Posted on 11/07/2002 11:06:56 PM PST by swarthyguy
RAMAH, Saudi Arabia -- Prince Alwaleed bin Talal sat on the floor of a cavernous fiberglass tent pitched in the desert some 40 miles north of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Next to him were three telephones.
Before him a procession of some two dozen poets declaimed verses composed of florid praise and pointed requests. They wanted help to pay off debts, buy a new car or secure a job on the royal payroll.
"Your generosity is so enormous, it is bigger than a mountain that shields us from the burning sun," intoned one supplicant. Another compared the prince's benevolence to the "shade of palm trees in an oasis."
The prince wasn't paying much attention. His eyes and ears focused instead on a flat-panel television screen at his feet, one of four generator-powered sets in the tent broadcasting almost nonstop news of the Republican Party's Tuesday triumph.
Walter Mondale had just conceded defeat in Minnesota. An elderly petitioner pleaded, poetically, for a $50,000 handout. Prince Alwaleed, a multibillionaire and the largest single foreign investor in the U.S., fingered his remote control, surfing through CNN, CNBC, BBC, Fox News and assorted other channels for clues to America's direction -- and the future of his own U.S. assets, which are valued at $13 billion.
"This is big. This is really big," exclaimed the 47-year-old chairman and sole owner of Kingdom Holdings, a Riyadh-based investment company.
Following election returns and punditry in the desert with a member of perhaps the world's most conservative royal family revealed mixed feelings about America's shift to the right. Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, Prince Alwaleed said, should help clarify economic policy and "for me, anything that makes the market less uncertain is good." But like most Saudis, the prince is deeply unhappy with President Bush's Middle East policy, which he sees as dangerously skewed against the Palestinians.
The midterm vote, he said, has "given Bush a free hand" and allows him to "do whatever he wants," including go to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This, he said, would play havoc with oil prices, pushing them up and then, once the conflict is over, leading to a slump that would be "very dangerous for all producers," of which Saudi Arabia is the biggest.
Outside the prince's tent, a fierce wind whipped up clouds of sand. Inside, the cathedral-like space was dotted with plastic palm trees and other foliage, big cushions and bodyguards. The berobed bards continued to beg as images of Jeb Bush, Harvey Pitt and Alan Greenspan crowded in from the other side of the world. Royal servants set out tea in tiny glass cups, making sure never to block the prince's view of the TV.
His evening in the desert with poets and other supplicants cost him about $500,000, he estimated. It was the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset. So part of the prince's outlay covered a lavish fast-breaking banquet for some 50 V.I.P guests. Then there were the salaries of scores of retainers -- including a troupe of dwarves and falcon handlers -- and, most expensive of all, handouts.
Born in Riyadh but educated mostly abroad, in Lebanon and then the U.S., Prince Alwaleed takes pride in straddling seemingly incompatible worlds. "You've got to be very flexible to be able to negotiate with both our Saudi poets and people like Sandy Weill," he explained, referring to the chief executive of Citigroup. The prince is the biggest individual investor in the financial-services giant, with a stake he currently values at about $9 billion.
He faces a challenge in the friction between Washington and Riyadh. Relations are severely strained due to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia -- and sharp disagreements over Iraq and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Prince Alwaleed is eager to show that Saudi Arabia can still negotiate a balance between rigid tradition rooted in a particularly stringent form of Islam and the freewheeling ways of American capitalism. The task, he said, is "like walking a tightrope."
Declaring himself a "big optimist," though, Prince Alwaleed hopes that "Bush's big victory . . . may make Saddam finally succumb to reality." The Iraq leader's "No. 1 priority is keeping his seat," the prince said. "Once he realizes that the Yankees are coming to downtown Baghdad, I think he will blink" and allow U.N. weapons inspectors unfettered access.
America's slide into what he calls "irrational pessimism" has cost Kingdom Holdings more than $2 billion this year. When shares in Citigroup, his biggest investment, dipped to $42 earlier this year from a high of around $58 in August 2000, he described the price as "dirt cheap" and invested a further $500 million. The price kept falling. Undeterred, he said he's staying with Citigroup "forever," calling its current price "ridiculously dirt cheap." The stock closed at $36.45 yesterday in 4 p.m. composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange. But he added: "We won't buy anymore. We have enough."
The prince's political touch also isn't golden at times. After Sept. 11, the prince cut a check for $10 million for the Twin Towers Fund and issued a statement condemning al Qaeda's "criminal act." But he also urged the U.S. to "re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause." New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent back the check. The prince said he regrets the rumpus but that America must, sooner or later, "wake up" to Palestinian suffering and the resentment this causes across the Arab world.
A TV-news junkie, he keeps nine sets on in his office at the downtown-Riyadh headquarters of Kingdom Holdings and has scattered his desert camp here with giant screens hooked to satellite dishes: on a hilltop where he receives dignitaries; in an open-air dining area; and even next to a row of hooded falcons tethered at a bonfire pit. Only prayer time and five hours of sleep a night interrupt his viewing.
"I'm a Muslim and I pray five times a day, but I'm also modern," said the prince, a grandson of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul-Aziz, who, though a devout Muslim, defied clerics fiercely opposed to the introduction of the telegraph and the radio in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, said Prince Alwaleed, Saudi Arabia is in the middle of another, sometimes painful, burst of modernization. "We are in a huge transition right now and moving rapidly to a more open society," while an "old guard and remnants of the old society" are trying to "pull back."
He not only watches TV channels, he partly owns many of them, through investments in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and AOL Time Warner and stakes in various Arabic-language channels. Like many Saudis, he blames much of the post-Sept. 11 rift with Washington on the media. News Corp.'s Fox News, he said, has a habit of being "very nasty." Over the summer he met Mr. Murdoch at the Paris hotel, George V, which the prince also owns. He said he told Mr. Murdoch that he has no problem with Fox having a "strong line" but asked that it "at least give the other side the right to be seen and shown."
His minions get orders, not requests. "Tell them that if I'm diluted it will be very nasty. I won't accept this," he shouted down the phone in a late-night call. Another caller got told off for writing a limp draft of a business letter: "This letter is not tough, not blunt. It is too ceremonial. You have to be tough." He hung up and tore up the draft, tossing it on the floor.
After the poetry petered out and scores of other supplicants had kissed the prince's right shoulder and handed over written requests for help, the royal party went outside to talk and watch yet more TV by the bonfire. The main item on the news was a decision by the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by half a percentage point.
The prince and an aide discussed whether this could be a sign of panic by Mr. Greenspan. It wasn't, the prince decided, tapping a TV screen with a green cane to point out that the hefty rate cut won unanimous approval from members of the Federal Open Market Committee. The stock market perked up a bit.
The prince relaxed, switching channels, briefly, from English-language news to an Arabic satellite channel broadcasting a concert from a hotel in Lebanon. He owns both the TV channel and the hotel. "This is all mine," he said. "This is real synergy."
Anyway, Bedouins are lined up for miles waiting for handouts. He stays seated, while they stand, and recite poetry/praise on the big kahoona.
All the while, he watches TV, and talks on the phone. It's just his way of buying their loyalty. It's some kind of Arab tradition that if you owe somebody money, then you're required to give them your undying loyalty.
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