Last week's Saudi-inspired announcement by the international oil cartel OPEC that crude oil production would be increased by two million barrels a day to help stabilise soaring prices was a godsend for the corrupt and decadent House of Saud.

The move allowed the oil-rich kingdom, which holds 25 per cent of the world's petroleum reserves, to deftly explain to the West that it was acting in the best interests of the global economy - while at the same time capitalising ruthlessly on the highest oil prices the world has ever seen.

Unbelievably, Saudi Arabia is now broke, thanks to the incompetence, decadent lifestyle and sheer criminal corruption of the ruling elite. Its oil income has plummetted from $140 billion a year in 1981 to just $60 billion today and its economy has been in deficit for most of the past two decades.

Standards of living among the disenfranchised poor and the educated middle classes are falling year-on-year and now the feudal, absolute monarchy of the Saudi royal family is under pressure like never before.

Even the most ill-educated Saudi citizen knows that the ruling family has presided over an unprecendented squandering of its oil riches. While they live in a repressive, undemocratic state under the cosh of both civil and religious police forces, they can only watch powerlessly as their rulers fritter everything away.

There are currently more than 9,000 members of the Saudi Royal family, but their numbers are increasing by 50-60 male babies - they don't bother to count females - every month. Each is entitled, from birth, to a salary of £380,000 per year.

These are people who are too proud to work, but who demand a lavish, spectacular lifestyle, To fund it, they will stop at nothing. They skim profits from oil sales before the money even reaches the Saudi treasury, they take bribes for major arms and construction projects, they sell oil on the open market in defiance of OPEC quotas. Furthermore, they ruthlessly suppress anyone who gets in their way.

The unavoidable truth is that the Saudi royal family has spectacularly failed to use its oil wealth wisely. The true state of the country's economic crisis is sytematically concealed using secret loans and officially-sanctioned cooking of the books.

The top four members of the family - the ailing 82-year-old King Fahd, his heir Abdullah, 81, Crown Prince Sultan, 79 and 77-year-old Prince Salman have just eleven years of education between them - and that at sychophantic Royal schools where their teachers were afraid to correct them.

Their family is beset by petty feuding, they have failed to secure a workable succession and they have presided over an economic disaster for the last 30 years. In many of those years, spending on Western defence contracts has accounted for up to 92.5 per cent of the country's oil receipts as the Saud dynasty fights to keep a grip on power.

The result is that now almost every Saudi citizen opposes them and accuses the royal family of putting the West's need for cheap oil over the interests of their own people. The Government, which is made up almost entirely of members of the House of Saud has cracked down on moderate opposition with the result that thousands are now languishing in jails.

The traditional form of protest by petitioning the king - who under Muslim custom is an absolute ruler - has collapsed and now the only form of opposition in the country is the heavily-armed fundamentalists who are agitating for a hardline Islamic state under strict Sharia law.

Part of the reason that the fundamentalists have such widespread support is that few ordinary citizens feel that their everyday lives would change very much in an Islamic state. They are already at the mercy of civil and religious police who dispense summary justice and are effectively a law unto themselves.

But a greater problem is that the House of Saud has sponsored extreme fundamentalist groups at home and abroad since the early 1960s because they believed that the Muslims would best counter the communist threat they believed was personified by President Nasser of Egypt. Indeed, it was with Saudi connivance and Saudi finanacial backing that Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi citizen, came to prominence.

But the growing instability of their own country - including last week's al Qaeda massacre of 22 people, mostly Western oil workers, at the eastern city of Khobar - has proved their strategy to be breathtakingly shortsided, naive and foolhardy.

It is interesting, too, that the perpetrators have yet to be caught. The dividing line between the Islamic police and the muslim fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia is largely illusory. Many would even say that the only real difference between the fundamentalists and the House of Saud is that the Royal family supports the West and relies on it for its continued existance, while the militant muslims are opposed to all things Western.

A large proportion of ordinary Saudis have some sympathy with the extremists because they oppose the presence of American troops in their country, which is home to Islam's holiest shrines, such as Mecca and Medina.

They also resent the fact that the Saudi Government pays repeated 'protection money' to the West in the form of low oil prices and huge defence contracts - and even paid the Americans to come to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war.

They also see that moderate opposition to the House of Saud is futile and could lead to imprisonment, torture or death.

But the ruling elite is now coming under increasing pressure from dissident voices abroad - opposition it cannot silence, although veiled threats have been made.

In London, two attractive, well-educated women - Dr Mai Yamani, daughter of the former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani and Dr Madawi Rashid, descendant of one of the old kings of Central Arabia - have become vocal critics of the House of Saud.

They believe that the royal family, which has survived by brutally crushing a series of attempted coups from the 1960s to this day, by their sheer weight of numbers and control of all the apparatus of state, because of the decentralised nature of the country and because of the backing of the Western world, is now approaching the end of the line.

It is too late for liberal reforms to save Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud knows that if it relaxed its strict state control, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. The danger for the Western world is whether it can afford to stand by while a fundamentalist state is created in Saudi Arabia - and what would that mean for global oil prices?

Now is the time for the West to finally make up it mind whether the House of Saud is its enemy or its friend.

June 2004

© Said K Aburish