Bush seeks Saudi support over Iraq as Arab anger grows

President George Bush launched a bid yesterday to repair America's tattered relations with its main Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia, amid a barrage of fresh warnings from the Arab world about the wisdom of a US military attack on Iraq.

In a highly unusual step, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, travelled to Mr Bush's ranch in Texas for a day of talks focusing on the Middle East crisis as well as Iraq, where Riyadh is adamantly opposed to a US strike.

The privilege of a visit to the President's personal sanctuary in Crawford had been strictly confined to a handful of heads of government, including Tony Blair and the Presidents of Russia and Mexico. That a mere ambassador, albeit a long-standing friend of the Bush family, has joined that number, indicates how high the stakes are for both sides.

The lynchpin of the US security structure in the Gulf and the chief US oil supplier, Saudi Arabia is regarded as more foe than ally in some quarters of the government. The Saudi monarchy was specially shocked by a trillion-dollar lawsuit against the country filed by relatives of the victims of the 11 September attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi-born.

In July, a private briefing to a Pentagon advisory board described the kingdom as an enemy of the US and recommend that Washington deliver an ultimatum to Riyadh to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and Saudi financial investments here. Reports, quickly denied, surfaced that Saudi interests had pulled hundreds of billions of dollars from US financial markets in retaliation.

The tension is the culmination of years of complaints, dating from attacks in 1995 and 1996 on American bases in the kingdom, that the Saudis have been lukewarm at best in the battle against terrorism.

Hours before Prince Bandar arrived in Texas, Mr Bush phoned the de facto Saudi leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, to assure him relations between the two countries were still strong. But the latest developments on Iraq can only widen the rift.

As Vice-President Dick Cheney presented the case for invading Iraq in the strongest terms yet, a chorus of Arab leaders, led by another traditional US ally, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, spoke out against an attack, in almost apocalypic terms.

If the US took military action without some solid peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, "not one Arab leader will be able to control the angry outburst of the masses", Mr Mubarak warned in a speech to students in Alexandria. Not one Arab state, not even Kuwait, supported a strike, and the whole region could descend into chaos.

But Mr Cheney predicted that ousting President Saddam would spread peace and democracy through the region and usefully focus minds in the Arab-Israeli dispute as well.

Mr Mubarak's views were backed by Qatar, the Gulf state where the US has been building up a base as a possible alternative command centre for a campaign against Baghdad. The Qatari Foreign Minister, Sheik Hamad, said his country, too, opposed military strikes, and, like Saudi Arabia, would refuse the use of its bases for that purpose.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, yesterday repeated that President Saddam could avoid attack by letting UN weapons monitors back into the country.