So what's happening in the rest of the Middle East? A survey of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Libya.

Saudi Arabia

A Successful Anomaly (So Far)

by Hume Horan

Of all the strange forms of nationhood that fill the world today, none stands out like Saudi Arabia. It is the only country named after a family--the Sauds, who have ruled in the Peninsula since the eighteenth century. In a world of competing ideologies, it is the only state that abjures them all, in favor of its version of Sunni Islam. And as for a constitution? The Saudis would reply, "Ours is the Koran, a constitution granted by God himself that will stand not just the test of time, but eternity."

Outside viewers, even critics, might agree that Saudi Arabia seems, up to now, a successful anomaly. In a particularly conflict-prone region of the world, it has survived intact the destabilizing inrush of untold wealth and the challenge of various contemporary ideologies. Communism, Baathism, Arab nationalism--all have come and gone. But today, Saudi Arabia, which controls two thirds of the world's oil resources, is threatened from within. It is challenged by jihadist Islam, the movement that includes al-Qaeda. Accordingly, a serious question for American leaders is: How much help can we expect from Saudi Arabia against a common threat which is, however, Muslim?

For much of the last century, U.S.-Saudi relations were mostly of interest to specialists. In the 1930s, American oil explorers and developers--no cross-cultural specialists they--nevertheless got the United States off on the right foot with a strange people in a strange land. In World War II, U.S. Army mapping experts charted the best air route across the peninsula to our forces in China-Burma-India. More recently, U.S. arabists during and after the Cold War tried to deal with the turbulence caused by Jamal Abdul Nasser and Arab nationalism.

When I arrived in the Kingdom in early 1972 as deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Jiddah, FDR's and King Abdul Aziz's 1945 meeting aboard the USS Quincy seemed almost a current affair, not history. The country was deeply conservative, but in a way that at the time seemed authentic and almost frictionless. Foreign diplomats and businessmen could live as Westerners in their compounds and enjoy folkloric forays into the town and countryside. The Saudi chief of police warned us, "I know the unspeakable things that go on in your Western compounds, but just keep them there--or I'll be forced to step in"