The Saudis are in the global saddle

The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom.

The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan (the Nation) on 7 October. It showed a garage — ‘Reforms and Repairs’ — in which a broken-down, leaking car was labelled ‘judiciary system’, and an upside-down vehicle was marked ‘schools’. A week before, the same paper carried the dismaying news that an extremist Saudi website had posted 18 flight-simulation videos for training on Boeing 747s.