Saudi king’s outburst reflects US Middle East policy failures

WASHINGTON: Saudi Arabia's unexpectedly harsh criticism of the US occupation of Iraq marked a turning point in the complex relations between Washington and its key Sunni ally that raises serious questions about the Bush administration's Middle East policy, analysts say.

Speaking to a summit meeting of Arab leaders last week in Riyadh, Saudi King Abdullah referred to the US troop presence in Iraq as an “illegitimate foreign occupation.”

US officials were dumbfounded by the portrayal of the costly US military operation that President George W Bush defends as an effort being carried out at the request of the Iraq government to help stabilise a fledgling democracy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, to seek an explanation of the king's remarks.     

But she refrained from taking the matter up directly with her Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal, in an apparent bid to avoid aggravating the rift.

Analysts saw Abdullah's tough public stance as part of a move by the monarch to take the lead of a new pan-Arab movement to counter the rising influence of Shiite. Implicit in the king's criticism is an assumption that Bush's strategy in Iraq is destined to fail and a desire to draw Syria — spurned by Washington as an ally of Iran — away from Tehran and back into the Arab fold, said Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma.