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Have you read Yossef Bodansky's "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America"? There's quite a bit of stuff there on how Bin Laden's terrorist activities related to a three-way power struggle between different factions of the Saudi government that was going on in 1995-1996 between 1) Prince Abdullah; 2) younger-generation Sauairis led by Prince Bandar and supported by Prince Sultan; and 3) the Salman-Nayif group led by two brothers of King Fahd (for more on this see Chapter 6, page 160). I'm wondering if that plays into one of the pieces of information you mention:

> Walker, the former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, which promotes understanding with the Arab world. Its board chairman is former senator Wyche Fowler, ambassador to Riyadh in the second Clinton administration. Saudi contributions covered $200,000 of the institute's $1.5 million budget last year, Walker said.

Well, I've always taken the Saudi situation to be a two way conflict.

On the one hand you have the Islamists. They think the Saudis are not strict enough in their enforcement of Islam and want to use Saudi Arabia's oil wealth to export holy war.

On the other hand are what passes for moderates, led by Bandar. They know they have a good deal, and do not want to have their societal perks and oil based cash flow taken away. Even more importantly they don't want to have to fight the Islamists.

Throughout the 90s, the deal between the two groups was that the Saudis would turn a blind eye to terror recruitment and funding as long as it didn't target Saudis. And before President Bush, the moderates knew that the US would do no more then give them a serious talking to over the terror issue - rather less of a threat then what Osama and Co presented.

Our invasion of Iraq changes things in rather alot of ways though. Most notably, Iraq as a friendly nation greatly weakens the oil weapon the Saudis have over us. Specifically this mean we can be much more demanding in what we want from the Saudis both in terms of anti-terrorism operations and also democratization.

One can already see this some minor, though significant, improvement in both regards already.

So the moderate faction in Saudi tried to use the weapons at their disposal to stop the invasion of Iraq. Their most powerful weapons being their bought and paid for friends in the America state department.