Saudi – Page 2 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

The Palestinian agreement; the Saudis’ new stance

Please, please, please– let’s hope that this time the Fateh-Hamas agreement can be made to stick, and the hard-pressed people of the Occupied Palestinian Territories be relieved of the economic strangulation and internal conflict to which they have been subject for far too long now!!
Here is the account in Arabic-language Al-Hayat of the agreement that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, concluded on Thursday evening in Mecca.
That account includes the text of the “Mecca Declaration” concluded there, and also the text of the “letter of appointment” handed by Abbas to the (Hamas) PA Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh. This latter text included this:

“I call on you to be committed to the higher interests of the Palestinian people and to the preservation of its rights, and to work to realize them on the basis of the decisions of the Palestinian National Council, the Basic Laws, the document of national agreement, and the decisions of the Arab summits. And on that basis I call on you to respect the decisions of international legitimacy and the agreements that the PLO signed.”

Presumably, by accepting that letter, Haniyeh was agreeing to form his new government on that basis.
The Hayat reporters there in Mecca write that the parties agreed that Fateh will get six ministers in the new National Unity Government, Hamas will get nine, and the rest– including the all-important Interior Minister– will all be independents.
In this account, Al-Jazeera English gives this (still incomplete) list of portfolios:

There is much more to say about this agreement than I have time to write here. I am not sure if it will “open the door” for whatever limp Palestinian-Israeli “diplomatic initiative” Condi Rice might be cooking up for later this month… At first blush, it would seem not to.
But for Palestinians living under horrendous conditions of international siege and threatened internal fitna (internal collapse/ civil war) inside the OPTs, that probably is not the first order of business. For them, the most urgent priorities are to ward off the fitna and to find a way to reopen the channels to the external aid that Israel’s inhumane economic siege has forced them to be reliant on.
This agreement– which was concluded under the direct auspices of both the Saudi King Abdullah ibn Abdel-Aziz and his Crown Prince, Sultan Ibn Abdel-Aziz– holds considerable promise of meeting both those goals to a significant extent.
Presumably, now, the Saudis have also undertaken to “underwrite” the process of intra-Palestinian reconciliation that they have so prominently brokered, by assuring the Palestinian parties– and the new government, which will be formed very soon– of the Kingdom’s financial support.
That is a new situation.
In brokering this deal, King Abdullah has moved decisively beyond the limits of the behavior toward the Palestinians– and Hamas, in particular– that the US has been seeking to impose on all members of the international community.
That is presumably why he felt he needed also to associate his Crown Prince with this action, as well.
(All this certainly underscores what I was writing here yesterday about the Saudis’ current stance on regional affairs.)
The reactions of the US and Israel to the deal have been notably frosty.
But what are the Americans going to be able to do about King Abdullah’s naughty transgression? I really don’t think they’re in a position to do very much at all. The Israelis may well try to block Saudi aid getting into the OPTs, or take other actions to block the implementation of the initiative… And the US and Israel may try to continue to support acts by rogue members of the notoriously ill-disciplined Fateh security services that are aimed at keeping the pot of internal tensions at boiling point. But given the near-unanimous jubilation with which the Palestinian greeted the news of the Mecca Declaration, any such rogue agents may have a hard time putting together their networks or building a following.
(Note that deeply embedded racism in that BBC account I linked to above. Though the text of the piece gives quite a lot of detail about the “jubilant scenes” that greeted the announcement of the agreement in Gaza, the headline says stiffly “Muted response to Mecca agreement”– as though the only “response” that actually counts is that of Israel and the United States!)
Anyway, for more on the jubilation in Gaza, see this account from Al-Jazeera English.

