RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SAUDI ARABIA AND THE UNITED STATES & BRITAIN

                     CONTINUATION FROM E-MAIL OF 1-5-2016 
              PERTAINING TO SAUDIA ARABIA -- U.S. 
                                       RELATIONSHIP 

   Memories of how the Saudis and Opec deliberately triggered an economic crisis in the west in retaliation for U.S aid to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war still rankle. Manipulation of the oil price for political ends has been a  common occurrence since. In 2008, as the world financial crisis hit, former U.S. president G.W. Bush personally requested Abdullah to cut oil prices, and was flatly rebuffed. 

   The mood regarding human rights has also changed. In 1980, a British television documentary, Death of A Princess, based on the true story of Princess Misha' al and her lover, who were publicly executed for adultery, led the Saudis to expel Britain's ambassador and impose sanctions, much to the London establishment's discomfiture. Many countries bowed to intense pressure not to broadcast the film. Nowadays such bullying is not so easy. Yet while the external environment has altered radically, inside Saudi Arabia itself, as campaigners testify, little, if anything, has changed. Intolerance of dissent, be it political, religious or ideological, remains almost total. Saudi jails are crowded with those whose only crime is to speak freely. 

   Curbs on women's rights have not relaxed significantly, despite promises dating back to the 1990-91 Gulf wars, when Riyadh was running scared of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and cried out for western help. If anyone believed King Salman would take a different tack, those hopes were quickly dispelled when the first public beheading took place under his reign. 

   The growing gulf between Saudi Arabia and its more skeptical western partners is nowhere more apparent than in the key area of security and defense cooperation, upon which the relationship was founded in 1915. The west has long viewed the Saudis s a pillar of stability in an unruly region. But Saudi policy since the 1980s has repeatedly given the lie to that over-hopeful analysis. 

   It was the Saudis, principally, who, encouraged by the U.S.,  funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan in their fight against Soviet occupation. But it was also the conservative Wahhabi Sunni Muslim establishment and their oil-rich billionaire supporters who went on to channel cash and arms to what morphed into the Taliban, who paid for the Madrassa religious school system in Pakistan that produced new generations of extremists, and whose intolerant and anti-western views laid the ideological ground for the creation of al-Qaida, led by a Saudi citizen, Osama bin Laden. 

   It is the Saudis, according to regional and American reports, who helped create IS in Syria and Iraq, again by funneling arms and cash. It was the unelected, despotic Saudi regime that, terrified by the implications of the Arab spring, opposed pro-democracy movements in Egypt and elsewhere, and energetically assisted in the brutal suppression of Shia Muslim reforms in Bahrain. 

   And it was the Saudis who, in improbable alliance with Binyamin Netanyahu's Israel, lobbied most forcefully against any American nuclear deal, or broader Western rapprochement with Shia Iran, their sworn enemy. 

  Far from bolstering stability, Saudi policy actively works against western attempts to end the standoff with non-Arab Iran ---still the natural regional partner for the U.S and Britain that it was before the 1979 revolution [that kicked out the Shah and installed the Ruhollah Khomeini ] . In Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and across the Gulf, the Saudi's age-old proxy war with Iran, formerly Persia, poisons hopes of peace. 

   They offer "intelligence sharing" and token forces when the obvious reality, after CHARLIE HEBDO, is that the Islamist jihadist terrorism threatening Europe has now replaced Tehran-backed Bashar al-Assad as the west's main security concern ----and is the product, to a large degree, of the Saudi's repeat mistakes. 

   To maintain its hold on western governments, the Saudi regime continues to hold out the prospect of lucrative arms purchases, such as the billion-dollar deal with BAE SYSTEMS to supply Eurofighter Typhoon jets. This despite the deeply unsavory legacy of the Al-Yamamah bribery scandal, which revealed corruption on a scale previously unheard of in Britain. 

   To keep its grip, the Saudi regime uses its network of official and personal to U.S. and Britain's gullible congressional politicians, and to business and investment leaders overly impressed by the Saudi regime's $1 trillion [with a T ] in cash reserves and its global investment portfolio. 

   But in the end it all comes down to values, not money or weapons or insider influence within the U.S. congress or British parliament. A sea-change is under way with which governmental authorities have yet to catch up. What was tolerable or ignoble 30  years ago is no longer so. 

   Happily, attitudes in American and British societies, especially on individual rights, have shifted. Unhappily, in Saudi Arabia, they have not -----not yet. But change there, too, is inescapable. The medieval game of thrones that is the absolutist Saudi system cannot endure. An unlikely 100-year-long affair is finally petering out. 


    MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED.