The Moonie News Service is reporting that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia is dead, although the practical implications of this outcome are somewhat up in the air: Jeff Quinton thinks there is going to be a power struggle, while James Joyner thinks Crown Prin...

Thanks for the correction. I got the information from one of Robert Baer's book.

Fahd is not "brain dead". He's functional; he recognizes people and tells personal jokes about them. I've seen it with my own eyes as recently as 2002. But he's not fit enough to run the country.

He has managed to put a scare into his relatives through his insistence on driving himself around his compounds, though.

The man is brain dead, a vegetable, who’s only kept alive because his desperate relatives’ want to hold on to power as long as they can.

The interesting play will be, assuming Fahd's death, the question of whom becomes the next Crown Prince. It's not automatic that Sultan, currently 1st Deputy PM, will become Crown Prince, though that is how things have tended to work out in the past.

It'll be up to Abdullah, in consultation with the rest of the Al-Saud family, to decide who becomes CP. It is possible--though not terribly likely--that they could jump over an entire generation of Al-Saud to find a younger (say, in his 50s) member of the family. That would be big.