They are so powerful they have a country named after them. They are The Saud Family of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship managed by democracy
core group of maybe fifteen to thirty
princes that are really controlling the
final decision on everything
a kingdom the size of Western Europe with a
quarter of the world's known oil
deposits riches that could tip the
balance of global history but with an
increasingly radical populist and a
resource that won't last forever is the
Sun setting on the House of Saud
it's a remarkable family and it's held on
a fairly fragile country
and each day brings further evidence
that the ways we use energy strengthen
our adversaries and threaten our planet
Western leaders point to Middle Eastern
oil as one of the most pressing problems
facing their countries and too many one
nation is synonymous with foreign oil
Saudi Arabia
it was called the day the West woke up the fact that 15 of the 19
terrorists on September 11 2001 were
Saudi nationals surprised some
Saudi Arabia has been a close ally of both
Europe and the United States but this
seemingly worldly group of princes and
kings has had a long lasting alliance
with a branch of Islam that has little
fondness for the West
Saudi royal family funded the extremists for years I mean
we're talking about going back to the
30s back the independence
so these people really control the media
and therefore they and they control the
schools and they have great access to
propagating their ideas
in 2005 the country crowned a new monarch King
Abdullah he promised a new era of reforms
our opinion inside the CIA was
that abdallah was more capable and many
other princes I mean he is this is a
good news for Saudi Arabia he's making
an alliance more with their liberals in
order to push the kingdom in the 21st
century a delicate balance but some fear
the fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia may
turn and bite the hand that feeds them
Saudi Arabia finally woke up and said
to itself if we continue to support
radical faction extremists mohave
factions we ourselves are going to
collapse the dynasty ruling Saudi Arabia
traces its roots to a desert past and to
a visionary tribal leader from the
mid-eighteenth century
 
 
the Wahhabist followed the teachings of Muhhamed ibn Abdel wahab
Alwahab and his followers reviled other religions and especially adherence to
other branches of islam like the Sheia
who honor figures other than the
original prophet muhammad
abdwahab have failed that islam had strayed from its
true belief so he wanted to go back to
the original beliefs of the Quran and
what had been taught by Muhammad the
wahhabis are a very strongly missionary
oriented sect they believed wahabi Islam
is will save Islam they had this fierce
religious ideology the willingness on
the part of the Iguana the Brotherhood
as they were called to die in battle
almost a willingness a wish to die in
battle
with the help of the puritanical wahabis  holy warriors the South
clan conquered land throughout the
Arabian Peninsula
in 1924 five generations later abdul
aziz bin rahman al saud also known as
eben Saud finally took over the holiest
sites in Islam Mecca and Medina even sad
is often seen as an Arabian Lawrence of
Arabia but he was better than Lawrence
was he actually fought very tall very
big had a lot of charisma and a lot of
Gots Sammy needed a lot of you know
attacks in the middle of the night
completely desperate type of military
attacks of other positions which no one
would have done I mean he was a man a
man of great courage he United the
area's warring Bedouin tribes through
both violence and intricate alliances
talking around the campfires the Bedouin
like to joke about him and south they
said he's got two songs a sort of steel
the one with which he conquered and the
sort of flesh which he used once he
conquered and would marry the chief
daughters of the tribe that he'd
conquered and thus bring that tribe
physically into the the union of the
Saudi family in 1932 he proclaimed this
conglomeration of tribes between the Red
Sea and the Persian Gulf his family's
kingdom Saudi Arabia the Arabia of the
sounds this patriarch and his 45 sons
would rule into the next century in
partnership with his religious allies
Wahhabi clerics were given wide control
of the educational and legal systems in
the early 20s abdulaziz al saud was able
to really take the ideology of Wahhabism
and we might consider today that's the
ideology of militant Islam and to really
make it into a political force in order
to pull the tribes of Saudi Arabia
together it's Islam we look at is
abhorrent because it involves cutting
people's heads off you know in slaving
women and on and on and all of thing you
know the popular cliches we know about
the kingdom survived largely from
revenues charged to the Muslims from
around the world who make the annual
pilgrimage or Hajj to Saudi Arabia's
holy sites he charged Muslims to make
the Hajj to Mecca they had to pay a fee
to be allowed in Saudi Arabia and that's
how he lived frugally but then in the
midst of the Great Depression a new
source of revenue presented itself one
that would change world history oil had
been found in nearby Iraq, Iran, and
Bahrain he was able to to have the
vision to know what he did not know he
knew that he did not do anything about
oil so he was not going to go look for
it himself knew it existed you knew he
could bring a lot of money to the
kingdom so he hired the oil company of
Southern California socal to look for
oil and eventually took them a long time
but they found oil this precursor to
today is Saudi oil behemoth Aramco gave
the King 170 thousand dollars for the
rights to drill a drop compared to the
many billions that the resource would
one day produce for the royal family
this was a personal license to drill oil
that even sound had granted in his lands
it was his money and to this day there
is a sense in which the house of South
considered the oil to be their own
personal property along with news of our
fuel oil shortages comes the fresh
warning that our known oil reserves will
be exhausted in 10 years at the current
toward the end of World War two Franklin
Delano Roosevelt recognized the
importance of Saudi oil to the United
States and invited the King aboard the
USS Quincy to officially open diplomatic
relations between the countries
the desert monarch and the patrician
from New York seems to be so different
but Roosevelt scored points when he gave
the aging warrior king his spare wheel
chair American firms have opened new
fields abroad of these one of the
biggest and most important is Saudi
Arabia beneath its blistering sands lies
and global shipping now safe again and a
major customer secured oil production
resumed and so did the flow of money the
King wanted to modernize no small feat
when his ideological partners the
wahhabis outlawed innovations developed
after the time of Muhammad he wanted to
attain modernity for his people while
keeping his society as it was in the
earliest days of Islam this is a tall
order but it's a formula that he
perfected and at a naval Saudi Arabia to
maintain its puritanical religion and at
the same time except an identity that
has come through to this day i believe
and i think that was amazingly it showed
amazing vision on his part it allowed
arranged a special demonstration of how
the phone could work and he had it call
up a distant town and he said to one
religious shake well why don't you speak
on the phone and see what you can hear
at the other end and at the other end
even sound had had stations another
religious shape and so when the
religious saw that this work of the
devil could in fact be used to to make
their own communications easier they
changed their mind as the battle-scarred
King aged and his severe arthritis
increased his kingdom seemed poised for
either great wealth or Oblivion by the
early 1950s people around the world
wondered could the new nation last
longer than its charismatic founder who
would be the next king the system of
succession in Europe are in royalty it
tends to go from
to son and if there's no son we name a
woman and then you have a queen they it
it doesn't work like this in a bed Wayne
system in the bed Wayne system the the
family gets together and tries to find
out who the most important leader is
Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship managed
by a democracy in other words the royal
family works solely by consensus and any
decision in the royal family has to be
okayed by everyone with the wrong
successor the fledgling country's vast
wealth could be squandered and the
kingdom could quickly returned to its
desert roots the kingdom of saudi arabia
was propelled from a group of desert
tribes to a modern nation this happened
in just a few decades at the hands of
its founding king known in the West as
it been south but in his waning years
he'd been sawed faced a problem in the
last years of his life even sound relied
very strongly on his two eldest
surviving sons sawed and feisal but most
people who knew the two brothers knew
that the second brother Faisal was the
one who really had it in his head the
one who had the political ability and so
before he died he burns out is said to
have brought the two brothers together
and asked that although one would
obviously become king that was sold and
the younger one pfizer will become Crown
Prince they should see themselves as a
partnership and should work as a team on
november nine 1953 the warrior who
established Saudi Arabia died in his son
fizzles arms but feisal was not the heir
to the throne I don't know why I was
chosen over face I'll probably because
he was more senior and had therefore
more following the rest of their family
and was probably more of a unifier into
the family but he did not do well
because he spent too much money to
quickly and he brought the counting them
to bankruptcy facing the new king saud
eventually built ten palaces and in one
year ran up five million dollars in food
bills alone he gave solid gold watches
to visitors watches sporting his own
portrait they became known as Mickey
South salad was known as a mis manager
he was not what we call a successful
manager by modern standards the country
run into huge deficits he had a
reputation for being more interested in
the leisurely lifestyle than in the
running of of a concrete sounds
extravagance even extended to his
personal life he had fifty two sons and
fifty five daughters
sounds brothers were concerned about the
hemorrhaging budget and there were hobby
Muslim partners were concerned with his
relationship with Egypt's Gamal Nasser a
proponent of socialism would the Royal
Family Council try to undo the will of
the patriarch King
would there be a coup d'etat
they were worried about Arab socialism
and they were worried about Nasser's
connections with the Soviet Union the
Saudis are deeply religious consider
communism generally speaking is atheism
u.s. president dwight d eisenhower
courted the king in an effort to shift
the balance of power away from the
soviet union with the help of his
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
Eisenhower and Dulles had the idea for a
time that soured representing the Saudi
state which was receiving more and more
oil income might be a useful counter to
Nasser in the Arab world South favored
Eisenhower's economic aid over Nasser's
movement but the cash infusion wasn't
enough the Family Council moved to
sidelines out and put the Crown Prince
his brother Faisal in charge of
day-to-day affairs a huge embarrassment
to a sitting monarch King Saud tried to
regain power but the deficits continued
he was declared unfit to rule and exiled
to Greece in 1964 even who the king is
is defined by the family you know you
have to be very very subtle and very
careful and how you work this out if you
want to maintain yourself in power he
simply was not up to running a country
that was rapidly moving from the seventh
century into the 20th century he skilled
the sensitivities the sophistication the
administrative skills he just didn't
possess he was a rather tragic figure it
was Saudi Arabia's bloodless coup the
deposed King died in nineteen sixty-nine
King Faisal had already been the
country's leader for years President
Kennedy supposedly said to file your
majesty you're going to deny this but
there are slaves in your country and I
want them free and they were through as
a result of this meeting
personality-wise they were so different
intellectually they were so different
sewed the last thing one would ever said
about him was that he was an
intellectual that wasn't his interest
Faisal was very well-read paid attention
to all kinds of things he was he was a
very wise able man an austere figure
with a surprising past
I understand that when he was a young
man he was a bit of a libertine at times
I can't say how much you're just wear
but that was what the stories were in
his youth feisal was known to live the
high life even on a humble picnic with
friends well that was hysterical that
really was history and we we prepare the
beef hot dogs and and all the fixings
for any picnic and we went to the park
in limousines yes and I'll never forget
Prince Faisal got a hot dog bun put the
hot dog and caviar hope Elsa on top of
it this was a trend that would be
repeated again princes who break Islamic
laws by drinking and carousing who later
become devout Kings feisal soon became
one of the most popular monarchs the
region had ever known
keep feisal I think you could almost
call him the idealized King he was Paul
he was very distinguished-looking much
more educated and worldly than any of
the predecessors this popularity meant
that feisal was able to launch ambitious
plans to modernize the country he built
hospitals schools and initiated massive
irrigation projects fasala more than any
other king in the kingdom is the person
who actually propelled the kingdom to
the modern era the man would work 12 to
14 hours a day receiving petitions
seeing if our diplomats meeting with his
cabinet so he was unlike any other Saudi
ruler I have known he was a creature of
work he was the cleverest King dev and
in some ways revolution room and I'll
give you an example girls didn't exist
until fiesel became king and when he
opened the first one a lot of protests
from the all of us and everybody else
then wanted to tear down and he stood
his crown and get away with it one
advanced didn't go over well with the
hardline Wahhabi clerics and their
followers the introduction of television
it was a hard pill to swallow for those
who opposed any innovation after the
time of Muhammad their actual
demonstrations against this wicked
Western invention that would bring these
ghastly soap operas showing the
decadence of the West into the Holy Land
King Faisal insisted that this was an
innovation which under control could
