The car bombings that killed eight Americans Monday night in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia will provide the Saudi Arabian kingdom one last chance to show America that it is truly an ally in the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The kingdom’s track record so far doesn’t leave much room for optimism.

Two of its previous failures were memorably recounted by Lawrence Wright in the January 14, 2002, issue of the New Yorker magazine. The first was a bombing in Riyadh in November 1995 that killed five Americans. “The F.B.I. sent over a small squad to investigate, but the agents had scarcely arrived when the Saudis arrested four suspects and beheaded them, foreclosing any opportunity to learn who was behind the operation,” the New Yorker reported.

The second was the June 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers at Dharan, where 19 American servicemen were killed. The New Yorker said that, according to a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, “The Saudis impeded the F.B.I. investigation because they were worried about the American response.” That response might have been to bomb Iran, the magazine said.

The most spectacular Saudi failure came in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Saudi interior minister, Prince Naif Ibn Abd Al-Aziz, offered his thoughts on the attacks in an interview published in English on November 29, 2002, in ‘Ain-Al-Yaqeen, a weekly news magazine published by the royal family. The Middle East Media Research Institute noticed the remarks and publicized them: “Prince Naif stressed that relations between the Saudi and U.S. governments are strong despite the Zionist-controlled media that manipulated the events of September 11 and turned the U.S. public opinion against Arabs and Is lam. Prince Naif said, ‘we put big question marks and ask who committed the events of September 11 and who benefited from them. Who benefited from events of 11/9? I think they [the Zionists] are behind these events.'”

The prince said, “I cannot still believe that 19 youths, including 15 Saudis, carried out the September 11 attacks with the support of bin Laden and his Al-Qa’ida organization. It’s impossible. I will not believe that these people have the power to do so horrendous an attack.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the Saudis figure out a way to blame Monday night’s bombing on the Zionists, or to obstruct America’s investigation of it.

These three failures — Riyadh in 1995, Dharan in 1996, America in 2001 — are just the ones that involve attacks against five or more Americans. It doesn’t begin to account for the Saudi kingdom’s funding of suicide bombers against the Jewish State. Israel’s former ambassador at the United Nations, Dore Gold, documented that activity in his best-selling book “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism,” which was excerpted in The New York Sun. Nor does it account for the regime’s human rights failures — the absence of freedom of religion, the restrictions on women, the kidnapping of American children.

President Bush, who used to own the Texas Rangers, knows about three strikes and you’re out. Lots of smart people in Washington are already past the point of giving up on the House of Saud and are looking for a way to turn the oil-rich Eastern Provinces over to a new leadership that might emerge as genuine friends of America. With this week’s bombing, the current Saudi regime gets another chance to cooperate. As the royal family scrambles to retain its grip on power, the fact is that many in America have long since lost faith in the possibility of an American-Saudi partnership.