With Saudi Changing of the Guard There Will Be No “Crash of ‘79”

by Richard H. Curtiss

"Because we wish to spend some time resting and recuperating and because of your highness's good character...we entrust you in this decree to take over management of government affairs while we enjoy rest and recuperation."—Excerpt from letter from King Faisal to Crown Prince Abdullah released Jan. 1, 1996 by the official Saudi Press Agency.

In the early 1970s novelist Paul Erdman's action-packed thriller The Crash of '79 was a best-seller in the United States and Europe. Although most of the action took place among conniving atomic scientists, crooked European bankers and anti-West Iranians, the catalyst for the world economic crash the book predicted was the accession to the throne of Saudi Arabia of Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud.

Erdman's thesis was that after the progressive, modernizing reign of Western-oriented King Fahd, eldest of the fabled "Sudairi Seven" —sons (and four daughters) of the modern Kingdom's founder, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud and his wife, Hassa bint Ahmed Sudairi, the assumption of power by Fahd's more traditionalist half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, would plunge an inherently unstable region into chaos, triggering a world economic crash.

The reality of such an accession, if that's what the current provisional transfer of duties eventually becomes, has turned out to be the opposite in every respect of the situation Erdman foresaw. Eight years of fighting between Iraq and Iran and the brief Gulf war that brought a million troops from 37 countries into and out of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors in the space of only seven months, left international borders in the region and even the administrations and ruling families of every concerned state unchanged. That's not instability.

The Saudi succession, laid out when King Fahd took over upon the death of his brother, King Khalid, in 1982, followed exactly according to plan and only months after King Fahd had initiated overdue austerity measures. They abolished wasteful consumer subsidies while retaining the country's two key social programs: free and modern medical care for all, and free education through the university graduate studies level to all who can qualify. King Fahd also had created a Majlis al Shura (consultative council) that contains the seeds of a broadening of the country's power base beyond the Al Saud family and, on Aug. 7, named a new cabinet that effectively passed the executive authority to a new and highly educated generation of technocrats.

The transfer of power was the result of a medical crisis variously described as exhaustion from overwork or a mild stroke that hospitalized King Fahd on Nov. 30. He left the hospital on Dec. 7 and was shown on television receiving official visitors. But Prince Abdullah began presiding over cabinet meetings and represented Saudi Arabia at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit meeting in Oman Dec. 4-6.

King Fahd is a diabetic and for several years has walked with a cane because of a bad knee, so the bad-health-induced transfer of authority, whether temporary or permanent, came as no shock to the country. Further, government announcements left no doubt that if the King's health improves sufficiently and he chooses to resume a full schedule, executive authority will be returned to him.

The event occurred some 17 years after Erdman's gloomy prognostication and, ironically, the very characteristics that alarmed him about Prince Abdullah now seem assets made to order for the times.

Tall, serious, with a firm handshake and an air of energetic and purposeful authority, Prince Abdullah bears some physical resemblance to his fabled father, King Abdel Aziz. The founder of the modern Kingdom had some 40 sons, and an equal number of daughters. All four kings that followed have been his sons. The oldest of them, King Saud, was born in 1902. King Fahd was born in 1922 and the youngest of King Fahd's six full (Sudairi) brothers, Prince Ahmad, was born in 1940. Next in line after Crown Prince Abdullah for the throne is Prince Sultan, born in 1924, who is Saudi minister of defense. Among his five sons are Prince Khalid, former air defense chief and co-commander of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, and Prince Bandar, a former fighter pilot who has been Saudi ambassador to the U.S. since 1983. Both were born in 1949.

Crown Prince Abdullah, who was born in 1924, has no full brothers. Among his sons, however, are Prince Mutib, deputy commander of the Saudi National Guard.

A Saudi Education

The Western press has described the 74-year-old Crown Prince as "reserved" and "a pious ascetic, more in tune with the kingdom's tradition-minded Bedouin." Further, because his education was entirely within Saudi Arabia, as was the case with nearly all of the princes of his generation, and he does not speak English, he is described as less Western-oriented than King Fahd, who both as a young man and as Saudi Arabia's foreign minister acquired a familiarity with the West and ease in dealing with Westerners.

