SAUDIS ON BOARD IN IRAK?

Saudis Consider Embassy in Baghdad

JEDDA, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 1 — Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister today said his country was considering opening an embassy in Baghdad and said he was “astonished” by recent criticism of its Iraq policy by a Bush administration official.

Prince Saud al-Faisal announced at a press conference with Secretary of State Condolleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that he would send a diplomatic mission to Baghdad “to explore how we can start an embassy in Iraq.”

This is a step the Bush administration has long sought to add legitimacy to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Prince Saud also said that Saudi Arabia would consider attending the Israeli-Palestinian peace conference planned by President Bush this fall, but only if it is assured that the conference tackles “substantive” issues, and isn’t “just a photo op.”

Saudi Arabia’s attendance at the fall conference would be a significant boost to the conference. It would be the first time that Saudi Arabia has held significant talks with Israel for more than fifteen years.

The Bush administration’s relations with the Saudis have been strained in recent weeks by comments made by Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to United Nations. He said recently that some Arab allies of the United States were undermining the American-led effort to stabilize Iraq and that the Saudis in particular were “not doing all they can to help us.”

Saudi officials have long had doubts about Mr. Maliki’s government. They consider it a largely pro-Shia entity that does not look after the interests of Sunni Muslims, and that provides Iran, a majority Shia country, with a bridge to expand its influence in the region.

Even so, Prince Saud bluntly rejected the ambassador’s comments. “I was astonished by what he said, especially since we have never heard from him these criticisms when he was here,” Prince Saud said, referring to Mr. Khalilzad’s previous role as ambassador to Iraq.

Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates arrived in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday night in an unusual joint visit to the country for talks with King Abdullah and other senior officials. The talks centered on issues including a proposed arms package the Bush administration is offering the Saudis, the Arab-Israel peace process, and measures to stabilize Iraq.

Ms. Rice welcomed the Saudi offer to explore establishing an Iraq embassy. She said that the visit, which included a lavish banquet at the king’s summer palace here, had reaffirmed the ties between Washington and the kingdom.

She has tried to play down Mr. Khalilzad’s recent remarks and yesterday explained that the relationship is strong enough to withstand such disagreements.

“If there are problems we have with Saudi policies, we tell them,” she said. “If there are problems the Saudis have with us, we talk about it.”

Prince Saud gave little ground during the talks on a request by the Bush administration for it to step up efforts to halt Saudis intent on joining the insurgency in Iraq from crossing the Saudi border or traveling through Syria.

He said Saudi Arabia was already making efforts to halt its citizens from going to Iraq and raised the opposite concern — that terrorists were crossing into Saudi Arabia from Iraq.

“All that we can do in order to protect the border in Iraq we have been doing,” he said. “The traffic of terrorists is, I can assure you, more concerning to us coming from Iraq, and this is one of the worries our government has.”

The dispute is one of the deep disagreements between Riyadh and Washington over the Maliki government, which Saudi officials say privately has not taken many of the steps that it has promised to take to promote reconciliation between Sunnis and Shias, such as passing a law to distribute Iraq’s oil revenues.

After the meeting in Jedda, Mr. Gates flew on to Kuwait and Ms. Rice traveled to Israel.

A senior Saudi official said that his country would only attend the regional peace conference this fall, the first of its kind in Mr. Bush’s presidency and which will be led by Ms. Rice, if it includes talks on the four big final status issues concerning the Palestinians and Israel: the fate of Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the borders of a Palestinian state, and the dismantlement of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Despite the reservations, American officials said they were encouraged by Prince Saud’s remarks about the planned conference.

“We interpret this as positive,” a senior administration official traveling with Ms. Rice told reporters aboard her plane en route to Jerusalem.

Ms. Rice’s trip to Israel is the first since the violent takeover of Gaza by the militant Islamic group Hamas. Since then, the Bush administration has sought to encourage the more peaceful route to a Palestinian state embraced by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and his Fatah faction, which retains control of the West Bank. Hamas would be excluded from the regional peace conference.

Mr. Bush called for the conference in July, saying that it should include high-level Arab envoys and their counterparts from Israel and the Palestinian West Bank.

At the time, he exhorted Israel’s Arab neighbors to open talks with Israel and to show leadership by “ending the fiction that Israel does not exist”. He also urged them to send cabinet-level visitors to Israel, a request that was directed implicitly at Saudi Arabia, America’s closest Arab ally, which has refused to do so.

The most notable previous Middle East peace conference was a regional meeting held in Madrid in 1991 under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union and the United States during the administration of the first President Bush.

In Saudi Arabia, the lavish banquet hosted by King Abdullah on Tuesday night featured a buffet that stretched for twenty yards and featured an astonishing range of dishes, an American official said.

It took place on the second floor of the palace. Guests were seated so they could gaze upon a wall-size aquarium that included hundreds of fish and at least two eight-foot sharks that were themselves fed fish parts during the banquet as the diners watched, American officials said.