What lies behind these strains is the drive by the U.S. rulers to gain more control over the oil and other resources of the Mideast—at the expense both of their imperialist rivals in Europe and Japan and of the various governments in the region, including the royal family in Saudi Arabia.

At the end of April, within two weeks of the U.S. seizure of Baghdad, the Pentagon announced it would withdraw most of its 5,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and set up its main regional command center in the Gulf state of Qatar, which Washington considers a more reliable ally.

In an interview in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair magazine, U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited one outcome of the U.S.-led assault on Iraq that was “almost unnoticed, but it’s huge”: it removed Washington’s need to keep U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia.  
 
Growing U.S.-Saudi strains
Under U.S. pressure, the Saudi authorities have rounded up more than a dozen people in connection with the May 12 suicide bombings in Riyadh that left 34 people dead, including eight U.S. citizens. Among those arrested were three religious figures who were accused not of being involved in the attacks but of speaking favorably about them.

Deep opposition in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Mideast to the imperialist assault on Iraq, as well as to the U.S. rulers’ hostility toward the Palestinian national struggle, has exacerbated problems for the monarchy because of its dependence on Washington. As a result, the Saudi government has placed some limits on the U.S. presence in the country. During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. military had used Saudi Arabia as a staging ground for its attack on Iraq.

Strains between the royal family and Washington intensified following a 1996 bombing that killed 19 U.S. marines at the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Riyadh. Washington was irked by the refusal of Saudi officials conducting the investigation into the bombing to allow the FBI to be part of the interrogation of witnesses.

The tensions deepened in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon when Riyadh refused a demand by the FBI to be given free reign to round up, interrogate, and take away any Saudi resident it deemed a “terrorist suspect.”

Over the past months, some voices in U.S. ruling circles have argued for taking a more aggressive stance toward Saudi Arabia, including the possibility of backing a palace coup by a faction of the royal family that would constitute a more reliable pro-U.S. government.

In July 2002 a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of Washington and recommended it be given an ultimatum to stop “backing terrorism” or face seizure of its oil fields and its investments in the United States.

The wars and upheavals in the Mideast have shone a spotlight on the reactionary social structures and semifeudal foundations of the kingdoms throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia is ruled by a monarchy. There is an appointed consultative assembly called the Majlis Al-Shura that has no legislative authority. This regime, like other monarchies in the Gulf, has had increasing difficulties in subjecting the population to continued denial of democratic rights and the extreme oppression of women.

At the beginning of this year, for example, the Saudi royal family issued a “Charter for Reform of the Arab Condition.” The charter makes reference to the need for “internal reform and enhanced political participation.”

The Christian Science Monitor reported January 15 that Saudi opposition currents “have increased calls for elections and a new constitution.” Spokespeople for some of these forces have even been allowed to be interviewed on regional satellite television, including Al Jazeera.

Women’s education has been taken away from religious authorities, and women now attend school together with men. Women can now apply for their own identity cards. Previously the only form of identity permitted for women was the ID card of a male relative. By law they cannot travel abroad without a male guardian’s permission and escort.  
 
Origins of Saudi Arabia
Like the other Gulf kingdoms, the Saudi state rests on a narrow social base of a parasitic merchant, banking, and oil rentier ruling class.

The Saudi monarchy consolidated its rule over the country as a willing supplicant to imperialist oil interests at the opening of the 1930s. A by-product of the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire following the defeat of the German-led alliance in World War I, Saudi Arabia holds the world’s largest known reserves of oil, an indispensable resource for the world capitalist economy.

Saudi Arabia is home to one of the world’s oldest cultures but is also one of the newest modern states. Until the 1930s the region was ruled by families heading competing tribal clans, among them the powerful Al Saud family. They rode a religious revival in Islam, led by Muslim leader Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahab, to dominance over most of Arabia. For the Saud family, this alliance with the muwahhidun, as the religious movement is known, enabled it to control most of Arabia by 1811.  
 
Alliance of monarchy, Muslim current
Today, the alliance with this current of Islamic clerics remains an important pillar of the royal family’s rule. It is seized on by some in U.S. ruling circles as an argument for adopting a more aggressive policy against the Saudi government.

Saudi Arabia came into existence as a result of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following the first interimperialist war in 1914-18. That empire, allied with German imperialism, was on the losing side of the war. As the victors took the spoils, it was divided up between the British and French imperialists on the backs of the Arabs and other peoples of the Mideast.

The House of Saud consolidated its power in a region that fell under a British “sphere of influence.”

