The Desert Superstate

Its cities are dominated by the roar of bulldozers and the rattle of jackhammers. The hard hat of the construction worker rivals the checkered ghutra as the national headdress. In the bustling commercial and financial port city of Jidda, on the Red Sea, bulldozers tear into the graceful old houses of the Ottoman era with their latticework balconies and harem windows. In the capital city of Riyadh, rows of mud houses topped with crenelated roofs are smashed to dust to make way for superhighways or high-rise buildings of chrome, glass and soaring reinforced concrete. Passenger jets land and depart from some of the Middle East's busiest airports, shattering the silence of the desert.

Last week, as he explained once again why it is in the best interests of the U.S. to sell the Saudis 60 F-15 jet fighters, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance described Saudi Arabia as "a very important country from many, many aspects." With its seemingly limitless oil wealth, it is already an economic superpower. It is the key supplier of energy to the industrialized West and, as bankroller to nearly every other moderate Arab state (as well as two or three immoderate ones), a behind-the-scenes broker in Middle East politics.

For all the flash and dazzle of its remarkable development projects, Saudi Arabia remains a feudal monarchy. Slavery was not outlawed until 1962. Murderers are still beheaded and adulterers stoned to death under Islamic law. Yet thanks to a gift of Allah--proven reserves of 150 billion bbl. of petroleum bubbling underneath the hot desert sands--this extraordinary nation is hurtling in a blink of history's eye from a medieval past toward the 21st century.

Saudi Arabian planning makes Texan big think seem like small talk. The Saudis are currently spending $15 billion on the largest desalination program in the world--and seriously pondering a plan for towing icebergs from the Antarctic to provide fresh water for a country that has not a single permanent river. The estimated cost of that: $80 million per berg. They are putting up $14 billion for a project that will bring natural gas to the newly planned industrial cities of Yanbo on the Red Sea and Jubail on the Persian Gulf, which are costing $30 billion to build. In the past three years, the Saudis have built nearly 300,000 housing units--enough for a quarter of the Saudi population. In a land where education a generation ago was essentially in the hands of the ulema, a powerful group of conservative Islamic religious leaders. 960,000 young Saudis are now in high schools and colleges.

That fabled ship of the desert, the dromedary, is a rare sight in Saudi cities now, except at camel races; the automobile has become almost as essential to Riyadh as it is to Los Angeles. There is approximately one car for every five Saudis --and this in a nation where only men are permitted to drive. Few Bedouins still live in desert tents; out of the urban areas, many of them have Toyotas, Datsuns or Chevrolets parked among their camels. Remote fishing villages are becoming modern towns. From the rocky hill near the Persian Gulf where the first Saudi oil well was drilled a scant 40 years ago, a visitor can gaze out toward the cities of Dammam, Al Kho bar and Dhahran, which are fast merging into one great metropolis that might well accommodate a million people by the year 2000.

With almost stupefying speed, the Saudis are making the desert boom, and their instrument for accomplishing this transformation is oil. Beneath an arid land of 874,000 sq. mi. (of which only 3% is covered by farms and forests) lies almost 25% of the world's known petroleum reserves--the greatest single energy treasure on earth. The Saudis want to diversify their one-source economy, and about 80% of their $142 billion development program is going into infrastructure--electric power, raw materials, housing, transport, roads. In addition, this acquisitively capitalist nation has created the elements of a welfare state for its citizens, with free education, free medical care and subsidized prices for food, most of which has to be imported.

Despite these expenditures, and despite the dollar's decline, the Saudis nonetheless are making money far faster than they can spend it. As of February, their international monetary reserves amounted to $28.8 billion--second only to West Germany's ($41.9 billion) and well ahead of those of Britain ($21.4 billion) and the U.S. ($19.6 billion). Their total foreign assets as of Jan. 1 were estimated by monetary experts at somewhere between $60 billion and $70 billion and climbing at the rate of $1 billion per month.

