Crown Prince Abdullah’s foreign affairs advisor Adel Al-Jubeir, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s ‘Late Edition’, commented on the discussion on oil prices that took place between Crown Prince Abdullah and President George W. Bush in Crawford last week. The discussion, he said, was “about clarifying matters. The U.S. wanted to know what Saudi Arabia’s production capacity was, what Saudi Arabia’s plans for future production were.  Saudi Arabia wanted to know what the situation was with the shortage in American refineries.  And I believe that the Crown Prince had a wonderful discussion with the President on this issue, as well as many other issues of mutual concern.”

Al-Jubeir also addressed Saudi Arabia’s commitment to the war on terrorism, specifically mentioning the multi-year effort to remove objectionable material from school textbooks. On the issue of al-Qaeda and reports from Saudi critics suggesting that Osama bin Laden remains a popular figure in the Kingdom, Al-Jubeir responded:  “Of course. What would you expect dissidents to say?  You can talk to radicals in Europe, and they’ll tell you that their agenda is very popular with the masses when, in fact, it’s not.  If bin Laden or Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia were popular, we would see an increase in recruitment, not a decrease.  We would see an increase in their ability to do damage, not a decrease.”

On aid to the Palestinians, Al-Jubeir said he could not come up with a bottom-line figure for Palestinian development, because “we have to see what the projects are that they require, what are the sizes of the aid packages that they require, who else is going to contribute, who else is going to fulfill obligations that they have made in the past but have not fulfilled.  And then we ask part of the international community to step in and help the Palestinians.”

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