Suddenly, Saudis May Have to Dance to Iraq’s Tune

Saudi Arabia, the petroleum powerhouse that for years has dominated policy-making within the Middle East, suddenly may have to answer to Iraq in everything from oil pricing and production policies to foreign relations--with or without any new military aggression by the Iraqis, regional experts fear.

Saudi officials are said to be “shocked,” according to one source, by reports that Iraqi troops are only 5 to 10 miles from Kuwait’s border with Saudi Arabia and that an Iraqi missile exploded Friday just inside Saudi territory. And they are uneasily awaiting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s next move.

“We live in a bad neighborhood,” one Saudi diplomat said.

Ironically, the desert monarchy finds itself in the difficult position of needing U.S. military assistance--its own forces are technologically resplendent but far outmatched numerically by Iraq’s--at the same time that an open request for military aid would present potential political problems at home.

Sources in Cairo said that Saudi Arabia, already facing criticism throughout an increasingly radicalized Arab world for its close ties to the United States, will be quietly encouraging Washington to offer military help rather than making a public plea.

“It’s not an opportune moment politically for the Saudis to be requesting a direct and public American military presence,” said one analyst, noting the wave of anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East that has helped fuel Hussein’s drive for dominance.

But he added: “If they’re really scared, of course, if they think disaster is imminent, they will make a deal with the devil.”

Nonetheless, even if Iraqi forces hold well short of the border, the Saudis--whose petro-dollars have for years quietly bought them unprecedented influence throughout the Middle East--may never again enjoy the kind of autonomy they exercised before Hussein’s brazen incursion, a variety of diplomats and analysts said.

“From now on, the Saudis will have to listen to him (Hussein), and they won’t be able to buy him,” one longtime diplomat in the region observed.

Said another: “Obviously, what Iraq has done in Kuwait is a big sign to all the Arab gulf states--and the Saudis especially--that Iraq means business. Are they in a position to dictate things like pricing and production to the Saudis? Their position looks pretty strong to me.”

Even before the invasion, Iraq’s tough talk against Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates was a factor in persuading the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to raise the target price on crude oil to $21 a barrel, analysts say. The Saudis, sitting on a huge oil reserve, have always been interested in holding prices relatively low in order to encourage long-term Western consumption of petroleum.

“If (Hussein) gets away with this,” Geoffrey Kemp of Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in an interview, “then clearly he’s achieved dominance of the OPEC pricing mechanism, and secondly, the . . . (failure) of the Arab League to do anything about Kuwait is an awful precedent for the Saudis.”

The Saudis, said one official in Egypt, are now going to have to “jump” to Iraq’s whims on oil pricing, “and probably foreign policy as well. It’s going to be harder for them to take an independent course.”

Most officials in the region said they were skeptical that Iraq would actually invade Saudi Arabia, a move that many analysts said would almost certainly put it at war with the United States.

“The Saudis don’t think they would come this way,” said one diplomat. “But at the same time, it’s pretty clear that Saudi policy is being guided by the concern that if they adopt too high a profile, they may alter that calculus. They’re sure not going to do anything that would encourage” Iraq to invade Saudi Arabia.

On Friday, President Bush said in Washington that the United States would be “inclined to help in any way we possibly can” to protect Saudi Arabia.

“The integrity of Saudi Arabia, its freedom, are very, very important to the United States,” Bush declared. Meanwhile, State Department officials confirmed that Iraqi troops were positioned 5 to 10 miles from the Saudi border.

With billions of dollars in oil reserves--the source of 15% of the U.S. oil supply--and a regime that has been comfortably aligned with the West for years, analysts say it is easy to forget that Saudi Arabia has forged many of its friendships because of its own strategic vulnerability.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia can be expected to have a “major security problem,” Harvard University Middle East specialist Nadav Safran wrote in a recent treatise on the subject.

He cited as contributing factors the vastness of its desert territory, the fact that nearly all of its imports flow through two bottlenecks in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and its location surrounded by countries that are, in Safran’s view, “too strong or too weak: the former threaten aggression and the latter invite it, especially since several of both are also extremely rich.”

Moreover, the regime of Saudi King Fahd has been buffeted in recent years by opposition from pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim extremists, as well as from an increasingly restive middle class that has become disillusioned with the downturn in the regime’s largesse that accompanied slumping oil prices in the mid-1980s.

All of this, analysts say, has prompted Fahd to consider carefully the impact of his foreign policy moves on public opinion at home.

“By and large the monarchy is fairly strong, but I think a major faux pas right now could create problems for them,” one analyst said. “They don’t want to make it seem internally as if they’ve become too dependent on the U.S.”