ANALYSIS: Despite the "war on terror", the militants behind the Riyadh outrage have shown their capacity to strike, writes David Hirst, from Beirut
Yesterday's spectacular, al-Qaeda-style exploit may have come as no great surprise to moderate Saudi Islamists familiar with the thinking of the extremists in their midst. The Iraq war brought anti-American feeling in the Kingdom to new heights, as well as the militants' determination to give expression to this feeling in violent "jihadist" deeds.
"They are a volcano waiting to explode," said one moderate Islamist, Mr Muhsin al-Awaji, in the war's last days, "and I fear that they will strike not just at Americans and British, but at Westerners in general."
Yet, even for moderate Islamists, there may have been some surprise that it happened now. For not only is the Iraq war over, the Saudi regime has done something to appease the public's anti-American feeling. It has, implicitly at least, gone a long way to acquiescing in a core al-Qaeda demand: the removal of "infidel" US forces from Saudi soil.
Expected or not, the terrorist strike is a painful blow to the US, but an even more painful and ominous one to the House of Saud, at which it was also clearly aimed. It may or may not have been timed to coincide with the visit of Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell.
Such a multi-pronged, closely co-ordinated operation required long and careful preparation. It could hardly have been more timely in the messages it conveys: that, despite the US-led "war on terror", the militants have lost none of their capacity to strike.
The message to the House of Saud seems to be that it is an irredeemably "apostate" regime which no longer can do anything to save itself. The agreed withdrawal of US troops has not impressed the militants, who are engaged in a struggle that goes well beyond the Arabian peninsula.
This is partly religious and cultural. As they see it, the US's war on terror is a war on Islam itself, now exemplified in Saudi Arabia by the pressure the US is exerting on the authorities to reform teaching and curriculums in religious schools.
But more important, for most Arabs and Muslims at least, the struggle is political, with the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq together with the Palestine situation its second source of motivation.
From the Saudi militants' standpoint, it was time - with Iraq - for a renewal of jihad, Afghan-style, and the duty of the House of Saud, whose legitimacy is grounded in the same Wahhabist credo to which they themselves subscribe, to direct it. It had, after all, been the House of Saud which, in the 1980s, collaborated with the US to recruit Saudi and Arab mujahedeen to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.
But now that the "infidel aggressors" are British and American, the House of Saud puts a different interpretation on its Wahhabism, enlisting the official religious hierarchy to preach against the appropriateness of jihad. This is not to mention the fact - which is shameful to as many Saudis as militants - that, although officially opposed to the war on Iraq, the Saudi government surreptitiously granted the US key military "facilities" to conduct it.
The terror is also directed at the Saudi regime for another reason. It is not merely anti-American sentiment that gives sustenance to the militants; it is a deepening discontent at social and economic conditions. This is an enormously wealthy country which runs up an enormous national debt, turns out tens of thousands of graduates who cannot find jobs in an economy dominated by expatriate workers, spreads poverty amid the profligacy of princes, and lacks modern, representative institutions through which people can voice these discontents.
However, it is doubtful the bombing will win much sympathy with the public because for all that the decision to remove US troops is appreciated.
Perhaps, as some Saudis see it, it was an act of desperation by a group whose cover was already blown. But even if it was, that will not prevent many of them from blaming the government for creating the climate in which the militants have thrived.
"All the efforts of a corrupt and hypocritical regime to seem more Islamically virtuous than the Islamists themselves," said a moderate Islamist, "helped turn Saudi Arabia into what the US sees it as, a factory of fanatics. And you can't just turn the religious machine on for one place, Afghanistan, then turn it off for another, Iraq."
What Saudi Arabia needs is far-reaching political, economic and social reform. That alone, the moderate Islamists and secular modernists say, can head off the collision between the two extremes - bin Laden's Islam and George Bush's America - which could ultimately destroy it.
The trouble is that the terror will make reform both more unlikely - because it frightens the regime - and more necessary, because any exodus of the now targeted foreign nationals, any drying-up of foreign investment, will add to the woes that help breed the terrorists.