WASHINGTON, Jan 18: US President George W. Bush wants to keep the US military presence in Saudi Arabia despite reported grumblings from the Saudis that the United States has overstayed its welcome.

“The president believes the current arrangements are working and working well,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Friday.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Saudi Arabia’s rulers are growing more uncomfortable with the US military presence in their country and may soon ask that it end. It said senior Saudi rulers believe that the United States should pull out because its forces have become a political liability.

Fleischer said he was not aware of any contact between the United States and Saudi Arabia expressing a desire for the US military to leave.

“The relationship is just as strong as it always has been,” said Fleischer, who noted Bush spoke to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah last week.

Secretary of State Colin Powell dismissed the Post report, saying, “There is nothing to that story that warrants my attention at the moment.”

The United States has insisted that all was well in the US-Saudi relationship despite some signs of a strain in the wake of the Sept 11 attacks.

On Nov 9, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, was quoted by the New York Times as saying Bush’s refusal to meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat “makes a sane man go mad” and that his government was “angrily frustrated” that Washington had failed to bring a promised initiative to forge a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

In addition, a former Saudi intelligence chief has said the crown prince sent a letter to Bush before Sept 11, saying the world’s biggest oil exporter would be forced to review its ties with the United States unless Washington took active steps to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Saudi Arabia depends on the United States for its defense, but has found itself walking a tightrope with increasing uneasiness among many Saudis over the presence of US troops there.

If asked to leave the United States would no longer have regular use of the Prince Sultan Air Base, where American forces have maintained a presence since the 1991 Gulf war.

But there is some talk in Washington that US forces should pull out anyway.

Just this week, Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the US military might need to end operations at Prince Sultan Air Base given the restrictions on US military personnel there. Women are forced to wear an “abaya”, a traditional item of dress similar to the burqa, when off base in Saudi Arabia.

A female US Air Force fighter pilot has filed a lawsuit to end this policy, which the Pentagon says is necessary to avoid offending Muslim sensitivities.

“We may need to move that base,” Levin told reporters. He said the Saudis had forced US personnel to operate at a base in a remote region and seemed to “want us out of sight”.

Shipley Telhami, a Middle East analyst for the Brookings Institution, said he believed the Saudis have concluded having US forces in Saudi Arabia is no longer essential to the US goal of containing Iraq and in fact had become a sore point domestically.

“The Saudis aren’t fearful that an American pullout from their own territory will then make them more vulnerable to Iraq or Iran,” he added.

Air Force Secretary James Roche said he had not been asked to look for alternatives to Prince Sultan Air Base.

He told a defense writers’ breakfast the facilities in Saudi Arabia, especially the combined air operations centre which coordinates data from satellites, aircraft and other sensors, would be hard to replace.

But Roche, prodded by a questioner, said he was unaware of a reported contingency plan to shift the combined air operations centre to Bahrain if Saudi Arabia nudged the United States to leave.

“The Saudis have cooperated with the Air Force in everything we have asked of them,” he said. “Everything we have asked, the Saudi government has done for us.”—Reuters