Horde of Strangers Hardly Touched Culture of Saudis : Kingdom: Many had believed Gulf War influx would nourish seeds of social reform, but impact was minimal.

When thousands of American and other foreign troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia a year ago, many journalists and Middle East specialists predicted that the conservative desert kingdom would never be the same again.

Some even warned of “Bangkok-ization” of the Muslim Holy Land, home of the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. No land, no matter how pure in faith, they argued, could resist the seductive, liberalizing, corrupting influence of 541,000 Marines, sailors, fliers and soldiers descending on its soil--not to mention the effects of 2,300 Western reporters nosing around.

The more socially conscious saw the foreign invasion of Saudi society as a chance to unveil long-latent tendencies for reform here. In particular, they hoped that the example of women soldiers, serving alongside their male colleagues to defend the kingdom against attack from Iraq, would loosen the ancient binds on Saudi women.

The much-publicized “drive-in” protest demonstration by Saudi women in the capital city of Riyadh last November fueled their hopes. So did a petition for democratic reforms by a group of 43 progressive academic and business leaders in February.

A full year after the crisis began, most foreign troops--who once numbered more than the population of Wyoming--have departed. But Saudi Arabia appears remarkably untouched by the strangers in its strange land.

The women drivers are back at their jobs (thanks to the personal intervention by King Fahd), but not behind the wheel.

The progressive petitioners are mostly silent and nervous.

At least one moderate critic of the system claims to have been stripped of his job because of comments he made to Western reporters during the crisis.

The country’s ultra-religious morals police, the mutawah, patrol the shopping centers scolding women who have dropped their veils or exposed their hair.

Except for a few shops near military installations that sell leftover Desert Storm T-shirts and bumper stickers at bargain prices (“My Mom Served in Operation Desert Storm” or “I Brake for Scuds”), there is almost no sign that the large military operation ever happened here.

“The (cultural) impact of the troops was just about nil,” concluded a Western diplomat.

Saudi officials, diplomats and some of the few remaining foreign military officers here have several explanations why an anticipated cultural clash never occurred:

First, most foreign troops were strictly isolated from most Saudis. “This was probably the first war in history without war brides,” one diplomat remarked.

Second, after years of travel and exposure to the West through television, music and movies, Saudis are much more world-wise than many Westerners imagined.

Third, with its huge population of foreign workers (including many “Americanized” Filipinos) and Western technical advisers, Saudi Arabia was already accustomed to having thousands of foreigners in its midst.

Finally, there was one thing that few anticipated in the early days of the Gulf crisis. The decisive victory over Iraq and the subsequent elevation of Saudi Arabia’s status in the Arab world were quickly interpreted here as an endorsement of the Saudi system, not as a catalyst for reform.

Despite the presence of so many foreign troops, the victory over secular, “socialist” Iraq, was widely viewed as a victory for Saudi Islam and for the conservative monarchy that has ruled here since 1932.

Reforms--including the “consultative assembly” pledged by King Fahd last November--may be forthcoming, some think as early as January. Some diplomats in Riyadh said they expect a rare reordering of the Cabinet, composed entirely of princes in the royal family, sometime this fall.

But in the postwar glow, the pressure on the monarchy to institute reforms has, if anything, diminished.

“The war only proved that we were right in our economics and in our politics,” said Dr. Abdulmuhsin Akkas, an official with the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce. “It showed that slow but steady change is superior to upheavals.”

A senior civil servant commented: “Look at Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Two countries of great natural wealth, but Iraq, with its rivers and agriculture, with even more potential. On the one hand, Iraq, you had a radical republic--basically repressive, intolerant and destructive of its economy. Where did all its money go? On the other hand, you had Saudi Arabia, a conservative monarchy, but tolerant, integrative of its society, valuing stability and development with something to show for its average citizen.”

If not smugness, the war produced a sense of confidence in Saudi Arabia that the monarchy is on the right track.

That does not mean that pressures for change do not exist in the kingdom.

“Saudi Arabia is really undergoing real change,” said a diplomat in Riyadh. “But Americans flatter themselves if they think they provoked it. The change in Saudi Arabia is working on its own dynamic.”

Typical of the kinds of concerns felt by Saudis were those expressed in a conversation aboard an airplane by a 60-year-old oil field supervisor who had just retired from his work in the Eastern Province and was moving back to his ancestral home in Hail, in north central Saudi Arabia.

The man, riding in the first-class section on the flight between Dhahran and Riyadh, complained that government fees for driver’s licenses ($140), car registration ($300) and passports ($80) were too high. He griped that too many of the country’s estimated 4,000 royal princes (all descendants of the Saud clan) do not work for their money but simply wait for their allowances, then fritter the money away outside Saudi Arabia.

But his main concern was the disparity between government services in big cities and those in smaller cities and towns, like Hail. “We still have many villages without water,” he said. “Some of us who live in the country still have septic tanks.”