Battle for the soul of the Saud family’s kingdom

I think Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world named after a single family? [Subsequent correction: More precisely: SA is one of two countries currently named for their ruling families, with the other being the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (Same general point about the importance of “family” relations to politics and governance. But thanks to Jefferson for pointing this out.) ~HC.] And now, a battle “royal” is being waged in Saudi Arabia for the ear of King Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz– and indeed over the entire direction of the country’s policies.
On one side: Abdullah’s nephew the former ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar ibn Sultan ibn Abdul-Aziz– and presumably also Bandar’s father Crown Prince Sultan, Sultan’s other sons, and perhaps also most of Sultan’s full brothers from the “Sudairi” wife of the notable (very) late King Abdul-Aziz al-Saud.
On the other: another nephew, recently departed ambassador to Washington Prince Turki ibn Faisal ibn Abdul-Aziz, along with his brother the ailing Foreign Minister Prince Saud ibn Faisal, and other sons of the late King Faisal (but presumably not Faisal’s daughter Haifa who is married to Bandar.)
The core issue being disputed: should the Kingdom align itself with the US and Israel, in particular, in an attempt to roll back a large perceived expansion of Syrian and Iranian power in the region (the position that, reports from several experienced observers agree, is being espoused by Bandar’s group)? Or, should it continue to pursue the discreet alliance with Syria that has long been a hallmark of Saudi diplomacy while also continuing to, at the very least, pursue normal diplomatic relations with Iran (the position reportedly espoused by Turki’s group)?
It is this dispute, and a lot of related skulduggery by, in particular, Bandar that apparently lies behind Turki’s recent, extremely hasty departure from Washington.
After all, why should Turki, an experienced player in the world of international affairs, have abandoned his post in DC so very precipitously unless it was to attend to affairs of state of the most serious nature conceivable, back home in Riyadh?
That is, to battle over the ear of the monarch.
(Turki’s people had said, when he left town so fast back on Dec. 11, that it was “for family reasons.” Yes– but then “family” in that family-ruled country can mean a vast array of things.)
For many decades, back when he was Crown Prince– and even before that, as head of the Kingdom’s tribe-based National Guard– Abdullah was a key and faithful supporter of maintaining a good working relationship with the Asad family rulers of Syria.
For his part, Bandar has a long history– dating at least back to the days of the Reagan administration’s support of the Nicaraguan Contras– of working alongside US and Israeli intelligence operatives in pursuit of covert operations… And some recent reports say he is doing that again: working with, in particular, Dick Cheney and people in his (extremely pro-Israeli) entourage to support various operations aimed at undermining or even toppling the Asad regime in Syria.
Robin Wright has an article in today’s WaPo in which she reports that Bandar had been sneaking back into DC in recent weeks for secretive meetings with Cheney and his people– and doing so without telling his cousin, Turki, while Turki was still the ambassador here.
Not known right now: the degree to which King Abdullah knew of and supported Bandar’s goings-on.
In “normal” times the 82-year-old Abdullah would most likely have happily left the conduct of most of the Kingdom’s foreign affairs to his Foreign Minister, Prince Saud. But now is not normal times. Iraq is falling apart. Some figures in the Kingdom have been warning of a huge explosion of Iranian influence in the region– including also in the Kingdom’s eastern province, where there is large concentration of Shiites. Al-Qaeda, which threatens the Sauds from a very different direction indeed, has been able to re-group in significant pockets in Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Prince Saud has been reported as very sick. Cheney and his people have been eagerly whispering in Abdullah’s ear… And Crown Prince Sultan– who at 78 is no spring chicken, either– has also been eager to have his say.
More so than most states in today’s Middle East, “Saudi” Arabia has been a continuing construct of international diplomacy. So what is apparently happening there now is not only about whether Cheney and his Israeli friends will succeed in winning substantial support from the Kingdom in their plots and plans against Syria. It is not only– as some have thought— about whether the Kingdom intervenes robustly to prop up the Sunnis of Iraq. It is also, centrally, about the “soul” of the Saudi kingdom itself.

Saudi ‘Mystique’ alive and still writing

The Saudi woman blogger ‘Mystique’ left a comment on JWN yesterday pointing out that the reason her earlier blog was down for a while was

because I sort of lost my anonymity to only one person. & this alone made me stop blogging, here in Saudi it is very difficult to write freely so imagine if I no longer have the privilege to remain anonymous..

But she’s put her blog back up with a new URL, and if you go there you can see some of her very interesting commentary on her life and on the society in which she lives. This new blog seems to contain the archives of her old blog (which originally had a different URL) back to March 2006– perhaps complete, perhaps not.
But the new blog also, sadly, contains this “farewell” from Mystique as a blogger, posted November 20.
I think that what likely caused all this turmoil in M’s life as a blogger was this November 12 article on Saudi bloggers, in which the WaPo’s Saudi reporter Faiza Saleh Ambah described her encounter with Mystique in these terms:

When the woman who blogs anonymously under the name Mystique finally shows up for an appointment at Starbucks on trendy Tahlia Street, she seems used to causing a stir. Heads turn when the 23-year-old walks into the coffee shop minus the mandatory head scarf worn by most Saudi women, her caramel-colored hair cascading past her shoulders. She is wearing a black cloak with a shiny copper-colored print on the sleeve, a black Prada purse slung over her shoulder.

