By David Pollock

To achieve an accurate measurement of Saudi public opinion, pollsters must pull some tricks out of their sleeves to overcome the roadblocks thrown up by one of the Middle East’s most conservative societies.

The very concept of public opinion in highly secretive Saudi Arabia is almost an oxymoron. Hard data are difficult to come by, and even rarer is information about controversial and strategically critical current issues: views about military action against Iran, corruption and the state of civil liberties within the kingdom, religious extremism and al Qaeda, and donations to other mujahideen. Yet I was able to obtain exactly this kind of data by working with the new Princeton, N.J.-based firm Pechter Middle East Polls and an established …