Saudi Arabia is huffing and puffing, supporting the Sunnis in Iraq with weapons and money, threatening Iran with an oil price war, and even entering the Somalia mess alongside the Muslim fundamentalists battling Christian Ethiopia.

Should the world tremble? Technically, yes. Between 1990 and 2004, Saudi Arabia, with a native population of 21 million, has spent $268.6 billion on arms — proportionally far more than either India or China, each with populations of more than a billion.

On paper at least, the Saudi military inventory is impressive: more than 1,000 tanks, 5,000 armored vehicles, 340 high-quality combat aircraft, including American-made F–15s and British Tornadoes, 228 helicopters, and 48 Eurofighter Typhoons scheduled to arrive in 2008. The Saudi navy operates 27 major combat vessels, including missile frigates and missile corvettes.

Despite all this, the most telling episode about Saudi military prowess occurred on the morning of August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s troops marched into Kuwait. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who was “shaking as a leaf,” according to a senior Western envoy summoned to meet him, ordered Saudi news organizations to refrain from reporting the invasion of a “sister” country next door for fear of offending Saddam. He then asked when he could expect Western protection. In Kuwait, meanwhile, top generals and the royal family gathered in a convoy and drove to Saudi Arabia, where they hid until their country was liberated by an American-led coalition in 1991. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait used any of their shiny military equipment to fight.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia never scrambled its warplanes for a real fight during the Gulf War, except for one photo opportunity for Saudi television when two Iraqi warplanes were shot down after being isolated and cornered by the U.S. Air Force. Nor did the Saudi armed forces move a single tank or armored vehicle into a direct one-on-one confrontation with the Iraqis standing on the borders. As always, the royal family’s major concern was that an empowered Saudi military would shoot at them first.

This fear raises a question: Why is it that Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf Arab states — Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — spend billions on state-of-the-art arms if they are unwilling and in all likelihood unable to use it?

The primary purpose of such weapons expenditures is to generate billions of dollars of commissions for the ruling families from the public treasury. The secondary purpose is to win favors with the countries from which the weapons were purchased by supporting their military industries so they can come to the royals’ defense. In 1990, the Saudis called upon “daddy” to fight Iraq. President George H.W. Bush and Prime Minister Thatcher obliged.

Now, as Saudi Arabia taunts Iran, the pertinent question is whether “daddy” is still available. What if Iran decided to respond to Saudi provocations by activating its hundreds of sleeper cells among Saudi Shiites and next door in Bahrain, where 60% of the 700,000 population has Shiite origins? What if Iran decided to go further, using its navy and its revolutionary guards in conjunction with Syria? With a population of 70 million and with a heavily equipped, well-trained army that numbers nearly a million, the Iranians, unlike the Saudis, do not view their armed forces as decor.

The Saudis sit on top of the world’s largest petroleum reserve, which makes many of them self-important. Many are also spoiled brats brought up by Philippine maids, whisked about by Pakistani drivers, and catered to by millions of Arab civil servants, along with the American and British managers running their country for them. They should not confuse luck with brains, and certainly not with armed might.

Had it not been for Uncle Sam in 1990–91, Saddam, who had Kuwait for breakfast, would have had Saudi Arabia for dinner. President Bush should tell his Saudi friends to focus on reforms so they can avoid producing more Islamic fanatics like Osama bin Laden.

More important, having been through the Iraqi adventure, America should be careful not to allow the Saudis to drag it into an Iranian misadventure, which is exactly the goal behind all this Saudi bravado.