Backgrounder: Saudi Arabia is key U.S. ally

The Prophet's Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, a holy site in Islam second only to nearby Mecca.

By Joel Hochmuth
CNN

(CNN) – Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally at the center of a heated debate about its role.

Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, and others in Congress have criticized the nation for not taking a more vociferous stance against Afghanistan in the midst of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

United States officials, however, stress that Saudi Arabia is a committed ally.

"The Saudi’s are doing quite a bit," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. In addition to identifying Osama bin Laden, the nation has also severed all diplomatic relations with the Taliban, Powell said.

"They are very much a participating member of the coalition," he added.

Over the years, the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has been nurtured more by necessity than genuine friendship. Since1932 Saudi Arabia has been a monarchy ruled by the al-Saud ruling family.

About the size of France and Germany combined, Saudi Arabia is a largely barren land, but under all the sand lies the largest known petroleum deposits in the world.

By the early 1970s, the United States was so dependent on the buried oil that there was a crisis when Saudi Arabia temporarily cut off exports in response to the Arab-Israeli War.

By the 1980s, however, old animosities were shoved aside when distrust of a common foe, the Soviet Union, aligned America and Saudi Arabia again.

In an alliance forged by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and King Fahd, America protected Saudi Arabia from the Soviet Union and received access to Saudi oil in return. Then, in 1990 there was another common enemy. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and his forces overran neighboring Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia feared it would be next. The nation rolled out the red carpet for American troops, provided the staging area for the Persian Gulf War, and even contributed arms and troops of its own to the counter-attack,

That help infuriated Osama bin Laden, then a Saudi citizen. After he was named a suspect in various acts of terror during the 1990s, Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship and seized his assets

Now the two countries are united in the fight against the Taliban, to a point.

While the Saudi’s have condemned the terrorist attacks in the United States, and are supporting the campaign in Afghanistan for now, they have not authorized U.S. planes to take off from Prince Sultan Airbase.

Reports of growing dissatisfaction among the Saudi people toward King Fahd’s rule are surfacing, and some say a fundamentalist movement is growing in the nation. After all, 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia.

MORE COUNTRY BACKGROUNDERS • Turkey  • Iran  • Turkistan  • Pakistan  • Afghanistan

"The reality is … this is a country in a lot of trouble with a lot of opposition, and a lot of dissent," said journalist Seymour Hersh.

"People have been predicting the demise of Saudi Arabia for the last 60 or 70 years," said Saudi Foreign Policy Advisor Adel al-Jubair.

"Every decade we have a new flavor of the decade. First we are too backward, then we are too poor ,,, the only constant in all of this is that they have all been wrong," he said.

The United States is hoping he's right. If Saudi Arabia falls to Islamic extremists, America would not only lose a key ally, it might gain a new enemy.