressive. It's one measure of the essential conservatism of the Saudi people that their country, despite the lack of freedom, produces very few political refugees. By Saudi standards, the Saud regime is liberal. "If you want to marginalize the Saudis, cut them off and turn your back on them, you are simply inviting another Taliban type of regime," says Ambassador Jordan.
For that reason, it seems unlikely that the Bush Administration will adopt a tougher policy toward Riyadh. While the neocons have won most of the internal debates so far in this Administration, this time they are fighting without their powerful godfather, Vice President Dick Cheney, on board. Cheney's pragmatism on Saudi Arabia is informed by his experience as an official in the Nixon Administration in 1973, when the Saudis protested U.S. support for Israel by embargoing oil sales to the U.S. for five months, causing the worst gasoline shortages in U.S. history. From Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and, significantly, his father, President Bush is hearing a singular line from his most important foreign policy advisers: that he must engage with the Saudis, work with them to bring about change and not alienate them. Indeed, when President Bush spoke to Abdullah for 20 minutes by phone last week, say U.S. and Saudi sources, he went out of his way to compliment the Prince on Saudi Arabia's efforts to combat terrorism. --With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Eric Roston, Elaine Shannon, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/Washington; Amanda Bower/New York; Bruce Crumley/Paris; Gorill Husby/Dar es Salaam; Andrew Perrin/Bangkok; Andrew Purvis/Sarajevo; and Christopher Shulgan and Leigh Anne Williams/Toronto