Saudi Ambassador to the US, Pr. Turki Al-Faisal, delivered an address to the attendees of the Conference. You can find a full text of his speech here, from the Saudi Embassy’s website.

The principle theme of his speech was the new constitutional law concerning the succession of kings in Saudi Arabia. He noted that calling the new institution developed to deal with succession the “Alliance Council” is wrong:

Allegiance Council, as I’ve seen now in currency, is a misnomer because allegiance is one-sided and connotes total obedience. The Bay’ah is actually a compact, and it is a contract between the ruler and the ruled whereby the ruler obliges himself to protect, promote, and enhance the lives and property of the ruled; and the ruled, in return, oblige themselves to protect, promote, and obey the ruler on everything but that which counters the teachings of God.

He continued with a history of consultation within Islam and within the modern Saudi state, stating that traditional values and traditional ways of governing are not made obsolete by modernity, but can be updated to meet new needs.

Pr. Turki took questions from the floor—through moderator John Duke Anthony of NCUSAR.

One dealt with US policy concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Turki found US policy wanting. It needs a major adjustment in order to implement its own Roadmap, he said. The peace plan put forth by then-Crown Prince Abdullah in 2003 remains viable and should be the focus of US activities. More than anything else, he said, a solution to this problem would allow the Arab world, the entire world, to get to more important issues for the future of the world.

In response to a question about Iraq, he noted that a partitioned Iraq cannot exist for long. Even trying to partition the country along ethnic or sectarian lines is doomed to fail because of the way ethnicity and sect are so thoroughly interwoven in Iraqi society. To envision a partitioned Iraq, he said,

…is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale, and the uprooting of families and even the divorce rate in Iraq will shoot up 300 percent because a husband who is a Sunni will divorce his Shi’a wife, and a Shi’a wife will – Shi’a husband will divorce his Sunni wise, and a Kurdish mother will disown her half-Arab children, et cetera. It is just, in my view, impossible to do that.

Pr. Turki also addressed questions on job creation; Saudi Arabia’s experience, so far, with the WTO; political participation by Saudi women; and the non-oil-related growth of the Saudi economy. I encourage you to read the entire piece.