Two weeks after long-time ally Saudi King Abdullah rebuked the United States for the Iraq war, the bush administration still has not received a satisfactory explanation of the unusual public criticism.
The comments - condemning the American involvement as "an illegal foreign occupation" - reflected what many see as the Saudi leader's newly robust leadership role in the Middle East, injected uncertainty in the volatile region and hinted at divisions between two countries with a history of close ties.
"There's been no real explanation for those remarks," a senior administration official told Reuters late on Wednesday. "In public they have been defended and reiterated by the foreign ministry," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter.
"When we've asked in private, we've been told that we have a deep and close relationship that goes back to (President) Franklin D. Roosevelt, that nothing can ever change that relationship and it's solid as a rock. Period. Which is not an answer to the question. So we really have not had an answer to the question," he added.
After Abdullah made the comments at the opening of an Arab summit in Riyadh last month, US officials expressed surprise and underscored that American and other international forces were in Iraq legitimately under UN Security Council mandate.
Aiming to understand the thinking behind the king's remarks, top US officials contacted the Saudi leadership but these conversations yielded no real clarity, the senior administration official said.
The king's speech was only the latest sign of divisions between Washington and its key oil supplier and traditional Middle East ally. In February, Saudi Arabia angered the Americans by brokering a power-sharing agreement between the Palestinian president, whom Washington views as a moderate, and the group Hamas, which the United States and Israel consider a terrorist organisation.
US officials said the Saudi diplomacy, which appeared to undercut their strategy of isolating Hamas, had harmed their plans to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
The senior US official said "while we obviously were very unhappy with what the king said" in his summit speech, the more important issue was what his Sunni-majority country did on Iraq.
If Riyadh encouraged Iraq's Sunni minority not to try to fight its way back into power over Iraq's Shia majority, Washington would be happy, he said. But some analysts say there are growing US-Saudi divisions over the fact that the US-led invasion has produced a Shia-led government in Iraq, which the Sunni Saudi royal family dislikes.
So far there has been no change in the Saudi approach, the official said, but he acknowledged some uncertainty saying: "We'll just have to see going forward whether that remark is a harbinger of a change in policy."
On ABC Television's "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Saudi Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, insisted Abdullah's speech was not attacking the United States but "talking about legitimacy, not legality" of the American presence in Iraq.
The senior US official said Abdullah's more assertive leadership role was prompted by concern over Iran, which has been developing nuclear capability in defiance of the UN Security Council, as well as the 83-year-old king's recognition that he has limited time to accomplish his legacy.
"I think some of their effort on Lebanese issues and Palestinian issues are meant to get the Arab house in order so they can then turn to what is a greater threat to them because it's right there - Iran," the US official said. For decades, Egypt was looked to as the leader of the Arab world but that role has diminished in recent years.
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