WASHINGTON: Judging by the media coverage, much of the US and international political establishment was taken aback to learn that Saudi Arabia is considering asking Washington to withdraw its military presence from the kingdom. But to experts on the US-Saudi alliance, which dates back to World War II, the story came as little surprise.

They have warned for some time that under Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler in Saudi Arabia since King Fahd suffered debilitating strokes several years ago, the regime was likely to distance itself from Washington. Abdullah is widely considered both more nationalistic and more tuned in to domestic Saudi opinion than his two predecessors.

As Charles W. Freeman, a former US ambassador and frequent visitor to Riyadh, said, “for the first time since 1973, we actually have a situation in which the United States is so unpopular among the (Saudi) public that the royal family now thinks its security is best served by publicly distancing itself from the United States.”

For months since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, the US media have been full of accounts of rising anti-US sentiment, which has made the kingdom a fertile recruiting ground and fund-raising source for al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi national who was stripped of his citizenship by government decree in 1994.

So intense was the coverage - one typical New York Times headline read “ Anti-Western and Extremist Views Pervade Saudi Arabia” - that Abdullah himself complained publicly about what he called a “ferocious campaign by the Western media against the kingdom” in early November, a theme that has since been echoed frequently by Prince Bandar, the influential Saudi ambassador here, and other senior officials.

The US has always had a close military and intelligence relationship with Riyadh, which has bought more than $50 billion in US arms and construction contracts over the past 20 years with the hundreds of billions of dollars it has earned as the world’s biggest oil exporter. It was a close ally during the Cold War, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to US-supported insurgents from Angola to Afghanistan, to Nicaragua.

With Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, however, those ties took a quantum leap. After a meeting immediately following the invasion, between top Saudi leaders and then defence secretary, now Vice President Dick Cheney, the kingdom invited the US to use its territory as the launching pad for rolling back Baghdad’s occupation.

After the war, Riyadh agreed to maintain some 5,000 US troops on its soil. It also permitted scores of US warplanes and pilots to be based at the Prince Sultan Air Base, where Washington has installed a state-of-the-art command centre that covers virtually the entire Middle East, Gulf and Central Asia regions.

Ironically, the US military presence was perhaps the most important catalyst in driving Osama - who saw it as a desecration of Islam and its holiest places - to launch his “jihad” against Washington.

His message clearly resonated both with conservative clerics and Saudi youth, many of whom are unemployed. In 1995, a car bomb killed five US military advisers in Riyadh. It was followed the next year by the bombing of the Khobar Towers apartments, which housed US troops. Nineteen US servicemen were killed in the blast, which resulted in the US military presence being moved to a more remote location and new tensions over the subsequent investigation.

Various currents on both the right and the left of US opinion have long been critical of its close ties to the royal family for a variety of reasons, ranging from its human rights record and authoritarianism to its history of corruption. In anticipation of Osama, these same forces argued during the Gulf War that a permanent US military presence in the world’s largest oil exporter would turn its population against Washington.

But recent events - including the preponderance of Saudi nationals among the Sept 11 skyjackers, the intense media attention paid to private Saudi support for Al Qaeda and anti-Western feeling within the kingdom, the rise of a more friendly Russia as a major oil exporter, the new US military foothold in energy-rich Central Asia, and even the apparent collapse of the Oslo peace process - have clearly weakened the kingdom’s standing and influence here to the lowest point in memory. —Dawn/InterPress Service.