Word: saudi
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...Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, and policy debates among the powerful princes at the top echelon of the Royal Family occur under a veil of silence. But divisions within the House of Saud over how to respond to al Qaeda's campaign are increasingly plain to see. A recent public statement by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, appeared to chide some of his uncles responsible for the nation's security as he demanded an all-out war on al-Qaeda: "War means war," wrote Bandar. "It does not mean Boy Scout camp...
...Bandar's statement was a harsh, if thinly veiled criticism of some of his uncles responsible for security in the Kingdom. Indeed, when he demands, "Enough blaming others when the reason lies within our own ranks!" he is explicitly criticizing a tendency, seen at the highest levels of the Saudi ruling family, to blame terror attacks in the kingdom on alien forces. Prince Nayef, the Interior Minister responsible for fighting terrorism in Saudi Arabia maintained long after 9/11 that the attack was the work of "Zionists," while even Crown Prince Abdullah, the day-to-day ruler of the kingdom...
...While some, like Prince Bandar, have called for a no-holds-barred jihad against Saudi Arabia's homegrown Qaeda element, others incline towards more conciliatory approaches, treating the problem as one of criminal deviance and premised on the idea that many who have been "misled" onto the al-Qaeda path need to be brought back into the mainstream. Some have emphasized the need for strong intelligence to accurately pick off terrorists through targeted police work, while avoiding any kind of mass crackdown on some of the wider ideological base that shares al-Qaeda's outlook but may not be directly...
...Saudi society is under the tremendous strain of a social crisis decades in the making. The most visible element of that crisis right now may be the apparent inability of the authorities to eliminate the threat of al-Qaeda attacks within their own borders. But its causes may be rooted in a variety of factors ranging from an increasingly unpopular alliance between the ruling family and the United States - widely perceived in the Arab world today as a power hostile to Muslim interests - to a monocultural economy whose oil earnings are unable to meet the aspirations of a rapidly growing...
...when the day-to-day ruler of the Kingdom blames the Khobar attack on foreign elements - "Zionists" being his rather bizarre choice - the coded message to the Saudi public is that the confrontation has no connection with the dynamics of Saudi society, and that the security forces are confining their crackdown to known criminals rather than the far wider element that may sympathize with the ideological outlook of the gunmen. Such mixed message inevitably impacts on the thinking of the Saudi security forces, and Western diplomats suggest there may even be a measure of sympathy for or collusion with...