The Saudi succession
THE DEATH of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd at 84 and the formal accession of his successor, King Abdullah, cast a bright light on an anachronistic regime that is perched atop 25 percent of the world's known oil reserves. As the country's name implies, every barrel of oil and all forms of political power belong to one family. That family, now comprising some 5,000 princes descended from the founder, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, is able to exercise inordinate influence over the world's economy, particularly now that soaring global demand for energy is beginning to come up against limits on the expansion of production.
Like it or not, the stability of Saudi Arabia can affect the stability of the rest of the world. This distasteful reality explains the flocking of presidents, prime ministers, and emirs to the kingdom to express condolences for Fahd's passing --and best wishes for 81-year-old Abdullah's dawning reign. In Riyadh, Vice President Dick Cheney joined the French President Jacques Chirac, Prince Charles of Britain, the sultan of Brunei, and the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Pakistan in a tacit acknowledgement of their perilous dependence on the Saudi royal family's ability to preserve the status quo.
The ultimate nightmare for those dignitaries would be an overthrow of the Saudi regime by followers of Osama bin Laden. Were such a calamity to come about, it would be as a consequence of a pact with the devil struck by senior figures in the Saudi hierarchy. They encouraged young Saudis in the 1980s to go off to Afghanistan as holy warriors to fight the Soviets, and they funneled money to fundamentalist madrassas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. In these schools for jihadists, boys were indoctrinated in an intolerant, purist version of Islam. The premise of the Saudi royals' export of Islamist holy warriors was that they would wage their wars abroad and leave the kingdom in peace.
Today, young Saudis conducting terrorist operations inside the kingdom are aflame with the same impassioning Islamist ideology taught in madrassas funded by the Saudi ruling class. If there is a promising evolution in the outlook of the members of that ruling family, it is a belated recognition that they -- not Al Qaeda's ''far enemy" in Washington -- are the targets most endangered by the jihadists they helped to hatch.
It should go against the grain of Americans to depend on the stability of a one-family regime that jails dissidents for what they write and bars women from holding office or even driving a car. But the only way to escape that dependency is to embrace a radically different energy policy rooted in conservation and renewable energy sources. Only when we Americans reform ourselves will our calls for Saudi reform ring true. 