One of the side benefits the Bush administration hoped to achieve in occupying Iraq was the removal of a major irritant in U.S.-Saudi relations.
Closing huge U.S. bases next door in Saudi Arabia, it was said, would allow the royal family to co-exist more smoothly and more easily with the mosque. The Saudis had been appealing for more than a year for the United States to leave as threats from the Islamic Wahhabi sect continued to build.
So, the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing said goodbye and good riddance to the scorpion-riddled Prince Sultan Air Base last year. It had been home to about 60,000 coalition troops during the past seven years and was turned back over to Saudi Arabia with great expectations.
Saudi Arabia had been the command-and-control point for the first Gulf War. That provided Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization with the big grievance it needed to launch an anti-American jihad - "the infidel" was on sacred soil.
The administration had hoped that getting out would defuse the radical Wahhabi sect of the remnants of al-Qaida that Osama left behind. So far, the effect of all this grand strategic maneuvering hasn't amounted to beans. Saudi Arabia is even more of a problem than it was when the Iraqi buildup began a year ago. In fact, it may be the most worrisome nation on Earth.
If anything, the Wahhabi sect seems to be growing in power and influence in the homeland of the Sept. 11 terrorists.
The current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine carries an analysis by one of America's leading Near East scholars, Princeton's Michael Scott Doran, which paints a far more complex relationship between the Saudi royal family and al-Qaida than has been portrayed elsewhere.
Doran believes that the oil-rich Saudi state has become a "fragmented entity" in which Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother, Prince Nayef, the interior minister, are locked in a "visibly tense" struggle for supremacy.
Abdullah is pro-Western, by and large. But Nayef, who controls the secret police, has ties to al-Qaida and "takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al-Qaida," Doran writes.
How close Nayef might be to the Saudi throne is impossible to say. Doran thinks neither Nayef nor his brother has enough power at the moment to succeed King Fahd, who had a stroke.
What is striking, however, is what little effect the massive U.S. show of force next door in Iraq has had on the Saudi situation. Shock and awe did not shock anyone across the border. The terrorist bombings that occurred inside Iraq last year at U.S. and other foreign compounds were followed by arrests of local al-Qaida suspects. But the anti-American and anti-Semitic fulminations of the radical Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia have intensified.
Furthermore, according to Doran, Shiite Muslims in Iraq have now become part of the general Wahhabi enemies list along with Jews and Americans.
It wouldn't be accurate to call Prince Nayef the political leader of this movement. He even went through the motion of leading an investigation of the suicide bombings. The crackdown in Riyadh drew Washington's praise, and hope rose in official circles that the Saudis were becoming friendly partners again.
But the forces he controls are plainly not the Enlightenment. According to one account, religious police under his control tried to beat schoolgirls as they tried to get help for girls trapped in a burning dormitory. Why? Because the schoolgirls were not covered in proper Islamic garb.
Corruption on the local level seems rampant, and the mosque is said to be more radicalized and hardened in its hatreds than ever.
Nayef controls the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which enforces the laws on public decency, and is a zealous defender of Wahhabi Puritanism and the doctrine of Tawhid that ensures a political role for its hate-filled clerics.
"Getting Riyadh to divorce itself from radical Wahhabism will be as great a task as getting the Soviet Union to renounce communism," Doran says.
It is not a happy prospect to begin the new year.
John Hall is senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. E-mail jhall@mediageneral.com
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