actually enhance education and pushed it
through one of Basil's own nephews was
killed during the ensuing skirmishes but
there were riots in the streets and
and one of the young men who was rioting
was a prince and was killed by the riot
police but through his own example of
piety and Bedouin tradition he seemed to
keep the extremists at bay with his
modernizations in place he was able to
rest controlling interest of a country's
oil company Aramco from Westerners
Saudis started to run the oil fields it
was this the great national asset that
feisal felt that the Saudi should take
control of themselves it jerks Saudi
Arabia out of this medieval past and
threw them on to the center of the world
stage because they were producing so
much oil so much money was coming in
that they had to spend this money in
order to keep the international economy
going a further break with the West came
when Israel's neighbors attacked her
during 1973's yom kippur war and the
u.s. sided against the Arab nations he
felt very deeply about Israel very
strongly about that he always insisted
he was not anti-semitic anti-jewish but
he was anti-israel having gotten this
message that we're going to be
even-handed in two days later saying and
we're going to give two billion dollars
to the Israelis for military aid was a
breach of trust person and it was at
that point that something advised was
snapped and he gave way to a very strong
female that was generated by those
around him that the power of oil held by
the Arabs should actually be used in
this wall as a leader in the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries or OPEC he called for an oil
embargo feisal made his Oil Minister
Sheikh ammani a household name
throughout the world as the Saudis
seemed to be in direct control of the
flow of gasoline
it was the only card he had to play was
the only weapon he had in his arsenal
that he thought would make a an impact
on on American I did make a big economic
impact on America but it certainly
didn't change American policy relations
were damaged and revenues were down but
feisal had become one of the most
powerful leaders the Arab world had ever
seen but had his effort to modernize
gone too far too fast the decision to
introduce television to the kingdom came
back to haunt him on March twenty-fifth
nineteen seventy five the brother of the
young nephew killed in the television
riots was admitted for an audience with
the King and when he his tent agreed
feisal he pulled his gun and and blast
his brain
I was so so horrified still AM to think
a man of that caliber amount of that
dream a man of that desire to make
things better had to reach such a
horrible ending one could argue that
because he was killed on the in great
part because of his belief in modernity
it really made the country realize that
that's what you had to do in other words
us sort of a martyr to the cause of the
future the nation went into mourning
with this assassination the question
came far sooner than anyone expected who
would take the reins of this emerging
global powerhouse with the assassination
of king faisal the kingdom of saudi
arabia suffered another crisis of
leadership the royal family quickly
chose a successor an uncontroversial and
little-known prince named khalid he
became king as a sort of a compromise
candidate because a lot of people
thought fahd was the de facto strong man
at the time even under King Faisal
because Forrest's other the main advisor
to him face that but Fahad because of
his reputation as a playboy and whatnot
did not always have the support of the
rest of their family so Halid who has
thought by many people as not wanting to
be king at all sort of was made king as
a peacemaker as a interim personality
until things could be sorted out Halid
was more of a caretaker king unlike
vessel who was always busy running a
government Halid was much more
comfortable in the tribal environment he
was the least remember person and all of
these people he did nothing he was not
interested in being common a king I
spent most of his time out in the desert
King Khalid loved city
the desert he loved his hawks but as he
got older he wasn't so mobile and so he
had a sofa put into the back of
all-terrain-vehicle and we'll go out
hunting in that during the reign of the
caretaker King there were major shifts
in the Muslim world in 1979 militant
fundamentalists took over the mosque in
mecca saudi forces killed over 100
people taking over Mecca was truly for
them a wake-up call this cannot continue
solving problems like this the side is
remarkably by the way for a Middle
Eastern country backed away from
violence just one month later
Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet
Army to the Wahhabi clerics who were the
Royal Family's partners this was an
unacceptable presence in the region the
Soviet Union was seen as godless it was
godless and therefore a direct threat
not just Afghanistan but to the whole
Muslim community in Afghanistan Saudi