In the early 1900s, the muwahhidun established agricultural colonies where people from different tribes supporting the Saud lived together. The inhabitants of these colonies were called brothers, or ikhwan in Arabic. They provided the Al Saud with a formidable military force and would become the backbone of the first and second Saudi dynasties.

Britain, the strongest imperialist power in the Mideast at the time, considered the Gulf region as the western flank of its colony in India. Among other problems facing its colonial rule, London was anxious about the proximity of the Ottoman regime to India and the Suez Canal in Egypt. At the same time German imperialism was increasing its political and economic relations with the Ottoman rulers.

The Al Saud family had a contentious history of relations with the Ottoman rulers. It attempted to play off the Ottomans and the British against each other. Earlier in the 19th century, alarmed at the rise of the Al Saud, the Ottoman rulers dispatched military forces to contain them. In 1818 they captured the Al Saud capital of Diriyah, bringing an end to the first Saudi dynasty. Six years later the Al Saud regained control of central Arabia but were defeated by a rival family with the aid of the Ottoman regime. The Al Saud were forced into exile in Kuwait.

By 1902, Abd al Aziz, the young heir to the Saudi house, had recaptured Riyadh and forced the Ottoman governor to recognize him as a client in the region. He also made overtures to the British government to rid the region of the Ottoman presence. Finally in 1913 Aziz’s armies drove the forces of the decaying Ottoman Empire out of eastern Arabia without British support.

Over the next two decades Abd al Aziz subdued the various regions of Arabia that in 1932 would form the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His rule was greatly aided by the discovery of oil in the region in the late 1920s. Huge royalties from concessions granted by Abd al Aziz to imperialist oil companies gave the Al Saud family a decisive financial advantage over its rivals.

The British, who called the shots in the region at the time, prevented the Al Saud from taking over areas of the Gulf where London had established protectorates with various ruling dynasties. They also opposed the extension of Al Saud’s rule beyond the Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi deserts, defining the kingdom’s borders.

With the discovery of oil, U.S. imperialism began to move in on Saudi Arabia. It took World War II, however, for Washington to establish itself as the number one power in the region, displacing London and Paris. Since that time oil production and distribution has been dominated there by the main U.S. and other imperialist oil monopolies.

Saudi Arabia joined the Arab League at its founding in 1945. When French, British, and Israeli forces invaded Egypt in 1956 following that government’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Saudi regime broke diplomatic relations with Paris and London and declared an embargo on oil shipments to the two countries.

Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt after overthrowing a reactionary monarchy in 1952, and this revolt inspired revolutionary republican attitudes in other Arab countries. To counter Egyptian influence, Saud formed an alliance with the monarchies in Jordan and Iraq in 1956. He also opposed the union of Egypt and Syria in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic. In 1962, when rebels influenced by Egypt’s example overthrew the Imam in Yemen and declared a republic there, the Saudi and Jordanian kings sent troops to aid the Yemeni royalist forces.  
 
Weakened position of regime
Together with the monarchies in Iran and Jordan, the Saudi regime was one of the reactionary bastions used by imperialism to maintain its domination of the region. In January 1982 Washington delivered the first of 60 F-15 warplanes to Riyadh under an agreement to counter “communist aggression” in the region.

The Iranian revolution, which overthrew the shah in 1979, sent shock waves throughout the Mideast. In response, the Saudi monarchy supported the U.S.-promoted war by the Saddam Hussein regime against Iran in 1980-88.

The same year as the popular insurrection in Iran, some 500 rebels seized the Great Mosque of Mecca, calling for the overthrow of the Saudi regime. In two weeks of fighting 100 rebels and 27 Saudi soldiers were killed. After the revolt was crushed, the regime organized the public beheading of 63 rebels. In 1980 a series of revolts by Shiites in Saudi Arabia was brutally put down. To defuse the potentially explosive social tensions building up, the regime promised to reform the distribution of Saudi wealth.

When the Hussein regime invaded Kuwait in 1990, King Fahd, the new Saudi ruler, agreed to station thousands of U.S. troops in the kingdom. It took in the Kuwaiti royal family, as well as an estimated 400,000 refugees. Thousands of Saudi troops were sent to join the first U.S.-led imperialist assault on Iraq in 1991.

Over the past decade since that war, however, the Saudi regime has become weakened and less stable. As the withdrawal of U.S. troops indicates, imperialism regards it as more of a political liability than a base of support for its aims in the region. The recent invasion and occupation of Iraq is a reminder that the existence of Saudi Arabia and the current national borders in the Mideast are no more real than before they were created by the imperialist powers.  
 
 
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