This awesome economic power is managed by ailing King Khalid, 65, who became ruler in 1975 after the assassination of King Faisal, and Crown Prince Fahd, 58, the man who really runs the country today. In the hands of a hostile government, Saudi Arabia would constitute a grave threat to the U.S., its allies and indeed all of Western industrialized society. But under Khalid and Fahd, both militant anti-Communists and enemies of Soviet expansion, Saudi Arabia has reinforced a friendship with the U.S. that has endured for more than four decades. It has exerted a strong influence on other oil-producing nations to hold down price increases. It has also agreed to U.S. requests to expand its oil-producing capacity in order to head off a worldwide energy shortage predicted for the early 1980s, even though some Saudis argue strongly that such a production increase is not in their country's long-term interest.

Only last week Saudi representatives spoke out against a proposed midyear increase in oil prices and reinforced the U.S. dollar by asserting that the oil producers should continue to use the weakening dollar as their medium of exchange.

For all its wealth, Saudi Arabia is a very vulnerable nation. Though it is one-fourth the size of the U.S. and has a 1,560-mile-long coastline, its population is generally estimated at only about 5 million.* Now, for practically the first time in their history, the Saudis have something worth defending. As Saudi government officials never tire of saying, their country is virtually unprotected. It is probably true that never has so much been defended by so little.

In the current debate over whether the U.S. should sell the Saudis the F-15 (see NATION ), the Israelis and others have argued that Saudi Arabia does not need so sophisticated a plane for defense purposes, and would be tempted to use it against Israel in the event of another Middle East war. In fact, most U.S. defense experts are convinced Saudi Arabia has very serious defense problems that could be partly alleviated by the sale of the F-15.

The fact is that during the 1973 war, the Saudis moved what planes they had as far as possible away from the fighting. They could not risk losing them. So serious are the Saudis' defense problems that the F-15s could hardly buy the country more than a couple of days of breathing time if it were attacked by any enemy. At the very most, the Saudis have only 96,500 men in their armed forces and reserves, including 41,000 national guardsmen, who are not considered front-line troops. Their air force consists of five squadrons of American-made F-5Es and obsolescent British Lightnings of 1950s vintage. Their navy consists of a converted U.S. Coast Guard cutter, three Jaguar-class PT boats and a few other bits of flotsam and jetsam. When they look south, the Saudis are alarmed by the rising Soviet influence across the Red Sea in Ethiopia, where there are now 16,000 Cuban soldiers supporting the leftist regime in Addis Ababa, and about 1,000 Russians. The Marxist regime of South Yemen, which has occasionally made raids across the Saudi border, has an army of 20,000, backed by 500 to 1,000 Cubans and a small but unknown number of Russian advisers.

Over the next decade, U.S. military strategists believe, the primary threat to Saudi Arabia may come from Iraq, with which the Saudis share 400 miles of a common but ill-defined desert border, enormous oil wealth and little else. Iraq, which is expected to surpass Iran in oil production by the mid-1980s is a power of the future. But even today, the radical Ba'ath regime in Baghdad has nearly three times the air capability of the Saudis, more than twice as many tanks, armored personnel carriers and helicopters, and five times as many men under arms.

At present, the Saudis cooperate closely with both Egypt's Sadat and the Shah of Iran. Together the Saudis and Iranians, despite a certain amount of mutual distrust, serve as a restraining force to prevent Iraq from absorbing the small, oil-rich Persian Gulf state of Kuwait, as Baghdad would like to do. But the Saudis realize that if either Sadat or the Shah should be displaced by a more radical regime, their own security would be dangerously affected.

With or without the F-15, the Saudis have no illusions about being able to fight off a serious attack from Israel, to say nothing of a combined assault by hostile neighbors with Soviet backing. Thus the very modest Saudi strategy is to be strong enough to hold out for a mere two or three days until international support could be rallied and a powerful friend -- say the U.S. -- could rush to its aid.

In political terms Saudi Arabia is an astonishing anachronism in an age dominated by the ideals of democracy and socialism. The country has not a single elected official, no parliament, no political parties. Absolute power is vested in the royal family, the House of Saud, a huge clan whose collective decision making provides stability for the country (see box).

