Time, surely, for a much younger one

摘要

The Saudi succession crisis persists HIS lengthy title revealed much about the man's stature: crown prince, first deputy prime minister, minister of defence and chief inspector of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So did the crowd at his funeral, which included America's vice-president, Iran's foreign minister and an estranged uncle of Syria's president, Bashar Assad, amid scores of other foreign grandees. The calibre of this hushed gathering testified not just to the power wielded by Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz, who may well have been the world's richest man, having run the lavishly equipped Saudi army as his fief since 1962. It also reflected apprehension. Under five successive sons of Abdel Aziz bin Saud, the kingdom's founder, who died in 1953, Saudi Arabia has posed as a rigid bulwark of the regional order. That order is challenged now, not just by shifting geopolitical rivalries, but by the new pressures of the Arab spring.