Saudi meet aims to soothe U.S. ire at oil price

By Andrew Hammond - Analysis

RIYADH (Reuters) - An emergency meeting of oil producing and consuming countries this Sunday will give Saudi Arabia the chance to try to turn around a storm of negative publicity it has received in the United States, analysts say.

Washington has been Saudi Arabia's closest ally since the 1940s when a tight relationship formed on the basis of guaranteed oil supplies in return for U.S. protection for the Saudi monarchy through thick and thin.

Frequent bouts of anti-Saudi sentiment in American politics rarely ruffled Saudi feathers until the attacks of September 11, 2001. Fifteen of 19 young Arabs who brought down New York's Twin Towers, attacked the Pentagon and killed some 3,000 people were Saudis, acting in the name of a group led by a Saudi dissident.

Since then Saudi Arabia's rulers have embarked on a series of reforms to improve the image of arcane autocracy where the Saudi royal family rules with no elected parliament to limit its powers in alliance with clerics who are given free rein to apply the rulings of a centuries-old school of Islamic law.

The government began changing some school textbook material that spoke disparagingly of non-Muslims and cracked down on radical preachers. This year King Abdullah began efforts to bring different Muslim sects together ahead of a planned interfaith dialogue with Jews and Christians.

Analysts see the Jeddah oil conference, which will examine ways of cooling record oil prices, in the same light.

"It's another thread coming after 9/11. First they tackled Islamic militancy, etc.," a senior Western diplomat in Riyadh said this week. "It reminds me of the king's religious dialogue idea. It makes them look good, it looks reasonable."

A string of foreign leaders including U.S. President George W. Bush have visited Riyadh this year to lobby the Saudi leadership to increase production, or persuade OPEC to raise output to bring down prices as they shot past $100 per barrel.