Four years ago, talking to Prince Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, in a hotel suite in Mayfair he told me he and King Abdullah had no real objection to allowing Saudi women to drive: “But Saudi society is very conservative”, he said, “many would reject it, and we could have trouble if we allowed it.”

One vast Arab Spring later, and in a five-minute speech to his country’s Shura (a sort of advisory council) King Abdullah announces that women will be allowed to run as candidates for municipal elections in polls after next Thursday’s male-only vote. He added, as if it was the more outrageous concept, “women will even be able to vote in municipal elections”.

There’s no question that this is a hugely significant development in a country in which women have faced some of the most draconian personal and working conditions anywhere in the world.

However, it is worth deconstructing what it actually means. There are 5,000 seats contested in Saudi Arabia’s municipal elections (half of all the seats in municipal administrations in the country – the government simply appoints the other 5,000). These posts have nothing to do with the national governance of the country in which there is still no  electoral element.

Saudi Arabia’s municipal elections on Thursday will only be the second ever staged in the country’s history. One intriguing future question is how many of the 5,000 people the government appoints to the councils will be women.

Nevertheless it is a palpable break-through and may signal the scale of female restiveness in the tensions that have affected Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships.

We have been aware of the protests by women against the driving ban on females. A number of women have been jailed briefly this year for flouting the ban.

But what of the ban on women having certain medical procedures and operations without male permission; the restriction on movement inside the country without a male guardian; the ban on women leaving the country at all without a male guardian; and the ban on women filling a great swathe of jobs?

Old man Saud and his brother King have seen the dangers of the continued repression of women in their country.

How long then before there really are women in positions of elective authority? It could certainly be several years and may be longer. Because of the considerable restrictions on reporting in Saudi Arabia we have no real way of knowing the scale of pressure that the authorities are under.

A number of ex-patriot doctors and construction people have told me that tensions are higher than we know. The King’s move would seem to suggest strongly that the Arab Spring has indeed left this deeply conservative kingdom shaken, perhaps even stirred.

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When I was young Esso used to urge us to “put a tiger in your tank” when filling up with petrol. These days some are trying hard not to consider what we are putting in our tanks at all. Is it Libyan?  Saudi? Kuwaiti? From which particular oppression does it flow?

This Friday, 11 March, Saudi opposition groups have called for a “day of rage”. The kingdom has responded with what local sources describe as the biggest deployment of armed force seen since the foundation of Saudi state. Eyewitnesses describe truckloads of soldiers moving through key centres of population. The government has banned all demonstrations. The troops have orders to fire on anyone who attempts to gather in a public place.

This amount we know from the locally staffed news agencies in Saudi. But very few western journalists are present in the kingdom, fewer still are ever allowed to travel to the towns which are populated by the country’s Shiia minority.

The ingredients are set for a good deal of blood to find its way into the Saudi oil supply. These days, we journalists in the outside world are dependent for our information upon ex-patriot doctors, nurses, construction and oil workers. Inevitably they tend to be centred in the cities of Jedah and Riyadh. It is they who have told us of the clamp down on Satellite phones, the occasional shut downs of assorted internet services, and interference with t he mobile phone systems.

Read more – Oil shock: unrest in Saudi Arabia ‘worst case scenario’

This is the eerie overture to something which could prove , after Friday Prayers this week, everything or nothing. We oil consumers, we who have depended upon this and other repressive Arab regimes to prop up our systems are holding our breath.

But as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have warned, Saudi is not alone. There are many other regimes battling to contain civil rebellion.

The demonstrations in Oman have continued now for several weeks. The numbers are not large. Some four hundred in the port city of Sohar; a couple of hundred in the capital Muscat, and what observers regard as most surprising, an uprising in the Southern city of Salaleh. The army has been deployed and so far seven people are known to have been killed, dozens injured and or arrested. How, without journalists present, do I know? Oman is awash with ex-pats – not least in the armed forces. The Omani army is commanded by a British Major General – ‘on loan’ from the UK – he has a number (one sources tells me ninety) of UK army personnel with him. If Oman blows, the British will be very intimately involved.

Most of us filling our petrol tanks fret about the price of the stuff, perhaps we should be a little more concerned about what colour it is.

Late last night I walked through the crowds thronging Tahrir Square and the streets beyond.

It’s rare to move so seamlessly through such vast swathes of humanity and experience such individual pools of joy. Whole families with babes in arms, children on shoulders; exuberant young men dashing around in flag waving ‘congas’; mothers and daughters in headscarves talking animatedly. And though I and my small team seemed to be almost the only Westerners present, we experienced no sense of threat.

