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Abdullah is generally considered to be popular in Saudi Arabia, thanks to his reputation for piety. He leans less toward the West in his orientation than his predecessor as ruler, the ailing King Fahd. And he has some diplomatic creativity. Throw in the Saudi's traditional leverage points on the U.S. — oil, the Prince Sultan air base, a long-standing relationship with the American governmental and business elite — and it makes for a pretty impressive package. Abdullah may not quite be a "five tool" player, as they say in baseball, but he is perhaps the best asset that the Middle East status quo has in resisting American assertion in the region. It is for this reason, among others (including the Saudi influence on Islam), that the future of the war on terrorism can be said to run through Saudi Arabia. As Nicholas Lehman pointed out in The New Yorker last week, the Bush administration's ambition is nothing less than to achieve a strategic transformation of the Middle East. What is happening now is that the current Middle East is demonstrating that it won't go quietly — with Abdullah taking the lead. The struggle over the future of the region is being waged primarily over the question of Iraq. If a reformist pro-Western regime is eventually installed in Iraq, it could boost reformers in Iran and provide an embarrassing contrast to Saudi corruption and backwardness — thus sapping power from both the Shiite and Sunni radicals. It also will lessen the U.S. strategic dependence on Saudi Arabia, both when it comes to oil (Iraq can open the spigots) and the U.S. military's basing requirements (we can pick up from Prince Sultan and move into Iraq) — thus increasing U.S. leverage on the kingdom. These effects would presumably be bad for the Saudis, which should shed some light on their motivations. There are two possible interpretations of Saudi behavior when it comes to a potential invasion of Iraq. The more widely held view is that the Saudis will be happy to see Saddam go, so long as the U.S. is serious about finishing the job. The more dire interpretation is that the Saudis simply don't want us topple Saddam, because it would bring all the aforementioned consequences. The last three weeks should have lent more weight to the dire view. Abdullah hasn't presented a picture of a basically pro-U.S. ruler, laying low until America actually fully commits on Iraq, at which point he'll go along. Instead, he has been actively subverting U.S. policy. The optimistic spin on Abdullah's "peace plan" is that it showed he is genuinely worried about a break with the U.S., and therefore feels a need to appear flexible. But it seemed more intended to wrong-foot Dick Cheney during his anti-Iraq tour of the region (and Cheney, unfortunately, was duly wrong-footed). Abdullah didn't seem particularly worried about needing to seem flexible when he engineered the Potemkin rehabilitation of Iraq at the Arab summit, sealing the point with a kiss of the Iraqi delegate, who was pointedly wearing traditional Gulf dress. The "peace plan" and the Iraq love-fest both served to distract attention from, and undermine the rationale for, a U.S. effort to topple Saddam. But they are as nothing compared to the Israeli-Palestinian conflagration. The worse it gets, the easier it is for the Arabs (backed by Western opinion elites) to argue that Israel, not Iraq, is the problem in the region. That is why the conflict has been fomented and funded by all the regimes that have something to lose from U.S. intervention in Iraq specifically and U.S. muscle in the region in general: Iraq (obviously), Iran, and Saudi Arabia. From the perspective of all these regimes, suicide bombings have the advantage not just of killing Israelis, but of making it harder for the U.S. to pursue its strategic goals. No wonder, as the indispensable Stephen Schwartz has pointed out, the Saudis have budgeted $400 million for the families of Palestinian "martyrs." The bottom line is that when he meets with Abdullah in a few weeks, President Bush will not be sitting down with an ally with whom he needs to "consult," but with a budding adversary he needs to bend to his will.
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the last three weeks, a formidable obstacle has emerged to U.S. strategic
goals in the Middle East. His name is Crown Prince Abdullah. 
