Saudi Arabia not stable, Clarke says

MADRID, Spain – Former U.S. counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke said Monday that instability in Saudi Arabia deserves special attention and warned of a repeat of the situation in Iran following the fall of the U.S.-backed shah.

“The problem of the Saudi regime is an extremely important problem that we should have paid more attention to – rather than, for example, to Iraq,” Clarke said in Madrid, where he was presenting the Spanish version of his top-selling book “Against All Enemies.”

“The threat to the political and economic world posed by Saudi instability I think is greater than the threat that was posed by Iraq,” said Clarke.

“I’m not alone in this,” he added. “I think Vice President (Dick) Cheney, although he’s never said it publicly, is very concerned that the house of Saud could fall.”

Clarke drew parallels between Saudi Arabia and Iran before the fall of the shah there in 1979.

“Iran was our good American ally guaranteeing us a source of oil … and suddenly the shah’s regime fell and it was replaced with the first radical Islamic, fundamentalist, terrorist government,” he said. “And I think that Cheney and others in the United States think that could happen in Saudi Arabia.”

He said another “disturbing” parallel with Saudi Arabia concerned intelligence.

After Iran, he said, “The United States went back and said: ‘How could we not have seen this coming?’ And the answer was we were relying on Iranian intelligence to tell us about Iran, which is like relying on the KGB to tell you about Russia.”

He continued, “We didn’t have very many of our own sources of information to tell us about the degree of instability … and I think that’s a problem we face today in Saudi Arabia.”