NewsMax.com
Friday, June 18, 2004

NM: Is there is a war of succession on in Saudi Arabia, and what is the danger to the oil industry/its workers?

Story Continues Below

Ijaz: There is a war of succession going on inside the ruling family, but that has very little to do with terrorist influences.

No Saudi with responsibility for the affairs of state at any level could rationally support the instigation of or support for terrorist acts that would benefit one side of the succession struggle over another.

The recent attacks against economic infrastructure (i.e., foreign workers who run vital oil installations) was designed as an attack against western interests, not the House of Saud.

The idea was to drive the perception of risk premium higher, and therefore oil prices higher, not to point out how lax kingdom security is or how lacksadaisical Saudi police forces are in combatting terrorist threats internally.

We know that already. Nothing new in revealing the internal failures of Saudi security.

The real concern about Saudi oil production has to be aimed at whether foreign oil companies are willing to let there citizens live permanently in harm's way.

My view is that one more attack of a significant nature against people instead of assets, and you have a debilitating mass exodus of foreign workers from the kingdom.

That would damage Saudi oil production more than any explosion of an oil refinery, loading terminal or series of oil field wellheads.

Interestingly, most people don't realize how deep the bench is in running those oil fields, and how many Saudi nationals are well-trained to pick up the slack if there was a large-scale exodus required or imposed on foreign workers.

NM: Is Saudi Arabia the world's second most secretive, repressed and contolled society?

Ijaz: Saudi Arabia has a unique culture and a people who feel tasked with a responsibility of promoting and preserving the original state of a great religion.

What we are witnessing today is the corruption of that responsibility by radicalized elements that I believe even the hardest line elements of the ruling family now realize have gone so far overboard that course corrections of a more meaningful nature are justified.

The real problem is that we in the West have (rightly) become so critical of the Saudis that we have impaired their ability to execute course corrections.

The more we bang on their heads for reform, the less the elements that want reform can respond because it appears they are pandering to U.S. interests (or worse, to the Judaic influences within U.S. society).

I think the Saudi leaders, Crown Prince Abdullah in particular, have gotten the message. They have to clean up their mess because it not only threatens them, but threatens long-term stability in their neighborhood by forcing western countries to look elsewhere for stability.

You will see a much different response from Saudi security institutions in the coming months and years as they are instructed to hold no punches in rooting out the cells and stopping resource allocation to al-Qaeda affiliates through religious institutions.

We have to give them the space to let this process take hold on its own - to do otherwise is to compromise our own security. And we have to live with the reality that democracy in our eyes will never be the democracy they practice over there.

But maybe our respect for their willingness to clean up their own mess will one day give way to a much greater degree of transparency and individual participation / emancipation in the state's affairs, and to the gradual elimination of the razon d'etre for radicalism.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

War on Terrorism