And thus, I suspect, the woman who has successfully kept her anonymity as a blogger for several months now, was rudely “outed” by a journalist eager for a “good”, i.e. salacious, story. [Addendum, Dec. 14: Please note that below, ‘Mystique’ herself comments that, “I broke Mystique’s anonymity once I told one ex colleague of mine about my blog, and since that day I can’t write like before, I feel I am watched and being monitored by her.” Therefore my supposition that it was Faiza Ambah who had “outed” M through her description now clearly seems misplaced. Apologies to Ms. Ambah. ~HC]
In the WaPo story, Ambah makes it seem as though the first thing Mystique wants to talk about, the very moment they meet, is sex. In this very pained post that Mystique put up on her blog the next day, she wrote:

I did not sit down and immediately start talking about sex or when I got in touch with my sexuality.

Anyway, I’ve now gone and read a few of the posts on Mystique’s reconstructed blog. Certainly, not all of them are about sensual relations (and the sensuality in those that are is expressed only in a very indirect way.)
I found this poem, that she posted on November 16, particularly touching. It’s about a flock of beggar children in her home-town, Jeddah. Yes, beggar children in Saudi Arabia. How many other people write about that??
So anyway, in her “farewell” post there she assures us, “I won’t stop writing, I promise.” (And she quotes a couple of beautiful lines from the great palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.)
… Just a couple of quick final notes on the Mystique story. Firstly, Mystique, I’m delighted you came to JWN and left a comment here– especially since it included the link to your reconstructed blog.
Secondly, in response to the discovery that Mystique’s original blog had been taken down after the WaPo piece came out, our sometimes overheated commenter, Vadim, wrote here about Saudi Arabia, “Does it concern you in the least that one of their female bloggers may face imprisonment, torture or death merely for expressing her thoughts online?” I later described that as a “silly exaggeration” that seemed intended only to whip up additional Islamophobia in western society.
(I also wrote, “The rights infractions that do happen in Saudi Arabia are bad enough without you propagating completely baseless scare stories like this one.”)
So anyway, I’m glad that we have, to a certain extent, cleared that one up and established that Mystique has apparently been neither imprisoned, nor tortured, nor killed as a result of her blogging..
Finally: My very best wishes to Mystique in her new writing ventures. I hope we can all enjoy the results– online, or on paper– sometime soon!
Addendum, 8:30 p.m. 11/28: Soon after I published this on my blog, Mystique’s reconstructed site also came down off Blogger. So I did a “cache” search on Google for the distinctive term she used in her URL there and got successfully to the cached version of the main page of her blog. I copied the banner there and the first three or four entries into this file, so that JWN’s readers can read that small sampling of her work. (It includes the farewell post, the post about the WaPo, and the poem about child beggars.)
I am, of course, sorry that Mystique took down even the reconstruction of her blog, as that means I’m now unable to explore most of it any further. But it was very plucky and resourceful fo her to have put it back up again, even if for only a few days there. And at least it gave her the chance to say “farewell” to her readers. I for one return the hope that she fares well in her new ventures.