By catapulting their country forward into the most ambitious building program that money can buy, the Saudi rulers also set in motion a kind of social revolution whose long-range effects are not easy to foretell. "We are just about keeping pace with our five-year plan," says Planning Minister Hisham Nazer, "but we still have more money than we can spend." They are building two of the largest and most modern airports in the world for Riyadh and Jidda, to accommodate the armies of migrant workers and businessmen who are coming to seek their fortunes.

The Saudis have bought the best in people too. To make some order out of urban chaos, for example, they brought in Greek City Planner Constantinos Doxiadis. To build up their soccer teams, they hired British Coach Jimmy Hill. To head the new Applied Research Institute at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, they signed William Pickering, who as head of California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory helped put a man on the moon.

With school enrollment expanding rapidly, the Saudis needed a major school lunch program. No problem; they simply began to fly in 200,000 meals daily from Paris. For a while the country's seaports were jammed.

But then, according to Nazer, "we threw a little money on the problem and solved it." What they threw was $6.6 billion for port expansion. The building program created a tremendous labor shortage; the Saudis solved it by requiring all large foreign contractors to bring their own workers along -- and add the cost to the price of the contract.

These migrant workers, who now number almost 1 million, remain outside the main stream of Saudi life, since most leave when their specific job contracts expire. In Al Knobar, shops cater to the thousands of Korean workers with window signs reading KOREAN SPOKEN HERE. Saudis complain that the Egyptian and Pakistani workers are responsible for the increase in burglary in a country that boasts one of the lowest crime rates in the world (in part, because thieves are punished by having their hands cut off). On occasion, Yemenites have gone on slowdown strikes, while Filipinos, Pakistanis and Koreans have demonstrated to protest poor housing or low wages; some have been deported.

With all this money in the country, corruption is inevitable, despite government efforts to crack down. Even a few of the many royal princes are not immune, although the assistance they provide to five-percenters is quite often innocent. Among Saudi influence peddlers there is a common phrase: "Remember the prince." After closing a deal with a foreign firm, the agent may tell his client, "You must remember the prince. Let's offer him $300,000." The two will then sit in a hotel lobby until a prince passes through.

As the prince waits for the elevator, the agent will hop over to him, pump his hand and, whisper, "I have my foreign partner sitting in the lobby." The prince will look across the lobby at the partner, smile politely and go up in the elevator. The agent will tell his client, "It's a deal. The prince will accept the $300,000." As often as not the agent pockets the money himself.

A much more serious social effect has been created by education and travel among the country's young people. Says a Saudi businessman: "We are in a state of schism, with a wide generation gap separating the traditionalists from the innovators."

A young American-educated Saudi says, "In the past, there was so little education in this country that youngsters learned everything they knew by rote, all handed down by word of mouth from their fathers. The environment did not permit us to take a critical view of our culture. But now, with university education, travel, television, the influx of foreigners, we are in a position to appraise our society and to demand changes if we see the need."

There are now 30,870 Saudis in universities, 20,000 of them abroad (and of those, half are in the U.S.). When a young Saudi returns from college in California or Texas, his re-entry is apt to be traumatic. He must doff his T shirt and jeans and don the traditional garments. He will be expected to submit to the traditional mores of family life, where his every move and thought are examined by his elders, and he must defer to those elders too, whether they deserve it or not. He must give up the company of women except those in his immediate family or the woman he eventually marries. He will not be allowed to go to public movies, nightclubs, discotheques. He will not be allowed to participate in political activity.

Despite these restrictions, the level of restlessness among young Saudis appears to be well below the boiling point. "I hear a lot of complaining," says a Westerner who has lived in Jidda for many years, "but I never hear the word revolution."

One strong indication that the Saudi social fabric remains intact is the fact that, unlike students from many other Middle Eastern countries, practically all Saudis who study abroad return home.

In public, Western-educated Saudis carefully observe the country's rigid mores. In the privacy of their homes, they live much more permissively. They drink openly with friends (Scotch is bootlegged for about $40 a bottle), and women are inclined to favor Western dress. They watch video cassettes or feature films ordered from a part of Riyadh that is nick named "Hollywood" because of its clandestine network of film distributors.

