Cautious kings
John Wilton
The House of Sa'ud David Holden and Richard Johns (Sidgwick and Jackson pp. 569, £9.95) The Kingdom Robert Lacey (Hutchinson pp. 631, £9.95) Ibn Khaldun, as President Reagan's speechwriters recently discovered, is full of good quotes. In The House of Sa'ud the late David Holden quotes Ibn Khaldun's theory that the role of the desert Arab in the perpetual conflict between the desert and the sown is to administer periodic galvanic shocks to sedentary Arab society; but since Bedouin staying power is short the energy they release is soon absorbed by the community; and as the impact of their intervention wears off the state once more declines until a new leader arises to start the cycle over again.
Is this, greatly oversimplified of course, what has been happening to Saudi Arabia since Abdul Aziz and his fanatical desert warriors united the kingdom in the first quarter of this century? Was Sa'ud's reign the swing of the pendulum back to indulgence and ineffectiveness? Did Faisal's austere zeal swing it back again? If so then the perceptibly milder temper of King Khaled and Crown Prince Fahad may result in the gradual corruption of the fabric of society and state until another and more effective zealot than Juhaiman al Utaibi arises to seize not just the Great Mosque at Mecca but the whole Kingdom. And its most probable next ruler will not be an Ayatollah of the Khomeini stamp (for the fiercely orthodox fundamentalist Saudi creed would find little appeal in a Shia model) but a Saudi Qadhafi. Richard Johns, David Holden's fellow author, almost reaches that conclusion. But he draws back on the very brink. Despite the regularity with which its imminent demise has been forecast for the past 40 years, 'the Kingdom is still in being... '
Robert Lacey, whose book The Kingdom covers the same period of Saudi history, comes on the whole to the opposite conclusion. He can be as clear about Saudi shortcomings as Richard Johns, but his final view is generally more charitable and his language more temperate. We are never left in any doubt which are Mr Johns's villains: Abdullah Sulaiman is always drunken, Sallal is hairy, Omar Shams ugly, Nawwaf charmless, Fawwaz crapulous, princes stay up all night and scratch their toes, Castro is the bearded catspaw of the Kremlin, Begin is goblin-like when he is not a homicidal dwarf. It is a pity that a book of this seriousness and weight should not have been better written and should contain so many trifling errors — of fact, of Arabic and in the maps — that could quite easily have been corrected. It does not matter a fig in what aircraft Mr Callaghan flew to Riyadh in 1975 but the truth is that it was an RAF VCIO, not a Comet. The statement that `Naif (bin Abdul Aziz) is physically impressive like his father' makes one wonder whether the author ever met either. And to misspell Magdalen College, Oxford is, of course, to forfeit all claim to scholarship. There is, unfortunately, a noticeable decline in lucidity in the second half of the book as Mr Johns's material becomes more complicated. Mr Lacey's technique of producing a series of impressionistic vignettes instead of trying to cover all the ground in chronological sequence at least avoids the danger of losing the wood in the trees. His material is more carefully digested, his conclusions are presented in what most readers will find a more memorable form and his book is altogether better produced. The House of Sa'ud no doubt suffers from having had to be written by two authors, of whom David Holden undoubtedly had the easier task in traversing ground covered so often and in such detail before. Its form gives it one advantage over The Kingdom in that it is a somewhat easier book to find one's way about in when looking something up. More important than matters of style and presentation, however, is to know whether the conclusions are correct. It is usuallY easier to ask questions about Saudi Arabia than it is to answer them. But Mr Lacey seems to me in his last two chapters to present the strengths of the present Saudi regime fairly and convincingly. Its foundation is the solidarity of the ruling family, and in that respect the mistakes which so nearly destroyed it in the previous century have been avoided. Both books bring out the unbelievable patience and caution with which Faisal manoeuvred to avoid such an outcome to his differences with Sa'ud: and the procedures which Saudi Arabia has evolved for carrying out changes in its government compare very favourably with those in most countries in the world. Moreover the regime is an indigenous one in which most of its subjects take a legitimate pride; it does not suffer from the endemic conflict between religion and state which destroyed the Shah; it is less vulnerable to assassination than most because its government is in fact government by committee; most of the alternatives, whether western or Arab, have looked a lot less attractive in the past few years than they may formerly have done even to complacent Saudi eyes; and most Saudis are cocooned in a welfare state of such amplitude as to blunt all but the most outrageous of life's slings and arrows.
There are difficulties and dangers, of course. Mr Lacey considers the slightly improbable case that revenue might decline to the point where the Saudi government would have to tax its subjects instead of cramming them with money like Strasbourg geese — and one must agree that such a turn around could modify drastically the Saudis' present complacent attitude towards corruption and extravagance in government circles. But more likely sources of tension arise from the fact that education will in time produce generations (of both sexes) which have been increasingly exposed to other ideas and influences than the simple pieties of Islam, and whose ambitions may no longer be so easily satisfied as they have been hitherto; that Saudi Arabia's geography, parched, remote and sparsely populated, will lead to more frustration than achievement in the struggle to industrialise her economy; and that the influx of foreigners and foreign ideas will increase, not decrease, as plans for economic development are pursued. In the matter of development, both books make clear, Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent on the countries of the industrialised west. Even if the Soviets were acceptable on ideological grounds they cannot supply what Saudi Arabia wants — a market for her oil, and a reasonable return in the form of goods and investment opportunities —, even less so the Third World. That is why the the Saudis keep up the pressure on their fellow oil producers in an attempt to moderate the ever-rising price of oil. It is why they move with such caution in the world's money markets. (Mr Lacey's chapter on this is particularly good.) It is Why they put up with recurrent American Pronouncements about the steps a U.S. administration might be obliged to take to secure its vital oil supplies; and stomach the sort of debate that inevitably developed in Congress around the proposal to sell them that expensive 20th-century telescope, the AWACS aircraft. It is why their anger with US over the film Death of a Princess was so rapidly brought under control.
It is still true that states do not have friends, only interests. And relationships based upon some solid community of interest are in general the most durable. But the extent of their dependence on the West, and above all upon the United States, exacerbates Saudi resentment at western attitudes over Israel and perpetuates the tangled and often strained interdependence' which David Holden identifies as being the basis of Saudi-U.S. relations as early as the 1940s.
If Saudi relations with the United States could be conducted in a vacuum they would, no doubt, be more easily managed but Saudi Arabia can no more isolate itself from the world about it than can the United States. To introduce his chapter on Camp David, Mr Johns produces a telling quotation from James Akins about the impossibility of a Saudi government underwriting a separate Israeli-Egyptian peace and surviving. American (and British) governments are quick to perceive, and plead, the pressures which prevent them from meeting Saudi wishes. They are less prompt to appreciate the realities of the pressures under which other governments also have to operate. If that is no more than human nature the same human fallibilities must be expected in Riyadh. So long as reason prevails there, the facts of life drive the Saudis inexorably back to renewed efforts to come to terms with the Americans despite all the rebuffs and disappointments they have encountered. The danger — to Saudi Arabia and to the West — is that Palestine from time to time explodes and reason goes out of the window. One proverb which Arab and Jew have in common is Samson's despairing cry as he brought down the Temple: 'On me and on my enemies, 0 Lord.'
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