King Fahd RIP

So they finally turned off the life-support systems for King Fahd. But not until the man formerly known as Crown Prince (now “King”) Abdullah had gotten a few of his ducks into a row by putting his own person (Prince Turki bin Faisal) into the ambassadorial post in DC, etc.
Abdullah is 81. The new “Crown Prince”, as expected, is Sultan bin Abdel-Aziz, 77. There’s a bunch more sons of Abdel-Aziz who could stake their own claims to the throne in turn… But the “rising stars” of the next generation are already in their mid-to-late 60s; and I would imagine they’re probably getting even more impatient than Britain’s Prince Charles.
The succession system is so complex for two reasons: (1) Abdel-Aziz and many other Saudi “princes” have always had a truly dynastic/political view of marriage and childbearing. Abdel-Aziz married scores of times, taking wives from different tribes and different parts of the kingdom in an attempt to lock all those families and regions into his political system. (Also, to indulge himself.)
And (2), the Saudis don’t have a system of primogeniture; plus, the ruling “kings” haven’t done a very good job of having all their younger brothers and half-brothers murdered to ensure that power sticks in their own immediate line. (Please note that I am not actually advocating interpersonal violence here. This is simply a reference to a famous episode in British royal history.)
I’ve learned a bunch of stuff about Abdullah over the years, but I don’t really know what to conclude about the “political prospects” raised by his succession at this point. In a very real sense, the Saudis’ bizarre system of rule by massive oil-rent payola allied to Wahhabism is in deep, deep trouble right now anyway, regardless of which extremely aged “prince” takes over.
I was, however, disturbed to learn from this AP story that, “Abdullah has married more than 30 times and usually keeps four wives at a time, as allowed by Muslim law.”
My God, it’s pathetic. In this day and age??? That there’s someone coming into power there who still thinks of women only as chattels, sexual playthings, and vessels for his projects of dynastic reproduction?
It occurs to me that the Saudi “princes”, as a whole, have ways too much disposable income. (Like all their good friends in the US oil industry.) All very depressing…

The Saudi government pays money for this?

Every so often, I get an email from someone called “halah@qorvis.com”. Since I vaguely remember that these are press releases from the Saudi Embassy in DC, I usually delete them just as fast as I delete all the other junk that comes into my in-box.
Today, I decided to open it. It contained just under 600 words of totally useless, non-newsworthy garbage. Interesting only faintly, in its capacity as providing a teeny window into what it is that someone at Qorvis Communications Inc., the p.r. agency hired by the Saudi Embassy, thinks it is that people might want to be hearing from the Saudis these days.
I reproduce the email in its entirety (and lightly annotated by yours truly) below.
So after opening the email I decided to refresh myself as to what this deal is that the Qorvis Corporation has with the Saudis. There’s a lot of interesting information out there on the topic.
Including this, from the WaPo last December, which says:

The FBI searched three offices of the PR firm Qorvis Communications and delivered subpoenas to a fourth office. Officials confirmed the raids but refused further comment, saying there was an “ongoing investigation.” Saudi Arabia is a major Qorvis client; the firm called the investigation a “compliance inquiry” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department found that “the Saudi Arabian Embassy paid Qorvis $14.6 million for a six-month period,” for such services as distributing material highlighting Saudi Arabia’s “commitment in the war against terrorism and to peace in the Middle East.”

$14.6 million? That’s, um, around $2.43 million a month…
A part of me feels really sorry for the Saudis. They’re shelling out $2.43 million a month to this “Qorvis Communications”, and they get rubbish like this in response? (See text of press release, below.)
It reminds me of those extremely unfortunate American Indian tribes, newly very rich with casino profits, who have recently been taken majorly for a ride by various Washington DC shysters. Except that the Saudis are not “newly” rich… They’ve had plenty of time to realize they need to protect themselves from the Gucci-loafered shysters of Washington’s K Street.
Look, let’s lay aside morality for one small moment, and look at this question purely on technical grounds. Do you know who was the best foreign “operator” in the past quarter-century in Washington DC, in the city’s own sleazy terms of influence-peddling, schmoozing, and generally getting ahead?
No question but that it was the late Nizar Hamdoun, who through the 1980s was Iraq’s Ambassador to Washington and had the somewhat unenviable task of trying to “sell” Iraq to a generally very hostile crowd there.
Hamdoun, an extremely canny and fairly charming person, knew how to take a bad case and a big budget and make the budget work for him. He courted everyone, right across the political spectrum, with small dinners, semi-open policy round-tables, and plenty of dosh to throw around. I think he even succeeded in persuading Danny Pipes and Laurie Mylroie to go to Baghdad for a “high-level briefing”, after which those two came back to DC to advocate for an audacious new pipeline scheme that Saddam was trying to organize.
(The pipeline would have gone down to Aqaba, Jordan, but crucially it was thought to require a guarantee from the Israelis that they wouldn’t bomb it before the investors would shell out the money… The appropriately named “Pipes” helped the Iraqis to get Israel’s Shimon Peres involved in the scheme. It was 1985. The plan went nowhere– though intriguingly, a very similar plan is now being peddled once again… Of course, shortly after 1985, both Pipes and Mylroie turned against Saddam in a big, big way. That development had something of the psychology of a major love-affair that all went bitterly wrong…)
Anyway, the man who brought it all together in DC for Saddam’s regime in those days was Nizar Hamdoun. And yes, “bringing it all together” certainly also included those visits that Donald Rumsfeld was making to Baghdad at exactly the time that Saddam was busy using chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds…
Hamdoun died of leukemia a few years ago. But not until after many, many of his high-ranking American friends had intervened to try to get him to high-end doctors in New York, etc.
Yes, he was, from a purely technical point of view, an outstandingly “capable” diplomat.
And now, there are the Saudis…
I invite you to enjoy with me the idiocy, the sheer, breathtaking vacuity, and the near-total nullity that characterize the press release that Qoprvis Communications sent me today:

Continue reading “The Saudi government pays money for this?”

Saudi instability, contd.

I am not the only person judging (as I did in this recent post) that Saudi Arabia may well be on the verge of a major breakdown. Today, during a meeting of many other Middle East specialists whom I respect, I heard serious discussion of planning for the contingency of a “civil war” in the Kingdom.
Well done, George W. Bush!! (Irony alert there.) Within just the past 18 months your policies have transformed Iraq into a land of brigandage and rampant insecurity, and a place of refuge for many terrorists and other criminals; and your inattention to what’s been going on in Saudi Arabia means there’s a growing chance that it will now go the same way, too.
I am not actually a supporter of any nation having military bases outside its own borders. (Or inside, come to that: look at demilitarized Costa Rica. But that’s a different story.) But I do note that for many years right through to 2003, the Kingdom’s major defense posture depended heavily on the presence of some 7,000-10,000 US military people.
In April 2003, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, still cock-a-hoop in the wake of the “victory” in Iraq, announced it would withdraw nearly all the US military from Saudi. According to this April 30, 2003 report in the Chicago Tribune:

[!!, ~HC]

Continue reading “Saudi instability, contd.”

Saudi implosion?

How worried should we all be about the implosion of state authority in Saudi Arabia? Personally, I think we should all be very worried indeed:

The Saudi authorities have been trying since last Saturday to locate kidnaped American helicopter technician Paul Johnson, without success. On Tuesday, his kidnappers issued that grisly video showing him quaking in fear while his captors spelled out their intention to murder him Friday if the Saudi authorities don’t release a list of Qaeda prisoners.
This, coming in the wake of the past two months’ bombings against residential compounds housing foreign contractors, and other anti-foreigner actions in the Kingdom
Not surprisingly, foreign contract workers have been leaving the Kingdom in droves. In an evident vicious-cycle effect, this exodus is itself impacting the Kingdom’s ability to provide/ensure basic public security, given the large role foreign contractors play in supervising essential elements of the internal-security system.

Regarding the role of foreign contractors in the Kingdom’s security system, the Global Security website has a November 2003 analysis of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), the component of the Saudi security system long headed by and loyal to the country’s effective ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz. This analysis spells out that:

Continue reading “Saudi implosion?”

Aging gracefully…

I’m on a cross-US plane, traveling home to Virginia after a poignant visit with my 96-year-old
mother-in-law, who lives in a small town in northern California. Being
with Granny and seeing her struggling to deal with her daily routine put me
in mind of two other older people elsewhere in the world who are going through
their own versions of these tough struggles of age-related infirmity– but
under situations where:

they are both the nominal heads of significant polities that have no
formal provision for head-of-state retirement,
each is surrounded by a tightknit conservative coterie of men who have
an interest in keeping him at some visible level of human functioning, and
each of these coteries can be presumed to have access to all the very
latest in life-elongation technology.

I am referring to the Pope, and to Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd.

Almost as soon as I started composing the above description of the situation
these two men find themselves in I found myself feeling sorry for them. I’m
assuming, in both cases, that there’s a strong likelihood that the ruler in
question may well have passed the stage of brain/physical decay at which he
loses the ability to make his own wishes known even if they’re in defiance
of the wishes of his advisors.

In both cases, the man’s advisors
seem to evince an all-too-evident desire to keep some some minimally credible
biological simulacrum of the old ruler alive. And in both cases, the
old man’s age-related decline seems to have progressed beyond the point where
we could expect him to be able to summon the guile, the planning ability,
and the implementing ability that would be needed to effect an end run around
the advisors.

