Better in their words…

Karen Elliott House: From Tunis to Cairo to Riyadh? – WSJ.com.

Think it can’t happen here?  I would rather not live to find out.

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In any authoritarian regime, instability seems unthinkable up to the moment of upheaval, and that is true now for Saudi Arabia. But even as American influence recedes across the Middle East, the U.S. soon may face the staggering consequences of instability here, in its most important remaining Arab ally.

….Despite the conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia is unique, and that billions in oil revenue and an omnipresent intelligence system allow the regime to maintain power by buying loyalty or intimidating its passive populace, it can happen here.

The many risks to the al Saud family’s rule can be summed up in one sentence: The gap between aged rulers and youthful subjects grows dramatically as the information gap between rulers and ruled shrinks. The average age of the kingdom’s trio of ruling princes is 83, yet 60% of Saudis are under 18 years of age. Thanks to satellite television, the Internet and social media, the young now are well aware of government corruption—and that 40% of Saudis live in poverty and nearly 70% can’t afford a home. These Saudis are living Third World lives, suffering from poor education and unable to find jobs in a private sector where 90% of all employees are imported non-Saudis. Through new media the young compare their circumstances unfavorably with those in nearby Gulf sheikhdoms and the West.

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Over the years, the royal family—now numbering nearly 7,000 princes—has come to pervade every corner of Saudi life, but it has lost public respect in the process. Almost every Saudi business, key ministry and mayoralty is headed, or figure-headed, by a prince.     …

Exacerbating the problem is that the royal rulers are old, infirm and largely out of touch. King Abdullah has been out of the kingdom for three months receiving medical treatment in the U.S. and Morocco. Crown Prince Sultan, 85 years old and ill with cancer and Alzheimer’s, rarely is seen in public. Rounding out the ruling trio is the deputy prime minister, Prince Naif, who is 77 and suffering from diabetes and osteoporosis.

After them? No one knows. What scares much of the royal family and many ordinary Saudis is that the succession, which historically has passed from brother to brother, soon will have to jump to a new generation. That could mean that only one branch of the family will have power, a prescription for potential conflict as 34 of the 35 lines of the founder’s family could find themselves disenfranchised.

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As events in Cairo have played out, some worried younger princes have privately acknowledged the need to curb corruption, better serve citizens, and reform the dysfunctional government bureaucracy. Still, to a man, even these princes stress the inevitability of al Saud rule. “We united Arabia and we remain the glue that holds it together,” says one.

What these reform-minded princes fail to understand—or at least acknowledge to foreigners—is the degree to which many young Saudis no longer respect or fear the royal family. Rather, they increasingly resent the indignity inherent in having to beg princes for favors that should be a public right.

Frustrated by these daily indignities, young Saudis experiment with drugs, steal cars and vandalize government property. Saudis at all levels of society are becoming increasingly lawless, emulating their leaders in doing whatever they can get away with. A recent target of youthful ire is a new camera system that tickets speeders. The system has been repeatedly vandalized by youth who claim that their fines enrich the Minister of the Interior, who is also responsible for the kingdom’s invasive intelligence agencies. In choosing this target, young Saudis protest both royal corruption and state intrusion into their lives.

Still, most ordinary Saudis do not crave democracy. They fear that traditional tribal divisions, coupled with a lack of social and political organizations, would lead to mayhem—or to even greater domination by the conservative religious establishment that is well-organized through the kingdom’s 70,000 mosques. If in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood is considered a potential threat, its Saudi equivalent already dominates Saudi society.

What Saudis hunger for are standard services provided by far less wealthy governments: good education, jobs, decent health care. They also want to be able to speak honestly about the political and economic issues that affect their lives. Yet when a professor of religion at Imam University dared in November to suggest on the Internet that Saudis be permitted to take public their private discussions on succession, he was jailed.

“The gap between reform here and the demands of our young is widening,” warns a senior prince. “It is a race against time because the young are tired of the status quo, tired of talk.” Saudi Arabia is not Egypt. But even in this most shrouded and supposedly most stable of Arab societies, time is running out.