Bandar, is the son of Sultan. My guess is that Bandar wants to be there during the days after Fahd discorporates. He is one of the leading members of the generation of the children of the Al Sudairi. His Father and Uncles are old men. The succession could be the occasion of a civil war

If you want to live, Washington is a good distance from the action, but if you want to be king and the owner of the richest prize in the world you want to be in Arabia.

This view was confirmed by an article about PB’s resignation in the NYTimes yesterday (7/21/05). The print edition said that an American official who did not want to be identified said that P Bandar might also be trying to jockey for an important position in the Saudi defense establishment.You will not see that statement in the on-line version of the story.

In order to understand what is going on in Saudi Arabia, you need to understand some things about that country.

Saudi Arabia is not a nation state in the way we think of them in the modern world. It is a family possession. The current nominal ruler, King Fahd is a son of the founder of the dynasty ibn Sa’ud, who died 50 years ago. At the beginning of the 20th century ibn Sa’ud was a penniless desert bandito. His family had historic claims to the area in eastern Arabia around Riyadh and a historic alliance with the heretical and militant Wah’habi dynasty of imams. Ibn Sa’ud put together a tribal alliance, blessed by the Wah’habi, called the Ikwan. After WWI, he conquered the Hijaz, the western province of Arabia containing Mecca and Medina and displaced the British clients, the Husseini sherifs (See, Lawrence of Arabia), who were in turn rewarded with monarchies in Jordan and Iraq.

Ibn Sa’ud, the ruler of most of Arabia, became the luckiest and richest man in the world, when American engineers found oil in his eastern provinces in the 1930s. When he died in the 1950s, the royal treasury, which was a chest kept in his tent, was stuffed with gold. His children have run the kingdom as their private property ever since.

Here is the important fact. There is no theory of legitimate inheritance of a kingdom in Islam. The first born son of the first wife is not a more legitimate heir to the throne than the seventh son of the seventh concubine. Islamic regimes have developed ways of dealing with this problem. One is that many heirs were designated before the old king died. The Ottomans had the charming and effective custom of having the successor to the throne strangle all other then living male heirs to the throne with a silken bow string upon his succession. It was part of their success. Their decline began when they abandoned it.

In years past, such as when ibn Sa’ud’s son and successor, ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, was deposed in 1964 because of his mismanagement and wasteful spending, the family was able to act on a unified basis. Of course, it was a much smaller and more cohesive entity at that time. It is worth noting that the younger Sa’ud’s successor was his brother Faisal, who was, in turn assassinated by one of his nephews.

The current king, Fahd was born in 1922 and is also one of ibn Sa’uds sons. In 1995, he had a stroke which basically made him a vegetable. Before the stroke he had designated one of his brothers, Abd’allah (born 1923) to be the Crown Prince. After Fahd’s stroke, Abd’allah took active control of the kingdom. However, when Fahd named Abd’allah as Crown Prince, he also declared that the crown prince would not automatically succeed to the throne upon the death of the king, but would serve as provisional ruler until he, or another son or grandson of ibn Sa’ud deemed more suitable, was chosen by the family. Reference

The last time Fahd was in the hospital, in May, the NYTimes said that: CP Abd’allah appointed his brother Prince Sultan, who is second deputy prime minister and defense minister, as his successor. A successor to Prince Sultan as second deputy prime minister would have to be chosen, which could open the way for a younger generation of Saudi royals to rise. “But Prince Nayef, the interior minister – who like Fahd, Abd’allah and Sultan is a son of the kingdom’s founder, King Abdel Aziz al-Saud [ibn Sa'ud] – is widely favored for the position, thanks to his success in Saudi Arabia’s battle with terrorism in recent years, Mr. Alani and others said.” As I said above, Bandar is Sultan’s son and he might have his own views about this issue.

