Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
How Strong Are the Saudis?
By Jim Hoagland
The Kingdom
by Robert Lacey
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 630 pp., $19.95
The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World
by David Holden, by Richard Johns
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 569 pp., $19.95
Saudi Arabia in the 1980s: Foreign Policy, Security, and Oil
by William B. Quandt
Brookings Institution, 190 pp., $22.95; $8.95 (paper)
During the past three decades, American policy makers supported a number of third-world leaders whose essential incompetence or corruption have brought them, and their American benefactors, to disaster. Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was unable to make compromises that would have set Iran on a stable course. When that chance was gone, he was unable to apply force to put down the street revolt that drove him from power and opened the way for Khomeini and a bloody chaos that eclipses the Shah's repression at its worst.
Review, 4281 words
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