Most diplomatic observers believe that the war has bought extra time for King Fahd to implement reforms, including decentralizing authority from the royalty-dominated Riyadh government to the provinces, where cities and towns often lag far behind urban areas in development.

Opinions vary about how much time the king has before social pressures may force him to make promised changes. “Because of the way the war went,” one diplomat said, “I think he has a couple of months of goodwill left. But if, by Dec. 31, he has still not established a majlis al shura (consultative assembly), I think he will start feeling the heat again.”

A European diplomat predicted a more evolutionary process in the kingdom. “Saudi Arabia is the only big winner of the region,” he said. “As the big winner, the pressure for internal change diminished. Politically, it is very nearly the same for King Fahd as it is for George Bush. Because of his successes internationally, Bush can ignore some of his country’s domestic problems and not be hurt politically. I think King Fahd comes away from the war with the same feeling. I don’t think he will take the risk of imposing the majlis al shura until it is accepted by everyone. . . . “

Meanwhile, educated Saudi women, including those who participated in the “drive-in” demonstration on Riyadh streets last fall, have had their dreams of change delayed, if not destroyed. Despite the interest their plight provoked in the West, particularly after their dramatic attempt to win the right to drive in the kingdom, women’s rights are far down the list of expected reforms.

“We hoped there would be change,” said a young woman who works for an international organization office here. “We expected it. But unfortunately . . . nothing happened. If anything, things got worse. There was a crackdown.”

Much has been made of the absence of alcohol and the effect it had on the behavior of U.S. troops. But during the crisis, the insulation of American troops from Saudi society and vice versa could hardly have been more complete.

When possible, foreign troops were housed in isolated compounds or camps deep in the desert. Saudi Arabia’s impressive infrastructure and massive public housing projects made this easy. At one point in the crisis, for example, more than 17,000 American troops were billeted in Khobar Towers, a project of several dozen air-conditioned, seven-story public housing buildings near Dhahran.

The project, conveniently, was empty when the foreign troops arrived. Mess halls were installed in parking garages. Gymnasiums, movie theaters, post exchanges and a little local crafts-souvenir shopping center were set up. The compound even had its own radio station.

As a result, U.S. military personnel, already well briefed about the dangers lurking in the strange world outside (the briefings inevitably mentioned public executions and the severity of Islamic law), seldom left their housing area except to go to work and for an occasional meal at a hotel.

“We had 541,000 service members in this country and zero incidents,” said Lt. Gen. Gus Pagonis, the Army logistics specialist who commands U.S. forces still in the Gulf region.

A senior Saudi official--responsible for the industrial city of Jubayl, where thousands of troops were housed during the conflict--was impressed by the Americans’ behavior.

“When the Americans first came in, we were very worried, especially in the Eastern Province,” he said. “But, I must say, they behaved much better than the soldiers from all other countries in the coalition.”

As Saudi officials were quick to point out, it was also not the first time that large numbers of Americans have been present in Saudi Arabia. According to Prince Fahd ibn Sulman, a member of the royal family who serves as vice governor of the Eastern Province, the percentage of foreigners in the region may have been higher in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Saudi oil industry was being developed with the help of foreign technicians, mainly American.

“In my opinion,” said the prince, who studied at UC Santa Barbara as an undergraduate, “the idea of serious impact on Saudi society was pure fantasy. Most Saudis have been abroad. They have had many encounters with foreigners. There are still many foreigners living here.”

Saudi Arabia has two national television channels, one in Arabic and one in English with regular U.S. and British programming. Saudi music shops have the same selection of cassettes and compact discs, ranging from country-western to new-wave, as do American shops. Except for one incident at the King Khaled Military City base in northern Saudi Arabia, in which Saudi military officers objected to some of the U.S. programming broadcast over the base’s closed-circuit television, there were no objections to programs of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network operating in the area during the crisis.

Military disc jockeys, in fact, said they received nearly half their requests for songs from the local population. Navy Petty Officer Dave McBride, 25, one of the regular DJ’s broadcasting from the Khobar Towers complex, said the popular tunes included: “People Are Still Having Sex” by LaTour, “I Want To Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd and “Thunder Rolls” by Garth Brooks, a powerful song that deals with wife-abuse in which the wife kills the abusing husband.

Far from being cut off from the world as some might have imagined, Saudis like to believe they have seen the West, understand its culture and have rejected it for their own conservative, but in their minds, “tolerant” Islamic state. In fact, few things irritated educated Saudis more than the flood of stories predicting the collapse of the indigenous Saudi culture under intense exposure to the West.

“It was a totally false premise,” said Riyadh chamber of commerce official Akkas, who holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Washington, “the idea that the pressure of 400,000 Americans in Saudi Arabia would inevitably change us. It is not that we don’t change. We change every day. But it was a false premise that we were an isolated island out of touch with the world.”