SAUDI ARABIA - The Political Perspective For Saudis & The Bin Laden Factor.

Many things have changed around the world since 9/11, when 19 hijackers including 15 Saudis destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York and hit the Pentagon in Washington. The US response has been a world war being fought in ways different from previous conflicts.

The war will lead to a change in the political map of the Muslim World, with Iraq now having become a central front against global terrorism, and will affect Saudi Arabia.

The problem for the kingdom is that Osama Bin Laden - Enemy No. 1 to the US and who has vowed to topple the Saudi royal family - became a hero to Saudis soon after his videotaped message was broad-cast late on Oct. 7, 2001 by the Al Jazeera satellite TV network. That was hours after the US and Britain launched an air and missile war on Bin Laden's Al Qaida network and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden swore that the US, which he wanted to oust from the Arabian Peninsula, would not live in peace until peace reigned in Palestine. He also said: "What America is suffering today does not constitute even a negligible part of what we (Muslims) have suffered for decades" (see background in Vol. 57, No. 16).

A videotaped message Bin Laden's deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri recently said that the 9/11 events were nothing but a small skirmish and promised a big attack to take place somewhere soon.

There is a low-intensity civil war in Saudi Arabia. Pitched battles between Saudi security forces and well-trained and armed Al Qaida militants have become frequent since the government declared war on Bin Laden followers after suicide bombings in Riyadh on May 12 killed 35 people, including nine attackers.

More than 15 militants have been killed and more than 220 suspects have been arrested in a series of police raids since then. Thousands of Wahhabi mosque imams have been dismissed across Saudi Arabia. But most of them are said to be active in a clandestine movement.

What makes this problem serious is unemployment, which among male Saudis stands at about 17%, in a quickly growing population. Combined with corruption and nepotism caused by "royal patronage" this has become a ticking bomb. One can perceive the dangers of a growing popularity for the likes of Bin Laden among jobless Saudis.

On Oct. 6, 2001, a report from Jeddah published in the IHT quoted "an influential lawyer who works with international companies" as saying: "Osama Bin Laden has been called the conscience of Islam. What he says and what he does represents what most Muslims or Arabs want to say but can't. What he says we like, we agree with it".

There are still about 35,000 Americans and 30,000 Britons among the six million expatriates working in Saudi Arabia. But the US forces have moved from their Prince Sultan air base to Qatar.

Bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi nationality in 1994, was in fact trying to imitate Hasan-i-Sabbah of the late 11th and early 12th centuries who was popularly known as "the Old Man of the Mountains". Founder of the Nizaris, who later became known as Hashashin ("Assassins" - a name derived from the sect's and its killers' use of hashish), Sabbah managed to terrorise most Muslim rulers as well as the Crusaders at the time.

That sect's network survived for nearly 200 years. So it no longer matters if Bin Laden, having become leader of Wahhabism's Jihadi Salafis, is dead or alive. There are now many of his like among the millions in Saudi Arabia and any other part of the world where the Wahhabis have penetrated with petrodollars since the oil boom of the mid-1970s.

The US-led war against terrorism will last many years. One of its most recent aspects is a call among powerful US politicians for the royal family to dissociate itself from the Wahhabi religious establishment - which is impossible for the House of Saud to do as this is the source of its legitimacy.

It is a US-led cold war and will be fought in various overt and covert ways. How it will affect Saudi Arabia and its petroleum policies remains to be seen. Also to be seen is whether and how this will affect a new version of the Saudi gas opening, for the world's biggest companies to explore for and produce gas for integrated or stand-alone power and water desalination or petrochemical projects (see Gas Market Trends of this week).

Saudi Arabia badly needs these projects to provide jobs for its nationals. Only by diversifying its economy away from oil on a big scale will Saudi Arabia be able to solve the unemployment problem. Per capita income in this kingdom has fallen from $19,000 at the height of the oil boom in 1981 to about $7,000.