Arabia was the full partner of the
United States we both agreed the best
thing to do is just hand out arms and
money Saudi nationals went in droves to
fight the Soviets including a young
Osama bin Laden it was very successful
for the Saudis and successful for us the
Saturday the Soviets were defeated and
all these young Mujahideen paid and
trained by the Saudis and to some degree
paid and trade by us we're also
victorious
but actions have consequences Khalid
suffered a heart attack in 1982 he died
of just seven years into his reign
Khaled's legacy the saudi involvement in
Afghanistan would have major
repercussions in years to come how do
you rent a great young warriors when
they come back victorious from a war
they looked and they saw instead of a
country ruled by Shepherd king's living
austere muslin lives they saw a country
that was run by and for the benefit of
the royal family and where there was a
gap between what the royal family said
and what it actually did with Khaled's
death the Crown Prince Fahd became king
by reputation he seemed the opposite of
the austere Muslim that the wahhabis
populace expected of their leader word
had it that he had once lost six million
dollars in a single night in Monte Carlo
he owned yachts an estate in Spain even
fahad's weight was seen as a symbol of
royal decadence the kingsway could
balloon up into you know well over 200
pounds and perhaps a good deal closer to
300 pounds and then he would go on these
crash dies but pretty soon you seaman
and even in the flattering concealing
garments that the Saudis war you could
tell that there was a lot of King they
are beneath these garments I think it
added to the way people saw him as
someone who was not as self disciplined
and with the same inner checks that does
someone like a faisal so totally had the
entire family came under scrutiny one
prince alwaleed bin talal was said to be
worth nearly 20 billion dollars before
his stake in citi group plummeted during
the bank crisis of 2008 and 2009
in one of his opulent homes Alwaleed had
17 dining rooms 12 elevators and a
private screening room hardly the
Spartan life of waha vast Islam which
shuns anything developed past the
seventh century rather than writing in
the royal family he more or less just
let the run wild I think Fahad really
was breaking the commitment to what I
might call social justice in Saudi
Arabia and allowing the elites to amass
great well they were very much nouveau
riche at the time and all of a sudden
that this big man are coming from heaven
and you know they were spending it like
crazy I mean it was very much fun and
then they realized that there's a lot of
drawback to that also King Fahd was
really was seen by the religious
establishment as being too wild and so
when he became king he had to make up
for that even as the Royals reaped their
percentage of the oil profits
unemployment within the kingdom sword
you had this population explosion more
and more people who were needing
education and needing health service of
needing housing and needing jobs and the
salaries just were not producing the
jobs that they needed in order to keep
the population you know satisfied the
discontented masses trained in Madras
schools and funded by the Saudi
government were about to add another
grievance international forces
non-muslim soldiers were about to be
stationed on their holy soil at the
invitation of the royal family
in 1990 Iraq's Saddam Hussein ordered
the invasion of Kuwait an international
coalition was poised to take Kuwait back
King Fahad fearing that his kingdom was
also in Saddam's sites agreed to station
foreign troops on Saudi soil Sally's had
always had a real fear and resentment of
an American military presence in Saudi
Arabia for two reasons one they are
xenophobic and the idea of armed
foreigners in the country was very
disquieting to them another thing that
that was a grave concern to them was
that they consider Saudi Arabia to be
sacred soil because it is the place
where Mecca and Medina are as if to
counter the criticisms fahad need to
fund the religious right you allowed the
conservatives to take over society and
under the the years of King Fahad
society became very very closed women
were not allowed to work when they were
allowed to work before of course they
still are not enough to drive you know
foreigners were really kept aside etc
etc and they gave a lot of money to
movements outside the proselytizing
movements outside Saudi Arabia to push
this this conservative were happy tram
and so the religious right was always
reluctant to attack the royal family I
mean they were the finance ears but the
efforts didn't silence the most radical
elements especially since five thousand
American troops remained after the first
Gulf War
a fact that made the top of Osama bin
Laden's list of grievances he uses the
American presence to recruit some of
these religious extremists who are
trained and show the universities to