So I see both these old guys as, effectively, the captives of their advisors’
designs for the polity. Which may well not be–indeed, probably isn’t–at
all the same thing as the best interest of the aging lion himself.

Continue reading “Aging gracefully…”

SAUDI LEADERSHIP ON LIFE SUPPORT:

SAUDI LEADERSHIP ON LIFE SUPPORT: Okay, call me a softie, but every so often I do feel sorry for those pampered little rich boys (and girls) called the Saudi royal family… The only family on the planet, by the way, to have a whole nation-state named after them. Well, maybe it’s something to do with them never having actually been forced to develop a work ethic, Protestant or otherwise. This idea that merely because of massive mineral wealth the rest of the world will come flocking to your doorstep looking for work or handouts.
But now, they’re in serious trouble.
As I see it, the trouble is this. The King, Fahd, has by common consent been almost completely out of it for (at least) the past eight years. But no-one’s had the decency to pull the plug on his many life-support systems, thus enabling a decent handover to the designated Crown Prince (and currently, the effective ruler), Abdullah.
Abdullah’s almost as geriatric as his elder half-brother, but has more of his wits about him.
So why hasn’t Abdullah or someone close to him pulled the plug on the old guy? Because they can’t figure out who, among the “senior royals” the NEXT Crown Prince (and therefore, the next in line to the throne) should be.
For the 30-plus years I’ve been watching the Saudi situation, it’s been assumed that next after Abdullah would come Sultan… And then, there’s a whole raft of further brothers and half-brothers– all of them the sons of the incredibly fecund King Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud.
But by all accounts Abdullah can’t stand Sultan. And I guess he’s unable to impose his own choice on the situation.
Then, beyond that, if this succession rule of continuing down the row of brothers and half-brothers to the very last surviving son of Abdul-Aziz carries on, that might take a further 25-30 years of Extremely Geriatric Rule in the Kingdom. I think the youngest son of A-A is now in his mid 60s? And then, every single advance known to medical science that prolongs the life of older people is available to the senior “citizens” in THIS particular family. We are talking, the cutting edge of human longevity there…
Which may not, alas, be the best thing for the many other citizens of that troubled land.
Actually, many senior members of the NEXT generation are now themselves looking incredibly aged. Saud Ibn Faisal looks older now than his father did at the time of his assassination in 1975. And the luster has really gone off Bandar Ibn Sultan’s once-polished public image…
But the problem is, once you do move down to this “next” generation– I’ll not say “younger”, because some of them aren’t– whose descendants win the big prize at that point??? Hah! It’s because the family hasn’t wanted to decide that question definitively at any point over the past decades that they’ve carried on with this brother-to-brother thing.
There is something to be said, maybe, for British-style rules of strict primogeniture. (If not necessarily for the quaint old British custom of a newly enthroned king having all his younger brothers strangled in their beds.)
But that marrying-and-begetting strategy that made so much political sense for old King Abdul-Aziz as he gamboled priapically around his kingdom in the early years of the 20th century marrying strategically– one wife from this family, one from that region, one from that city; tying the new in-laws into loyalty to the centralized state by virtue of their concern for the resultant joint offspring– well, it may have made sense back then. Now, 100 years later, the results look quite dysfunctional.
So here’s a startling idea. Instead of having a centralized monarchical system, how about making this nation-state–whatever it may end up being called; and maybe “Saudi” Arabia is as good a name as any–into a state of all of its citizens?? One in which the joys and perils of sovereignty are shared equally among all of its people??
So far, the commonly held view has been that “ruling” over Saudi Arabia is something that confers only huge benefits. Oh, in the form of family-held monopolies (including over a good chunk of state revenues).
Right now though, I bet that if I were a senior royal, I would see the position of being “King” as also one involving incredibly tricky and dangerous decisions.
So okay, Fahd and Abdullah– go ahead– share those risks around! Democratize!! Do (at last) what you’ve vaguely been promising to do for so long!!!
You’ve got to admit, democratizing would also get you all out of the bind of deciding which particular Saudi royal gets to be the next Crown Prince, and which branch of the family walks away with the “big prize” in the next generation. Looks like a win-win situation to me. Or am I missing something?