The distributors regularly send out booklets listing movies available at prices ranging from $20 to $80 -- the current rental fee for Star Wars.

In this semiprivate world, the wives of the rich can buy Christian Dior gowns at elegant shops in Riyadh and Jidda. At beach houses on weekends, young women whose mothers would not dream of appearing in public without a veil may don swimsuits that violate the spirit if not the letter of Islamic injunctions about female modesty.

While the well-to-do experiment with Western ways behind closed doors, groups of Islamic zealots, known the Committees for the Commendation of Virtue and the Condemnation of Vice, still patrol the streets outside. At prayer time these committees roam the cities and towns, ordering shops to close. Not long ago, the committees campaigned against young men who had adopted the infidel habit of letting their hair grow long. The drive backfired when a committee caught a tough Bedouin whose tribe had worn long hair for centuries. The tribesman fought back and was stabbed to death in the fight; the leader of the committee was tried, convicted and beheaded. The committees will publicly flog anyone found drinking alcohol in public. But respect for privacy is so great in Saudi Arabia that not even the most fanatical of these protectors of public virtue would ever dream of breaking into a home.

Within this underground culture, the ranking item on the list of necessary reforms is women's rights. Women are still forbidden to drive cars, travel alone or obtain exit visas unless accompanied by a "legal guardian," a male relative. Polygamy remains a thriving institution. But behind those closed doors, many Saudi women are spoiling for a showdown. "We will fight them," a young woman says of the religious conservatives, "and we will win."

Much of the limited progress that Saudi women have achieved is due to the work of Queen Iffat, the enlightened widow of King Faisal. Through her husband, Queen Iffat persuaded the government in 1960 to open an elementary school and later a secondary school for girls. There was great resistance to the idea, and in the beginning the King had to send police to keep the guardians of public morals from flogging the girls on their way to school.

Today about 250,000 Saudi girls attend public school; there are also 11,000 university coeds, about half of whom are studying abroad. Despite conservative opposition, educated women are gradually moving into public life. They work today as radio and TV announcers, physicians and psychologists (even treating male patients on occasion), and newspaper columnists and teachers.

But the public debate is far from over. Every Friday in the mosques, the imams (preachers) bemoan the immorality of working women. A few months ago, the ulema pressured the government into circulating a letter to private companies asking them not to hire women. On the other hand, two Cabinet ministers asserted in a TV interview a few weeks ago that women should be allowed to work in order to ease the country's labor shortage. When a newspaper columnist wrote that male and female students at the local university were mingling in an immoral fashion, the women at the school sued him for circulating false rumors about the immorality of women, a violation of Islamic law. He spent two days in jail.

Neither in private nor in public is there any serious talk about doing away with the monarchy. In the Saudi system, King Khalid reigns, but Crown Prince Fahd rules. Austere, gentle and frail, the King had open-heart surgery in 1972 at Cleveland Clinic and last year underwent hip surgery at Wellington Hospital in London. He limits his duties to seeing of heads of state, although he is consulted on all important decisions. But the day-to-day running the country is in the hands of Fahd, a heavy set man who exudes warmth and good humor. The Crown Prince possesses a diplomatic subtlety that is almost Florentine in its gentility, a talent developed from his many years of dealing with Bedouin tribal chiefs. Though he is urbane and widely traveled, he received a traditional Islamic education. His father, Abdul Aziz, taught him to ride, shoot straight and speak the truth. Like most Saudis he enjoys camel racing and soccer; perhaps his favorite recreation is to go camping in the desert with Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, and some of his other brothers.

During King Faisal's reign, Fahd appeared to favor life abroad -- particularly in France -- to the austerities of Riyadh. He damaged his prestige somewhat in 1974 by spending five months in Europe, even staying there during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. Faisal never scolded him but in public was often heard to ask, "Where is our brother Fahd?" Since Faisal's death in 1975, Fahd has had little time to go anywhere for personal pleasure.