When Fahd dies, Abd’allah will continue to rule the kingdom, but his succession will not be assured. He will be challenged by many others. Further, he is 82 years old. The ranks of the sons of ibn Sa’ud have been thinned by the years, but there are hundreds of grandsons and thousands of great-grandsons and great-great grandsons. It is possible that the succession will go smoothly, but out of the thousands of male heirs of ibn Sa’ud, there is, no doubt, at least one who is saying to himself: “These senile old men will lead us into ruin. We need strong young leadership to survive the American assault on our world. I am that man.” As I said above, there is no primogeniture in the Islamic world. And history shows that even where there was disputed successions have happened and have led to civil war. At this point you should stop reading this and re-read Shakespeare’s histories of the War of the Roses.

Indeed, it is possible that the civil war has already begun. One hypothesis, that I have entertained, is that some one or more princes, who want the Saudi throne — which, after all, is the richest prize in the world — have used (whether they believe in it or not) the ideology of the Wah’habi imams and the oil money that flows through the kingdom to raise a private army. Their intention is to drive the United States out of Arabia and use their private army to secure the throne. Whether they have further ambitions such as a Pan-Arab or Pan-Muslim state are their own counsel.

In this view, we call the private army Al Qaeda. OBL is, or was until his incineration*, emir (in English, admiral) of this army. One reason the US invaded Iraq was to outflank Al Qaeda. Their counter was a series of attacks in the Kingdom last year. When that failed, Al Qaeda started pumping more money into the Zarqawi operation in Iraq, hoping to win the US election and stop the emergence of a shi’a dominated republic in Iraq.

Al Qaeda has forced the Saudi establishment to take them seriously and to be nicer to US. But even if the Sunnis are suppressed in Iraq, Arabia will remain a powder keg. Like I said, read Shakespeare, not me.

*I am skeptical that he is alive.

(1) would be great, (2) interesting and (3) horrific. But all mean a serious crisis.

Saudi Arabia is basically the Manson family in charge of a country with a large portion of the world’s oil reserves.

In a part that will make you want to both laugh and cry, Coll tells of Turki’s relationship with Clinton (p.262). They were apparently at Georgetown at the sametime, though not familiar. When Clinton decided to run for president, he sent letters to influential former classmates looking for varied support. Turki didn’t remeber him and ignored him at first, until he started to look promising in the race. At that point Turki decided it would be helpful to have a correspondence with a potential president and replied.

Later after a Georgetown reunion, Clinton had both Bandar and Turki over to the White House to talk of globalization and the future of Central Asia and the MidEast. He asked Turki what kind of policies the US should pursue in places like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Apparently Clinton liked this type of opportunity to find out what others think. Coll continues:

“But Bandar and Turki left the White House disconcerted, shaking their heads. Clinton’s questions about how America should define its policies left the Saudis uneasy. They said to each other, He’s asking us?”

Turki is a whole different issue. Prior to being the UK ambassador, he was the head of the very same GID for nearly 25 years. He resigned in Aug, 2001; giving no reason as far as I’ve been able to find. He worked closely with the CIA, Pak ISI, and Afghan muhajadeen during that time. He’s had numerous meetings with UBL and was certainly a financial conduit for quite some time. He started to have misgivings about UBL in the early 90’s, yet played the Saudi game of ‘just don’t cause problems in the Kingdom’ until at least 1998. While he’s spoken out against him since (both before and after 9/11), he’s also named in the $trillion lawsuit against various Saudis by some families of 9/11 victims. He’s got blood on his hands, the question is whether he was actor or foolish bystander.

If all is right with the world, Bandar will seek to throw a pro-western influence into the Saudi intelligence and Turki will bring extensive knowledge of the Waziristan aQ networks to the US to recpay for his past sins. All is right with the world very close to never, unfortunately.

But that’s only 2 interviews.

If this is the same guy I’m thinking of, I think it’s a loss, regardless of what his wife did. Unless, like the Foxnews story says, he moves up in the hierarchy.

Anyone know any more about him than I do? The above opinion is subject to reconsideration; I admit that I’m not all that informed about him.