Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
The Saudi regime, or extended royal family must be aware of the impact of the Arab Spring, with once friendly, or allied governments being overthrown and replaced with something very different. What I have yet to see is any in-depth reporting on the impact upon the Saudi population.
It would be very difficult to assess the impact on the population as a whole.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are quite different from the states so far affected by the Arab Spring, in a number of ways.

One factor that I think is much underrated in the West is the extent to which traditional aristocracies are granted a degree of legitimacy, at least as long as they keep bringing home the... well, not bacon, but you know what I mean. To the outside eye there may be little difference between the sheiks, emirs, and princes of the GCC and a ruler like Gaddafi, Mubarak, or Assad. In the Gulf the perceived difference is very large, and it's not limited to the ruling class.

The second factor of course is that in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf a large part of the populace, in most cases a majority, is materially comfortable enough to have a stake in stability. There is a real envy of the political freedoms and human rights enjoyed in the west, but also an overpowering fear - you could almost call it terror - that liberalizing would bring chaos, collapse, and a loss of all they have.

I've picked up some repeated threads in time spent in that region: not a scientific survey by any means but comments repetitively heard...

It's almost a mantra that democracy and human rights promotion are western conspiracies designed to weaken traditional systems so that Westerners can come in and take control of the oil.

It's often heard that while government is corrupt and it's terrible, the very fact that ruling is so profitable makes democracy dangerous: factions will destroy the country in a fight over the control of the spoils. Corruption with stability is better than corruption with chaos.

Another mantra: "Osama is good and pious and we all support him, but if he and his people ever took over here we would have a war and we would lose everything"

In short, I get the feeling (again, through very un-scientific means) that the dominant political positions of Gulf populaces are driven less by what they seek than by what they fear, and that the status quo, for all it's deficiencies, is often seen as better than an unknown and potentially catastrophic change.