Saudis marked the long-expected start of the war against their neighbour - a war which the kingdom has battled long, hard and unsuccessfully to prevent - with a flurry of anti-American text messages sent to friends on their mobile phones.
"I have received dozens," said one resident of the capital, Riyadh. Typical messages were: "God protect Iraqis from the boots of American soldiers" and "God once drowned pharaoh and his court - may he now sink an American aircraft-carrier."
Those private messages were the most outward sign of the deep unease felt by Saudis about the attack on Baghdad. On the Riyadh streets there was nothing to indicate that this was anything other than the quiet beginning of just another Muslim weekend.
The Saudis are not much given to public demonstrations. One said: "People keep to themselves. But they are really tense and expectant."
People remained glued to their televisions following the coverage of the attack on al-Jazeera and al-Manar - the trenchant, Qatar-based pan-Arab satellite channel and the Beirut-based "Voice of Hizbullah", which are probably the two most popular here.
Having vainly sought to prevent the war, Saudi Arabia has resigned itself to the only course now left open: to limit its potentially disastrous consequences for Iraq, the region and itself, and to play what part it can in shaping the post-Saddam order. "To say that we are deeply worried about whatever might come after him," said a senior government adviser, "the violence, the chaos, or the political vacuum, is to say the simple truth."
The outbreak of war has put the government in a very delicate position. On the one hand, it seeks to preserve the favour - severely impaired since September 11th 2001 - of the US, and any influence over its Iraqi policies which that might earn it; on the other, it has to humour the feelings of a profoundly anti-American public.
Crown Prince Abdullah, in effect the kingdom's ruler, said in an eve-of-war statement: "Under no circumstances will Saudi Arabia take part in the war against brotherly Iraq and its armed forces will not enter an inch of Iraqi territory."
And, in an unusually frank admission for an Arab leader, he added yesterday: "Let me be candid with you: if it were not for the obvious weakness of the Arab world, we would have come up with an effective unified Arab stand that would have bypassed declarations."
Yet almost everyone in the kingdom is aware that the government is trying to make things as easy as it can for the Americans. This means that it is going out of its way to ensure the flow of oil to world markets: for three months it has been building up a special reserve which it will release in the event of any war-related disruption of supplies. More significantly, it also means that the crown prince's categoric assertions about Saudia Arabia's non-participation in the war are less than frank.
True, it has not offered its territory as a launch-pad for the Anglo-American ground assault on Iraq. But it is hardly a secret that it has granted lesser forms of collaboration, including the use of the key command-and-control facilities at the Prince Sultan air base near Riyadh and overflight rights for aircraft and missiles.
There is also a contingent of US troops stationed for "defensive and humanitarian" purposes near the Iraqi border; and 3,300 Saudi soldiers are in Kuwait as part of the peninsula shield, a military operation ordered by the Gulf Co-Operation Council to protect Kuwait from Iraqi attack.
The oil-rich kingdom is America's oldest continuous Arab ally. The equivocations are inspired by the awkward fact that the anti-US public temper has reached an unprecedented level - the most intense, perhaps, in the Arab world. According to an opinion poll this week, only 3 per cent of the population take a favourable view of the US, compared with 12 per cent last year; that is the lowest of the five officially pro-American countries in which the poll was conducted.
A statement signed by 170 leading Saudi intellectuals urged all Arab states to "deny US forces facilities for attacking Iraq" and to "use the oil weapon to defend Arab interests"; 32 high-ranking Islamic scholars and preachers declared that it was religiously impermissible for Muslim governments or individuals to "co-operate" with the war on Iraq; a moderate Islamist warned that, once the bombing of Iraq started, "all western people in Arabia will be in trouble one way or another, no one can stop that, unfortunately" - a reference to random terrorist attacks in which two Britons and a German have so far died; the westernised, often American-educated, elite have become perhaps the most angry and embittered segment of society; the indignation, common to all Arabs, at the almost daily televised spectacle of Palestinians dying at the hands of American-supported Israel merges with a specifically Saudi indignation at the humiliations, insults and abuse deemed to have been heaped on the kingdom since 9/11 by American officials, politicians, religious leaders and commentators.
None of this anti-Americanism means, however, that Saudis, government or people, are indifferent to the almost certain silver lining: the removal of a now generally detested Arab leader, "the Arab Nero of our times", as the editor of al-Riyadh, the kingdom's best-selling newspaper, described him.
Some of the Saudi intelligentsia ask, like a columnist in al-Watan newspaper: "Where were Saudi intellectuals when Saddam used his chemicals on Halabja, when he invaded Kuwait and set its oilfields on fire?" Jamal Khashoggi, a moderate Islamist who in the 1980s volunteered to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, wrote: "The Saudis must not allow events in Iraq to pass them by. They must play some role in the liberation of Iraq."
Now that the war has begun, it is very important for the Saudi regime that it be as swift and surgical as possible, and it clearly hopes that the granting of military "facilities" will contribute to that. The longer it lasts, the harder it will be to appease or suppress popular anger.
Crown Prince Abdullah said that failure to stop the war was a wider Arab failing. That argument, together with his personal popularity and nationalist reputation, finds considerable favour. "Of course," said a former newspaper editor, "it is shameful that non-Arab Turkey should have been the one to deny access to US troops, not the Arabs themselves. But it is an Arab shame, not just ours." For Saudis, as for other Arabs, it is all but axiomatic that, with one of their states about to be invaded, occupied, or even - as some see it - "colonised" in 19th-century style, they have sunk to one of the lowest points in their history. - (Guardian Service)