The historic pact is ratified in early…

Fahd's half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, commands the National Guard, a force nearly as powerful as the Saudi army, which is under the control of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz.

While the press labels Abdullah as pro-American, the U.S. is said by some commentators to be favoring Sultan as the next in the royal succession.

In recent years Saudi Arabia, plagued by declining oil revenues, has become a debtor nation, despite that the fact that they possess twenty-five percent of the world's proven oil reserves.

The oil is located in the eastern part of the country.

US military personnel had recently been moved from Saudi Arabia to nearby bases in Qatar and Kuwait—most likely to protect the hardware and equipment against the event of internal conflict, not to mollify public opinion.

Fahd, the first son of Hassa Sudairi after her remarriage to the founder of the kingdom, Ibn Sa'ud, had become king of Saudi Arabia n 1982.

In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of neighboring Kuwait, Fahd had reversed a long-standing policy and invited Western and Arab forces to deploy in Saudi Arabia in support of the Saudi defense forces.

In Saudi Arabia, we find a Muslim and an Arab state that is potentially on the verge of civil war.

It should be lost on no one that fifteen of the nineteen alleged hijackers involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001 were identified as Saudi Arabian nationals—Arabs, but not Saudis, as this is a term applied to Saudi Arabia's ruling Saudi-Wahhabi clan, which boasts some thirty thousand princes.

The only dramatic domestic challenge to the monarchy since the Second World War took place when followers of a religious extremist seized the Al-Haram mosque (Great Mosque) in Mecca, the holiest site in the world for Muslims.

However, there is tremendous, though underreported, unrest in Saudi Arabia, mostly directed against the perceived incompetence and corruption of the Saudi rulers, and in opposition to the establishment of U.S. military bases on the Arabian Peninsula.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has become a debtor nation, borrowing money to finance social programs, which remain underfunded due to declining oil revenues and corruption.

The general population is violently anti-American and are said by Western observers to live in fear of the monarchy, which they apparently despise.

Lebanon, one of the world's smaller sovereign states and one of the most densely populated countries in the Mediterranean area, is a Middle East trouble spot with problems in dire need of a solution.

As an Arab republic, Lebanon shares many of the cultural characteristics of the Arab world, yet it has attributes that differentiate it from many of its Arab neighbors.

Its rugged, mountainous terrain has served throughout history as an asylum for diverse religious and ethnic groups and for political dissidents.

Arabic is the official language, but French and English are widely spoken; the country has one of the highest rates of literacy.

A small percentage of the population is Armenian-speaking, and Syriac is used in some of the churches of the Maronites (Roman Catholics following an Eastern rite).

In the wake of the Lebanese civil war that devastated the country form 1975 to the early 1990s, Sunnite, Shi'ite, and Christian factions vied for political power within Lebanon's revived constitutional framework.

The pro-Iranian Shi'ite group Hezbollah, founded during the early 1980s, aspired to eliminate Israeli influence from the country and replaced the PLO as Israel's principal antagonist in southern Lebanon, waging a vigorous war against the Jewish state even after that country's final withdrawal from Lebanon in mid-2000.

Seeking to develop a broader base in the 1990s, Hezbollah became increasingly active in Lebanon's coalition politics and established its own social, medical, and educational infrastructure to serve its supporters.

Much of the domestic opposition within Saudi Arabia is centered in the West, encompassing the Hejaz and ...

...Asir, the region of southwestern Saudi Arabia immediately north of Yemen.

… Serbian, and Yugoslav, and parliaments, and in February the name Yugoslavia is once again relegated to the annals of history.

Saudi Arabia's King Fahd had suffered a stroke in 1995 and had handed over control of the government to his half brother Crown Prince Abdullah on January 1, 1996.

Less than two months later, Fahd had returned to power, though Abdullah continued to handle the country's day-to-day affairs.

The ailing Fahd, eighty in 2003, lives more or less permanently in the Andalusian beach town of Marbella Spain, where his family reportedly spends an average five million dollars a day in the shops.

The US could consider reallocating its aid to Israel.

Since 1949, the US has given Israel a total of $84,854,827,200 in financial aid.

The interest costs borne by US taxpayers on behalf of Israel were, as of 2003, $49,937,000,000, making the total amount of aid given to Israel from 1949 to 2002 nearly $135 billion ($134,791,507,200).

As to military aid, the US Foreign Military Financing budget allocation to Israel for FY 2001 was $1.98 billion, about 60% of which stays in the U.S, going directly into the accounts of various defense contractors.

The Economic Support Fund Budget allocation for the same year was $840 million.

The sum of nearly 3 billion dollars per annum is typical.

Moreover, tax-deductible donations to American charities, which initially constituted one-quarter of Israel's budget, are estimated to exceed $1.5 billion per year.

The only way that the US can feasibly reallocate the aid money is if peace in the region can be guaranteed, and the only way to do that is for the Israelis to adequately satisfy the Palestinians in some meaningful way.

However, the Israelis will likely never allow the Palestinians a viable state.

A contiguous corridor, however narrow, between

the Gaza Strip and

the West Bank is out of the question, while the West Bank is increasingly crisscrossed by Israeli “security roads” and military reservations.

The best that the Palestinians can hope for is something like what Bophuthatswana land was under South Africa's apartheid government,; i.e., a noncontiguous scattering of ethnic ghettos on the marginal lands.

In addition, there is the question of a national capital.

Ram Allah is by all accounts a pleasant city, but is probably too small to serve as the capital of a Palestinian population in the multimillions, and the population of East Jerusalem is becoming, as a matter of Israeli government policy, more Jewish each year.