In fact the stereotype is somewhat overdrawn, but it will do Prince Abdullah no harm at home. He has been a frequent visitor to Washington and to European capitals, primarily in connection with his principal duty as commander of the Saudi National Guard. His job has been to turn that 57,000-man army, once the power base of the Royal family, into a modern army entrusted with the safety of the Saudi capital, the oil fields, and the air force and air defense installations that protect both from external attack.

More accurate are the characterizations of Prince Abdullah as a man who is patient with petitioners, an enthusiastic horseman who founded Riyadh's Equestrian Club, and a man who has strong pan-Arab sentiments and close ties with the present Syrian regime. In fact, his Syrian wife is from the same minority Alawite population as Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad and his most trusted military supporters.

Saudis predict the Crown Prince will initiate no significant changes in Saudi policies toward their Arab neighbors or the United States, even if the transfer of authority becomes permanent. However, there is no doubt that the Syrian president will feel significantly reassured as he enters negotiations with the Israelis, who are visibly reluctant to accept his offer of "full peace for full withdrawal."

If the negotiations fail, the Israelis believe it will not impair their relations with their American mentor. Now Assad has a fallback to strenghen his hand as well. It was the Saudis who in the past supplied most of the funds which enabled Syria to purchase Russian arms. If the Israelis ultimately refuse a land-for-peace settlement, Saudi funds might more likely be available to the Syrians, and perhaps to the Palestinians as well.

At home Crown Prince Abdullah will have to deal with a new $4 billion shortfall in government revenues. King Fahd had vowed to trim Saudi government expenditures to $40 billion to balance the national budget. He did the necessary cutting, but the further weakness in world petroleum prices reduced anticipated revenues by $4 billion. Crown Prince Abdullah can borrow money to meet the shortfall, but as he seeks new economies to balance the budget next year, the Saudi public is going to be looking for sacrifices at the top to match the losses in food, fuel, electricity, water and even telephone subsidies that produced this year's budget savings.

His own reputation for a simple lifestyle and a business-like approach to problem solving will give him credibility with the Saudi public, within his own family which now extends to 5,000 persons, and with the Saudi bureaucracy as he apportions the next round of sacrifices. They will fall on people of all classes and backgrounds in Saudi Arabia who, until the painful aftermath of the costly Gulf war, had almost forgotten for more than two decades the meaning of frugality or deferred gratification.

Ironically, the car bomb explosion last Nov. 13 that killed five Americans and two Indians and sent a shock throughout Saudi Arabia occurred outside an American-run training center for Crown Prince Abdullah's Saudi National Guard in Riyadh. Getting to the root of that incident, which to date the Saudis have not attributed to either a domestic or foreign source, will be high on the Crown Prince's priority list.

Most important, however, will be to deal with the ripples of discontent that have surfaced among Saudis, mainly outside the Kingdom, since the end of the Gulf war. Some originate with Westernized technocrats who seek more power sharing and complain of favoritism in government and business circles. By far the greatest threat, however, is from traditionalists (some of them also Western-educated) agitating over the resort to outside military support for Saudi Arabia's defense in the Gulf war, the impact of even the highly sanitized Western television programs available in the Kingdom (there are no movie theaters), and what they see as a breakdown in Saudi traditions inspired by exposure to life abroad of Saudi tourists from a land where women do not drive and do not leave their homes unveiled.

Crown Prince Abdullah is known to have argued against the resort to non-Muslim forces for Saudi defense. Since the successful outcome of the Gulf war, however, he has stated publicly that the decision he initially opposed was, after all, the right one.

As a man who has been on both sides of that key question, and who sets an impeccable example by his personal lifestyle, he is admirably equipped to deal with his country's current preoccupations while keeping it on the track it chose two generations ago. That choice has changed America's most important Middle Eastern trading partner and military and political ally from a hard-scrabble land of scattered oasis villages, drowsy fishing ports and timeless nomad encampments to a nation of sparkling modern cities, deep-water ports and high-tech industrial plants, all linked by modern airlines, thousands of miles of divided super highways, and gas, water and oil pipelines.

Meanwhile Saudi Arabia's deeply conservative people, now among the most highly educated, best nourished and best cared-for in the world, have maintained their Islamic heritage intact throughout the entire national metamorphosis. It's a record Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud is admirably equipped to preserve and enhance.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.