He writes well, but his predictions have been off base more often than not. People who rag on the royals don't understand that they are the moderates, that they keep a lid on tens of millions of fanatically-zealous subjects who will depose them if they step out of line. The Israelis and neocons keep going on and on about the royals spreading Islamist propaganda. It's BS. They finance missionary work because it's their concession towards religiosity for the Saudi masses - it's boob bait for Ali. These subjects don't need imams to tell them what to do. They're not illiterates - they can read the world of Allah for themselves. No imam has the authority to countermand the decrees of Allah as set out in the Koran, and any imam who does so literally has a target on his back. Imams have been killed for deviating from the Koran.
The agitprop about the Saudi royals comes entirely from the the pro-Russia/Putin/Iran/Syria shills.
The 3000 corrupt princes (term from Ari Sharon) love their lifestyle of the rich and infamous, but they aren’t the only ones in the kingdom who have money. Cash for jihad against the late USSR was largely contributed by Gulf State billionaires, including those ruled by the royals. Most of the volunteers for the 9/11 mass murders came from Saudi Arabia.
In S.Arabia the wahhabists are independent of the gov’t. Until they got concessions from the House of Saud, they wouldn’t condemn the self-appointed mahdi during that late-1970s standoff at the Great Mosque. Practice of religions other than Islam is prohibited, and the largish Shia minority live almost entirely in the Saudi oil patch.
When the lid blows off — could be this year, could be fifty years from now — the only US priority will be to secure the oil patch, relocating the entire local population if need be. I read somewhere that the House of Saud started a large project during the late 1970s or early 1980s to build new housing for just such a relocation, in order to move the Shiites out of the oil patch and move in the foreign labor necessary to keep everything running, a sort of proactive approach.
When Saddam invaded Iran, starting a massively costly eight year long war which ended with no gains for either side, the housing project was shut down (if indeed it ever broke ground) because of the cost of the war. When Saddam turned around in 1989 and invaded Kuwait (the first time; apparently it was practice for the real thing, regardless the Kuwaitis paid him off to leave) it was seen as a betrayal of the very people who bankrolled his pyrrhic defeat.
And when the Gulf War started, there were so many foreign troops along the border that the Shia minority remained quiet.