How to explain Al Qaeda’s targeting policy in Saudi Arabia? One month they hit Westerners in the hope of driving out the infidels who are essential to the country’s oil industry. The next month, they try to kill a member of the ruling House of Saud. Then it’s back to the “crusaders.” Last week, it was once again the turn of the regime to feel the pain – in the form of the bombing of the Interior Ministry in Riyadh.

One thing is certain: The kingdom is no longer able publicly to dismiss the insurgency – as spokesmen such as Prince Bandar did in the good old days – as the work of a few troublemakers. There is nothing like a bit of “blowback” to induce a little humility.

Some in the Bush administration regard Al Qaeda’s increasingly erratic approach as evidence of the success of the Saudi counterinsurgency. They welcome the kingdom’s shift away from managing the problem indirectly – by exporting jihad and jihadis as in the 1980s and 1990s – toward a stance that more closely resembles the policy of the Algerian and Egyptian confrontation of their Islamist militants. Many Al Qaeda activists have been killed or are in prison, while others have surrendered and recanted. There is, therefore, a headless-chicken quality to much of the targeting, or so the argument runs.

But the apparently uneven nature of the terrorist strikes also reflect genuine tensions within Al Qaeda – the word split might be too strong – about strategy and tactics. Or, more precisely, the movement’s priorities. For years, it has been bedeviled by one key question: Is it going to take the direction broadly favored by the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood or by the radicals within the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood?

For the longest time, the “Saudi tendency” has enjoyed the upper hand. It accepted the ruling House, regarding the existing power structure as useful agents of its power. Its spokesmen may often have opined that the government needed to purify itself according to Wahhabite principles, but they were not out to overthrow the regime in the immediate term.

For Al Qaeda, this logically led to an initial focus on such outside targets as America and Chechnya. It was exemplified by the unofficial Al Qaeda anthem, “Haya Bina Haya” meaning “C’mon.” This catchy ditty speaks of “folding up the space” between Islamic militants and Mecca, rather like rolling up a table cloth. Before the takeover of the Saudi Kingdom is accomplished, there are many other things to be done: proselytizing in India, liberating Jerusalem, and unfinished business in Syria.

But everything changed with September 11 and the subsequent overthrow of the Taliban. History now had to be fast-tracked without its intermediate stages. To the most hard-line elements within the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – whose intellectual godfather, Sayed Qutb, was hanged by the Nasserists in 1966 – fighting all these battles further a field is akin to whistling Dixie. Forged in opposition to the secular nationalist regime in Cairo, the “Trotskyists” of Egyptian Islam redoubled their revolutionary efforts in Saudi Arabia. Oddly, this approach owes something to Gamal Abdul Nasser himself, as outlined in his seminal work, “The Philosophy of Revolution.” After fighting in the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War, which created the Jewish state, he concluded that all roads to Tel Aviv went through Cairo. In other words, he believed that the Zionist enemy could only successfully be tackled once an ideologically correct modernizing government overthrew the corrupt old monarchy that stood in the way of effective action. The “Egyptians” dismiss the establishment Wahhabites, whom they believe have been co-opted by the regime. Instead, they have succored the Kingdom’s “neo-Wahhabites.”

It would probably be too crude to suggest that the radical Egyptian “school” is now in the ascendant. But the lines between the two strains are increasingly blurred. This confusion, in turn, has consequences for the targeting policy of Al Qaeda, which represents a fusion between the two approaches. The existence of two broad hierarchies of objectives within the Al Qaeda movement inevitably also has consequences for Saudi Arabia’s countermeasures. While they undoubtedly target Al Qaeda elements, the obvious question is: Which ones? As a well placed Bush administration official observes, the Saudi government has tended to go after the “Egyptians” in order to tilt the balance back in favor of the least threatening “faction.”

Maybe all of this is par for the course in the world of Middle Eastern realpolitik. But what a contrast it all forms with the moral clarity of the president’s war on terrorism.