Maureen Dowd spent a week in Saudi Arabia, presumably without having to wear the hijab or be smacked on her tush by themutaween to get her to pray. But now that she’s been to Riyadh, she is also an expert, an expert not so much on the huge peninsula but on Israel. Great place to learn!

On his way to Kabul, Secretary Gates accused Dr. A’jad and Iran of “playing a double game” in Afghanistan. And surely they are. Nonetheless, the administration which the secretary of defense serves has, if anything, encouraged this behavior. Most especially by not following through on any of its (in any case, namby-pamby) threats as Tehran carries on its relentless march to nuclear possession.

At least, that's what many of our old and deeply democratic friends seem to feel.

Now, it's hard to accept that the president of the United States would actually make that choice. He probably feels--but how do I really know? I actually don't--that the hooligans and especially the hooligans who produce our oil and the hooligans who buy our products are the folk we need court more than our historic allies. After all, what else can they do but stick with us?

Yes, you read it right. Here is the essence: If the Saudis (and other OPEC producers) export fewer hydrocarbons, the buyers should still pay as if they were purchasing the old amount. They should pay what the Saudis could charge when the market was tight and the demand high, and the arrangements should not made in the Arab bazaar, but by treaty. It's a nice world that Riyadh lives in. Perhaps this is King Abdullah's gracious response to President Obama's servile bow.

"Less global warming would be good, right?" ask Jad Mouawad and Andrew C. Revkin in a report in Tuesday's Times. No, they answer themselves: "Not to an oil giant."

This comes up now because of the upcoming Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The fact is that the Saudis (as well as the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the emirates, and other big producers) are frightened that their incomes will fall if the attendees commit themselves to "improvements in fuel economy and rising mandates for alternative fuels in the transportation sector." Yes, it could be happening ... and it could be happening this year.

Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has a very apt--in fact, devastating--analogy: "It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking." In fact, if a smoker stops smoking, why don't we oblige him to pay for his cigarettes anyway?

Maybe you haven't noticed. But Saudi Arabia hasn't at all played according to Barack Obama's script. Now, frankly, that doesn't surprise me. As you already know, I am a skeptic. And especially skeptical about Saudi intentions vis-a-vis Israel. Still, don't count on their intentions towards the Palestinians, either. They do not care a fig, as an Arabic saying has it. Riyadh will be constructive bi-al mish mish. Alas, apricots don't grow in the dessert.

In conversations I had with Obama during his campaign he maintained a healthy doubt as to what they were and were not willing do. No, I am not saying that he agreed with me. Just that he didn't seem smitten, that he had some distance.

I am afraid that he now seems very much smitten by Arab rhetoric and Arab objectives. That is, the president is oblivious to the fact that the Saudis have not been at all responsive to his undignified bowing and scraping, to his mouthing of their own world view and to their intransigent determination to stand still. Asalum aleikum, Riyadh is not a foreign policy.

It wasn't until I reported my print piece on how much Barack Obama's foreign policy--from closing Gitmo to Iran to the global economy-- depends on the Saudis that I appreciated the influence Riyadh has over its Sunni ally Pakistan.

King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is the monarch of Saudi Arabia. He is 85, having succeeded his half-brother, the decrepit King Fahd, who succeeded his half-brother, Khalid, who succeeded... The founder of the "modern" Saudi state had 37 sons. Abdullah is the sixth of the male line to rule. No princesses, of course.

It was King Abdullah before whom President Obama bowed during his April visit to Riyadh. It was also he from whom Obama got zilch in his quest for Arab assistance in easing the atmospherics--and really just the atmospherics--of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Not that Obama received anything from any of the Arabs--not even in response to his Cairo address, which read them the world as they themselves read it.

(If you want a profound explanation of the administration's expectations and disappointments from the Arabs--and the Saudis especially--you should read Michael Scott Doran's piece, "Naïve pan-Arabism in Washington", a recent installment of an ongoing series, Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH). I first came across Doran's name and work in an essay, "The Saudi Paradox", from the January-February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs. Bernard Gwertzman did an interview with him shortly after it was published. After reading these two, I found another Foreign Affairs essay exactly a year earlier by Doran, "Palestine, Iraq and American Strategy", laying out the impending Washington blunders. Doran has also published a book, Pan Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question.)

The fact is that, if the Saudi royals care more than a fig about the Palestinians, they'll satisfy their compassionate instincts by ponying up very small amounts of cash for the cause. But the evidence points to a basic indifference to the real needs of Palestine other than as a diversion from their troubles (like those of other Arab rulers)--brigand chiefs turned into monarchies, abracadabra, military juntas purporting to be revolutionary republics--with their own populace.

Last week, I wrote about The Hunting Party, a film that tried (and failed) to integrate geopolitics into a black comedy. This week, The Kingdom attempts the only slightly less daunting task of integrating geopolitics into an action film. (Rather see a movie that leaves out the geopolitics altogether?

Consider this scenario: The Saudis have gone nuclear. So have the Egyptians. Both countries had been signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that agreement is now dissolved. Riyadh and Cairo acquired their weapons from Pakistan, a Sunni ally, in response to the nuclear threat from Shia Iran. Meanwhile, Iraq continues to fester, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from settled, and Iranian proxies remain firmly entrenched within Lebanon's combustible sectarian mix--a mix that pits Sunni against Shia and just so happens to exist on Israel's northern border.

CONFRONTING IRAN:
THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE NEXT GREAT CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST By Ali M.

In Washington today, many blame America's terrorism problem on Saudi Arabia. In an August 2003 Washington Post op-ed, for instance, Senators Jon Kyl and Charles E. Schumer accused Riyadh of continuing to deceive the United States, "acting as our ally [while] supporting a movement--Wahhabism--that seeks our society's destruction."