The Crown Prince's style is to nudge the country forward gently on social matters, permitting a measure of progress without unduly offending the Islamic conservatives. He opposes the introduction of Western-style democracy, arguing that free elections would not bring the country's most qualified people -- the young Saudis who have been educated abroad -- to positions of leadership. "We have invested heavily in educating these young men," Fahd says, "and now we want to collect a dividend on our investment. But if we were to have elections, these young men would not be elected. The winners would be rich businessmen who could buy the votes. Our real talent would not be used."

As Minister of Education in the 1950s, Fahd introduced the country's first extended public school system, and since then he has quietly allowed the expansion of women's education. But he has often told friends that he is against the "Atatuerk approach," a reference to the way in which Turkey's Kemal Atatuerk outlawed the veil and traditional dress and tried to impose social reform from the top. Fahd favors the sort of grass-roots evolution that seems to be taking place in his country today.

The same velvet-gloved approach characterizes his conduct of foreign affairs. In the Arab world, the Saudis are resented by some of their Islamic brethren as nouveau riche desert barbarians. But Fahd is on speaking terms with almost every leader (one notable exception: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who refuses to deal with him). On the theory that Saudi Arabia's first line of defense is diplomatic, he avoids quarrels even with Arab radicals, preferring to build as broad a range of contacts as he can. In the interests of preserving Arab unity, he has mediated between leftist Algeria and royalist Morocco in the Sahara dispute. He maintains ties with Egypt's Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad, with the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yasser Arafat and with Lebanese Christian Leader Camille Chamoun. Saudi Arabia has had problems with radical Iraq and Marxist South Yemen, but he keeps in touch with leaders of both states.

This policy sometimes puzzles Westerners and causes Israelis to point to Saudi support of the P.L.O. as evidence of Riyadh's untrustworthiness. "The Saudis donate their money to some of the most fanatical terror groups." charges a high-ranking Israeli general. "They speak in 300 languages and with as many tongues as there are crown princes. There is no one solid Saudi voice." Fahd's argument is that by supplying Arafat's Fatah with some $40 million a year in aid, he is strengthening Arafat against George Habash's more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two years ago, Fahd was close to reaching an agreement with Arafat under which Fatah would renounce terrorism in favor of a negotiated peace, a deal that collapsed following Sadat's trip to Jerusalem last November. But Fahd's support for Arafat did not waver. When the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon this spring, the first shipment of arms to reach the P.L.O. guerrillas came from Saudi Arabia.

Without Fahd's help, Anwar Sadat would probably not be in power in Egypt today. When Sadat's regime was shaken by food-price riots in January 1977, the Saudis and their oil-rich friends in the gulf put together a $4 billion aid package to keep Sadat afloat. Fahd was unhappy about not being adequately consulted by Sadat on his peace initiative and was fearful that it might fail; nonetheless, the Saudis announced that their financial aid to Egypt would continue.

The Saudis make little effort to conceal their anxiety about their future security. Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani declared recently that he feared "the day may come, toward the end of the 1980s, when the world will see an all-out oil war in which the strong will fight over the wealth of the oil-exporting countries." Fahd never provokes Communist propaganda assaults by attacking the Soviet Union directly, but he is wary of its designs on the Middle East. He has extended aid to Somalia, Djibouti and other countries in the area to offset Soviet influence, and has occasionally made contributions to anti-Communist political institutions in Western Europe. One recipient: Italy's Christian Democratic Party.

From his earliest days in the Saudi government, Fahd has been a close friend of the U.S. Today, he and Sadat are Washington's two most important allies in the Arab world. The Crown Prince is responsible for the Saudi policy of holding the line on oil price rises, reasoning that his country ultimately must look to the U.S. for its security and therefore that anything damaging to the American economy will eventually endanger Saudi Arabia. He is also responsible for the Saudi decision to increase its productive capacity, which was requested by Washington.

