NEWS ANALYSIS : Who’s Hot, Who’s Not in Saudi Political Circles : Arab relations: The key determinant was taking sides in the Gulf conflict--and who has cash.

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd has declared an informal media truce for the holy month of Ramadan, making it a little tougher--but not much--to determine who’s on the royal blacklist in Riyadh.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is No. 1, of course. He went down blazing under Operation Desert Storm, ridiculing Fahd, his ruling neighbor, as an Arab Hessian, a political dwarf unfit to be steward of Islam’s holiest places. This is not the kind of talk, even given Arabic rhetoric, that earns an invitation to the next feast.

But President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran--which engaged the Saudis in a long-running, gutter-level dispute on the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca--is off the list again. Diplomatic relations have been restored.

Who’s hot and who’s not in postwar politics depends on the beholder.

But the key determinant was taking sides in the Persian Gulf conflict or, in Iran’s case, sitting neutral.

The Saudi point of view is instructive.

In Riyadh, the Jordanians, Yemenis, Yasser Arafat and some of the North African states are out. That’s important because the Saudis call the political shots in the Gulf, and the politics of the Gulf is money.

If you’re out, you’re probably short of cash. Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization has not received the proceeds of a 5% PLO tax levied in the Gulf since the crisis began. The Saudis turned off an oil pipeline to Jordan in September. Henceforth, charity will begin at home in the Gulf. Read the bottom line.

Yemen, an uneasy neighbor locked in mutual dependency through labor exported to the kingdom, has received some hard knocks from Riyadh.

Prince Sultan ibn Abdulaziz, the defense minister, lit into Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh last week.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regards the Yemeni people as a brotherly people,” he said. “Although the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh adopted a deviant attitude toward the invasion of Kuwait, that position does not represent the view of the Yemeni majority. What makes us bitter about the position of Ali Abdullah Saleh is the fact that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia helped bring Ali Abdullah Saleh to the presidency despite the opposition of our Yemeni friends.”

Take note, President Saleh.

But all this pales in comparison to the reversal on Iran. The hajj dispute was a bitter, angry confrontation, grounded in blood. Violent demonstrations by Iranian pilgrims, and equally violent Saudi suppression, had led to pilgrim quotas and an Iranian boycott of Islam’s most reverential duty, the trip to Mecca.

“We in Saudi Arabia know the real reasons behind these aggressive policies, deep-rooted in the souls of the mob in charge in Iran,” the official Saudi press agency said at the height of the confrontation.

Now the dispute has been settled in the amicable postwar atmosphere enveloping Iran and the Gulf states. What happened to the sound and fury on an issue of deep principle?

Remarked the London-based Palestinian daily Al Quds al Arabi:

“Many Iranians must be puzzled when they recall Ayatollah (Ruhollah) Khomeini’s famous speech in which he said he might be able to forgive Saddam one day but would never forgive the House of Saud. . . . It seems President Rafsanjani is prepared to forgive and forget and make all the concessions required by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. after he succeeded in turning the Islamic revolution into just another regime, like any other, with no regard for the revolutionary values it championed at its inception.”

Leave it to the down-to-earth Egyptians to point out, in a separate matter, that the principle of Arab brotherhood may have been a casualty of war. Columnist Said Sonbol of the newspaper Al Akhbar drove it home:

“Some of us are angry because American and British firms have swallowed the large Kuwaiti cake, leaving us only the crumbs” of reconstruction contracts. “Not a single Egyptian official made the effort to go to Taif (the seat of the Kuwait government in Saudi exile). . . . To those who are angry and disappointed, I say that the age in which we live is an age governed by interests, rather than by principles and slogans. It is an age governed by mutual benefits rather than feelings.”

The most bewildered entrant on the Saudi list is Jordan, whose king and officials misread the critical angle of political tilt in the Gulf crisis.

King Hussein, who has given his country the Arab world’s most far-reaching experiment in democracy, trekked to Damascus last Monday for his first direct talks with Syrian President Hafez Assad in nearly a year.

It was time for fence-mending with an Arab strongman who backed the Saudi side on Kuwait. Al Dustour, a pro-Iraqi Jordanian newspaper during the war, called the king’s trip “a qualitative step on the road to restoring Arab solidarity.”