literally hate non-muslims and look who
is supporting the show the royal family
the infidels are supporting them who
happens to be having bases in our
country in November 1995 angry rhetoric
turned to violence a us run training
facility in Riyadh was bombed killing
five Americans and two citizens of india
king fahad claimed to have found and
executed the guilty terrorists but US
law enforcement agents complained that
they had never been given access to the
investigations from our point of view
here of course previewed it as the
killing of US servicemen and therefore
we wanted to be involved but from the
south is it was on their territory and
they were going to lead the operation
and they were going to manage the how it
was investigated the following year
terrorists drove a truck with 5,000
pounds of explosives into an
international complex called the khobar
towers 19 americans were killed and
nearly 400 people of various
nationalities were injured this was a
strike at the royal family bring it down
and I think it was vulnerable
and then the events of September 11 2001
15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi
nationals the alleged mastermind Osama
bin Laden was also from Saudi Arabia
people around the world started to focus
on the royal family and their
relationship with the hardline Wahhabi
branch of Islam this was never planned
by the Saudi royal family but they
allowed the Wahhabis to spend their
money in places like Pakistan and this
is the result working victim's family is
alleged that key Saudi figures funded
al-qaeda including Prince Sultan the
defense minister and Prince Turki
al-faisal the ambassador to Great
Britain at the time although we cannot
prove that high-ranking Saudi officials
committed this atrocity we know for a
certainty that they were the terrorists
travel agents who delivered them
well-fed well-trained and well-equipped
to the World Trade Center that day most
of these allegations were dropped by
2005 but damage had been done the Saudi
monarchs threatened to divest of key
investments in the United States during
this period Fahad suffered a
debilitating stroke and Crown Prince
Abdullah took responsibility for
day-to-day operations it was
excruciating period for the Saudis
because they didn't know who was in
control so you had a huge power vacuum
rumors swirled that fahad's prominent
full brother's known as the sidari seven
weren't ready to give up power the SU
dairy seven are they had a single mother
from sue dare it was the favorite wife
of abdul aziz the founder of saudi
arabia
and they had seven boys out of this
relationship who were all very capable
politically well-connected and have run
the key ministries key industries in
Saudi Arabia and they act as a faction
there were even whispers that Fahad was
being kept on artificial life support to
prevent Abdullah from taking the throne
in these inner circles of the royal
family no one knows how decisions are
made no one knows why they're being made
and I don't I don't know whether that
was it's a possibility I don't know
whether that was the fact or not i think
it's it's really what i would call a
rumor but of course in the middle is
true memories news you know inside and
outside saudi arabia some worried that
the crisis of leadership could mean the
end of the kingdom of saudi arabian 2003
in 2004 was on the brink of an
insurrection allah hafiz in 2005 king
fahad died after being seriously ill for
10 years the Crown Prince Abdullah
became king you know he's supposed to be
a very simple man as simple as a man
worth billions of dollars can ever be
you know but he's supposed to be able to
talk to the people and to speak very
straight to the people and that in fact
he's been criticized in some circles
from not being diplomatic he says it the
way it is he knows he's very old he's
got to achieve things and he will not
waste his time on people you know being
gentle and nice it just tells him
straight we always knew all along that
he was going to be much more
what Casey more responsible leader is
not the word he's not particularly
pro-american he personally despised the
Bush administration held it responsible
for the war in Iraq relations between
the Saudi royal family and the United
Kingdom also hit a rough patch that
country's Serious Fraud Office
investigated a scheme in which Prince
Bandar son of Saudi Arabia's defence
minister took massive bribes from the
arms manufacturer bae systems it was
very well known in the kingdom that the
bae contracts had been subject to
probably some kind of understandings on
how the payments were made and what i
did not realize is that there would be
two million dollars a month passed on by
bae to Prince Bandar in Washington
things went from bad to worse when Prime
Minister Tony Blair called early
investigation to be halted I don't
believe the investigation is then they
would have led anywhere except to the
complete wreckage of a vital strategic
relationship for our country the Prime
