Our enemies the Saudis.

May 27, 2002 7:24 AM

Our enemies the Saudis. In a must-read editorial, Michael Barone makes a scathing attack on U.S. support of Saudi Arabia. Does anyone else cringe when they hear G.W. Bush speak on how much he wants to protect freedom and fight totalitarianism?
posted by bobo123 (12 comments total)

Does anyone else cringe when they hear G.W. Bush speak

Yes.
posted by Optamystic at 7:39 AM on May 27, 2002

Yup.
posted by laz-e-boy at 9:08 AM on May 27, 2002

I snicker for a bit, then I feel a kind of sinking disappointment.

in other news, very interesting article.
posted by mcsweetie at 9:54 AM on May 27, 2002

The holy cities of Mecca and Medina could be returned to the custody of the Hashemites (Jordan's King Abdullah's family), who unlike the Saudis are direct descendants of the prophet Mohammed

After the earlier post I thought it was clear that we can all make that claim.

What an hysterical article.
posted by fellorwaspushed at 9:57 AM on May 27, 2002

Iran hates us because the CIA overthrew their democratic government and reinstated the deposed Shah. That's right. America, spreading democracy across the globe, in fact forced totalitarian rule on Iran. Sadly, the next time Iranians overthrew the Shah, they replaced him with a theocracy; and an America-hating one at that.
Our foreign policy is embarrassing.
Listening to Bush's conditions for ending the Cuban embargo made me laugh. We won't do business with Cuba until Castro holds free elections and allows freedom of press and religion. What bullshit. We do business with China and Saudi Arabia. Too bad Cuba doesn't have oil or a billion cheap laborers.
posted by eperker at 10:14 AM on May 27, 2002

Funny how Barone avoids the accusations that Bush & company "stymied" an FBI investigation of their own. Blame the Saudis, but completely ignore the long-standing and very deep links between the Saudi and Bush royal families? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
posted by mediareport at 10:52 AM on May 27, 2002

I'm sure there are a lot of Americans who would like nothing better than to flip the Saudis the bird. Many of them are even in the administration. Policy toward that country doesn't notably change whether a Democrat or Republican is in place, however, for a variety of reasons, including the conviction that any replacement régime would be a revolutionary Islamist one -- which very easily might pursue a number of policies contrary to our interests, including but not limited to dickering with the oil spigot and attacking Israel. It's a Devil-you-know policy.

There is no requirement, nor necessarily benefit, in having a "consistent" foreign policy.
posted by dhartung at 11:04 AM on May 27, 2002

That duplicity which is so obvious in how we deal with different countries is not a product of GW Bush or the Republican party; every administration has towed the same line regarding Israel,Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China since the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, respectively. Since people like JFK, LBJ, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were at times in charge I wonder why they kept the charades going?
posted by Mack Twain at 11:34 AM on May 27, 2002

Policy toward that country doesn't notably change whether a Democrat or Republican is in place, however, for a variety of reasons,

True, I don't think I got as riled up when Clinton would talk about foreign policy because he would use vague doublespeak as opposed to Bush's inconsistent logic. Helmes described Clinton's policy on Cuba as taking a firm stand on both sides of the issue.

I think the most interesting claim of the article is that Saudi Arabia's usefulness to the U.S. has shrunk because of it's lack of cooperation on terrorism and other supplies of oil.
posted by bobo123 at 11:38 AM on May 27, 2002

including the conviction that any replacement régime would be a revolutionary Islamist one

Right now, that's probably true: trouble with Devil-we-know politics is the flipside, as it's allowed militant Islam to flourish as the only tolerated form of grassroots political expression - with Israel, of course, as its target. It's as if the Sauds encourage militancy as a kind of guarantor of their own crony plutocracy, which isn't a tenable long-term situation. (The same applies in Pakistan: at least if you regard the ISI as the real power-brokers there, not Musharraf.)

And I'm not convinced that oil supply is the key, bobo123: Saudi oil wealth, regardless of who's buying, makes it a high-roller for construction and defence contracts, making it a golden-egg-laying-goose for multinationals. That's the impression I get from those regular full-page ads in the Economist.

What this piece shows is how 'regime change' has been taken up by some US pundits on a wider and wider basis: not just for supporting terrorism, not just for interest in WMDs, but for being 'not nice'. I just hope that it doesn't go further than the comment pages.
posted by riviera at 12:12 PM on May 27, 2002

Does anyone else cringe when they hear G.W. Bush speak on how much he wants to protect freedom and fight totalitarianism?

Oh sure. But the cringing is worse when he says our enemies "hate freedom." Yep. That's why they fly planes into buildings.
posted by dack at 8:29 PM on May 27, 2002

Dack, that's hardly a greater simplisme than your point of view, which is that we bomb people because they're brown. Do you think it might, just possibly, have a shade more complexity than that? Or do you simply enjoy taking potshots from the realm where nothing you say matters, so you can say anything at all? Satire sure is fun when you don't have to make hard decisions. Quick, who should we support in the Middle East? The secularizing Turks? The Christian Armenians? The oppressed Kurds? Or the terrorist Kurds in Turkey? Or the Assyrians, who are oppressed by both the Iraqis AND the Kurds? Is it really accurate to say that we think they're all brown and the best solution is to bomb 'em all? If you say that, how can you realistically retain the moral superiority to decry other's oversimplifications? Do you think the tone of your satirical whine is any less cringeworthy?

In any case, the latest Ali vs. Hitchens debate (last month Georgetown, this month London) sparked this comment from the Observer, which seems relevant to the current discussion:

The primary charge against Tariq Ali's position was that there is rarely any prescription as to what can be done. The support of "organic" revolutions from within will take a long time, and the point at which support from outside counts as unhelpful "intervention" comes very early indeed. And yet Hitchens, for all of the bracing clarity of his secular worldview, may be no less vulnerable to the charge of impracticability. The real questions, he rightly suggested, are what are to be done about Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence services - our valued allies who do most to spread the poision of fundamentalism. If nobody in the west has an answer to these questions, then it may be unfair to pick on Hitchens. And yet the sheer obduracy of his secularist position would leave him unable to engage with the only possible forces for change in these societies for the next decade or more.

Guess what? In the real world, sometimes all the choices are bad.
posted by dhartung at 12:27 AM on May 28, 2002