So where are those baton wielding thugs? Where are the secret police who have beaten the occasional demonstrator down the years and killed as many as 300 in these past 19 days? At home waiting? For what?

The army on their tanks and armoured personnel carriers were relaxed and mingled easily with the families who wanted to photograph their children sitting on the Abrams’ warrior bodywork.

Then I woke this morning to a quiet sunlit calm on the square. I glimpsed video on Egyptian television of an incongruous group of military men arrayed around a circular table – military men of a certain age – the ruling Army Council.  And to believe that they had made their first move to mourn the ‘martyrs of the revolution’. What capacity do these men have to wake up and respond to Egypt’s mood and needs?

The jarring contrast with the under thirties leadership of the revolution. a haphazard leadership, but informally (as informal as the military is formal) it exists and has brought us to this day.

It is impossible to exaggerate the achievement in knocking down the authoritarian, human rights abusing leadership that went before. But if it is possible to imagine, an even bigger challenge lies ahead – that of responding to the aspiration of the people – pride in an Egypt that expands and defends, freedom. Justice and economic prosperity for all – I shudder as I write these words – it is SUCH a very, very big challenge for a country dominated by the military and its President since 1952.

But the Eastern bloc – or elements of it, in Europe has shown it is possible – grim old Poland, austere old East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria – all changed and in a few cases now significantly free, just and prosperous. All things are possible. If it happens here – the prospects for realistic peace and justice in the Middle East must accompany it.

But it remains, this sunny morning, a truly vast challenge.

Well. Charismatic certainly, efficient effect, intelligent…and running for president? Well that’s how it felt to meet General Petraeus…

He had a good line on the World Cup: “rest Rooney for Saturday, save him for the other matches.” (England play USA on Saturday).

He was full of praise for UK Afghanistan effort - he set out the UK US linkages in military.

But he was cautious on the Israel question, one senses he is representative of US security institutional fatigue with the political failure of endless efforts to win Israeli Palestinian peace.

Headline from it all – without you the coalition cannot win in Afghanistan…

Petraeusism of the day: ‘The real surge in Iraq is a surge of ideas’.

All in all, no fire-crackers, but an intriguing close-up of a man who one suspects will attempt to go much further.

A short blog to start the day. I’m just off on the bike to chair an intriguing session for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Don’t often get the call from the military. But two very special guests today: Generals David Petraeus (US) and Peter Wall (UK) are to speak and interact with an audience.
Both have Iraq experience, both are now key players in the deployment of forces in Afghanistan.

But Petraeus is of particular interest in that as Obama’s key military mind he has thought deeply about US policy in the Middle East. He has raised questions about the balance of US interests and the way its relationship with Israel is handled. In the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla debacle he may have interesting things to say.

I shall blog later about what the generals have to say and the experience of sitting amid such military might.

Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.

For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.

This is not the end of the US-led occupation, merely the beginning of the end. 131,000 US forces remain and will do so until the cessation of combat operations in September 2010 and the eventual pull-out in 2011.

And the US and her allies leave amid an alarming upsurge of bomb attacks (200 dead in a week). Is it too fanciful to suggest that this horrifying adventure spells the last of such “wars of choice”?

Nonetheless, a military adventure which displaced some 4 million Iraqis, killed and wounded as many as a million (we shall never know the true figure), and reduced the country’s precious oil output to the point where, even today, it remains below that of Saddam’s final year in power, is coming to an end.

That adventure also shredded the reputation of Tony Blair at home and divided Europe as never before. This is before we even begin to estimate the financial costs of the war, which run into trillions of dollars.

So what were the Iraq war aims? To safeguard oil supplies? To remove Saddam? To instil a new democracy in the heart of the Middle East? To find and destroy weapons of mass destruction? To provide a bulwark against, and to reduce the power of, Iran?

Six new oilfield contracts are to be auctioned today, but production is still stagnant and the oil law is still stuck in the Iraqi parliament. Saddam has been replaced by an upsurge in radical religiously backed parties that threaten civil war at any turn.

Democracy has delivered a factional parliament and, in the prime minister, the firm hand that Iraq has grown used to. Water and power supplies remain inadequate. And Iran, despite recent events, is stronger than at any time since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Perhaps Iraq enjoys a greater collective spirit of hope than at any recent time. But that hope has come expensively, and there is still a ways to go.

It is hard to imagine that history will smile on the two men, Bush and Blair, who decided to take the world in to this war – although it isn’t beyond the wit of Europe to reward one of them (who defied the majority of EU leaders on the war) with its presidency.