Minister of Great Britain compromised
hence cos can't his judicial system
democratic values and tradition because
of threats from this charity rolling
family that's that's a very dangerous
precedence as King Abdullah could
finally roll out more of the reforms
that he promised but change can happen
slowly in the Middle East the real point
is management inside the country
and you know frankly I didn't think this
was going to be this smooth Saudi Arabia
is stepping into the 21st century slowly
but it's coming in because he believes
that the kingdom will only reach its
potential if it's allowed to develop
economically and that means really
moving away from the conservative
religious establishment Abdullah has
also started to carry out his goal to
loosen ties to the west he tried also
very hard to go east to China and to
India and have arm deals and harm sales
with these people and cooperation and he
felt comfortable with that and he used
that actually as a blackmailing
instrument against the West you know
you're not the only boys and girls and
tongue I'm in China and India their
economies they will use our oil we could
get arms of from them we could services
so we don't need you as much as we do
whatever his reputation Abdullah seemed
to hold particular sway with the product
of another oil family president george w
bush the big image we have of this thing
is when abdella went to crawford texas
and talked to the president and walked
with the president around the compound
there and that meeting in crawford was
very important for the Saudis not so
much for the war in Iraq which there was
always disagreement and we will never
agree with us on anything on that but
one of the big decisions I were taking
it profit which didn't make headlines at
the time where's the fact that the king
was able to convince the President to
allow Saudi Arabian to the WTO against a
lot of the objections of the Europeans
today Abdullah is pushing to diversify
making the kingdom less dependent on one
resource if the price of oil stays down
below thirty dollars for a long period
of time Saudi Arabia will once again
face existential problems as will the
rest of the Gulf so they're they're
spending an enormous amount of money on
education to bring more research more
dependent on science they are spending
an enormous amount of money on creating
factories that will use their energy of
course because that's what they have as
cheap but in a way that instead of
selling it for forty dollars a barrel
that after the value added and the work
and so on they will sell ultimately for
five hundred dollars of them Abdullah is
the right man at the right time he has
maintained his ties to the to the
traditionalist he is very well respected
by all salaries as being highest
uncorrupted and he knows it's going to
take a generation at least to change
educational system but he knows if you
don't start now you'll never get
anywhere and the kingdom will stay as a
second-rate power forever in February
2009 King Abdullah shocked the world he
announced that he was dismissing
ultra-conservatives from top posts and
made other changes and we've seen with
the appointment of a female minister
Deputy Minister Minister this is all
fantastic news for Saudi Arabia this is
a vibrant society it has its problems
like old societies in the world but it
is not a failed society it is
experiencing growing pains but it is a
society that will
if abdullah strategies work the House of
Saud will also endure but the king is in
his 80s by 2009 Crown Prince Sultan was
reportedly already terminally ill plus
the rest of the sons of the founding
king are also of advanced age the
succession process is anything but a
sure thing soon a grandson or even a
great-grandson of the founding king will
have to be chosen and we don't know
who's going to be next but he has made
it in such a way that whoever comes next
will be very close to his views of where
it should go many of them the grandsons
are educated people very detached from
the past I mean from the bed when the
traditions like King Abdullah has a
progress they grow up in semi-nomadic
life and you know like to the sword
dance and go to the desert and hunting
these new generations to grow up like
many other generations with computers
and you know public universities and the
western other places so their value
system has changed too so there might be
some might be some positive changes in
terms of splitting power little bit okay
but it will be very interesting thing to
see in just a matter of decades the
Saudi royal family has presided over in
nations transition from a tribal society
to a major player on the world stage
despite all the internal and
international turmoil the House of Saud
has retained its power was the Saudis
like to say they're like a fist when
their threat
gather but I think the important
question about the Saudi royal family is
they don't shoot a poison each other
because if they do it's the end of
Saudis