With oil production declining in the U.S., the Soviet Union and even in many Middle East states, the one country in which large increases are still feasible is Saudi Arabia. The Saudis' present capacity is 11.9 million barrels per day, though their current production ceiling is 8.5 million per day and actual production last month dropped to 6.6 million per day. Nonetheless, on Fahd's orders, Saudi Arabia is proceeding with an $11 billion program aimed at increasing production capacity to 14 million barrels per day by the early 1980s. Saudi Arabia hardly needs the extra revenues. As Planning Minister Nazer said last week, "Production of between 5 million and 7.9 million barrels would produce enough revenue to meet our development needs." But Saudi Arabia is going ahead with the expansion program, primarily as a concession to the U.S. The program, says Oil Minister Yamani, "is not really in our interest. It is only in the interest of the West that we are carrying out this expansion."

That kind of friendship in international politics is not easy to come by. It extends at least back to 1938, when Americans brought in Saudi Arabia's first oil well. Four American oil companies later formed the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), which eventually developed Saudi Arabia into the world's pre-eminent petroleum power. Through negotiations with the parent companies, the Saudi government has gradually acquired 60% of Aramco and will eventually purchase the remainder, but it still has more than 2,600 American employees. Of the $142 billion that Saudi Arabia will spend during its current five-year plan, nearly half will go to American companies. Riyadh has invested between $35 billion and $40 billion in the U.S., which is Saudi Arabia's largest trading partner. One-third of the Saudi government's present Cabinet ministers are American graduates. So many of the country's young technocrats received their training at U.C.L.A., Stanford, Caltech and other nearby institutions that they are known collectively as the California Mafia.

Despite the enduring web of relationships, however, there has never been a formal treaty of any kind between the two nations. Abdul Aziz once railed at Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had gone to Riyadh to get the King to sign some kind of agreement: "Why do you always want us to sign something with a lot of fine print? Out here, we consider it enough to shake hands and be friends."

It is in the context of this kind of U.S.-Saudi relationship that the Saudis asked the U.S. to sell them 60 F-15 jet fighters. They have been astounded by the controversy that the deal has caused in the U.S., in part because they believe the sale would be as much to the advantage of the U.S. as it would be to their own. They point out that they would pay in cash for the $2.4 billion purchase, after all. and that the sale would be contributing to the defense of a strategically placed U.S. ally.

Beyond that, the Saudis feel that they have effectively answered most of the Israeli charges regarding possible use of the F-15s. As Prince Fahd told TIME (see NATION), he is willing to pledge that the planes will not be transferred to another Arab state in the event of war. The Saudis have no intention of stationing the planes at Tabuk, just southeast of the Israeli border. Explains Prince Saud, the Foreign Minister: "Israeli warplanes overflew Tabuk 140 times during the past year. We certainly would not put our planes in such a vulnerable position."

The Saudis have emphasized that their present oil policy would not be affected, either way, by U.S. action on the F-15, though Prince Fahd acknowledges that his people expect the U.S. to reciprocate the Saudis' "good feeling and to translate it into action." Oil Minister Yamani is a bit more blunt. "Even if the F-15 sale should be killed, I don't think we would react immediately," he says. "We would continue our program to expand our production capacity. But we would have far less enthusiasm to cooperate with the U.S. at the same speed as before." He adds, "Anyone who tells you anything else is just being polite."

Perhaps the most compelling argument for selling the planes to the Saudis is the importance to the U.S. of strengthening this special relationship. The U.S.'s self-interest requires that it make every effort to reinforce this economically powerful, strategically vital but militarily vulnerable ally. A strong Saudi Arabia can help to stabilize the entire region--including Israel. For despite the anti-Zionist rhetoric that emanates sporadically from Riyadh, the Saudis are a strong moderating force in the Arab world, and no peace settlement will be possible without their tacit approval.

*According to one apocryphal tale, an American population expert went to Saudi Arabia to take a census. He called on King Abdul Aziz al Saud (Ibn Saud), who told him: "You're wasting your time. There are 7 million people here." With apologies, the American said there could not be more than 3 million. "You're wrong," said the King. "There are at least 6 million." Begging forgiveness for his audacity, the American insisted that surely there were no more than 4 million. At this point the King held out his hand and closed the deal, bazaar-style, saying: "All right, five and a half."

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