Posted on 05/24/2019 2:00:58 PM PDT by Kaslin
If you paid attention, you would know that Usama bin Ladin fled Saudi Arabia to found Al Qeada.
AQ has never been in SAudi Arabia as a meaningful force. AQ is in fact the enemy of Saudi Arabia.
Yet Al-Qaeda receives support and assistance from elements of the Saudi government and Intelligence Service, especially in Syria today.
[And why should we care if Iran takes its natural place as hegemon of the region?]
Iran doesn’t have the force projection to control the realistically control all of the oilfields, and they don’t have ICBMs. Even if they did, why would they use them? Because they’re so crazy that they don’t mind being nuked off the face of the Earth?
[Yet Al-Qaeda receives support and assistance from elements of the Saudi government and Intelligence Service, especially in Syria today.]
Al-Qaeda is a Saudi proxy army. It was made up of mujahedeen which nobody disputes were Saudi proxies, and Bin Laden’s family is tied to the hip of the Saudi Royal Family. Then suddenly 9/11 happens and Al-Qaeda hates the Saudi government, despite being armed and funding to engage in advancing the same geo-strategic interests and receiving continuous support from the Saudi government.
Well, the Binladin group will have a hard time ginning up terrorists because the Saudis just nationalized a good chunk of it.
CC
[Al-Qaeda is a Saudi proxy army. It was made up of mujahedeen which nobody disputes were Saudi proxies, and Bin Ladens family is tied to the hip of the Saudi Royal Family. Then suddenly 9/11 happens and Al-Qaeda hates the Saudi government, despite being armed and funding to engage in advancing the same geo-strategic interests and receiving continuous support from the Saudi government.]
The 9/11 attacks were a supersized coup attempt against the Saudi royal family by bin Laden. The idea behind the attacks was that the US would invade Saudi Arabia and topple the al-Saud family, thereby uniting the Muslim world behind al Qaedas plan to make bin Laden the first Caliph since the Ottomans were removed from power by Kemal Ataturk. Assuming al Qaeda was able to eject the US from Saudi Arabia the way the Afghans ejected the Soviets, the bin Ladin family would graduate, from mere retainers to a royal family, to being the royal family.
In addition, Saudi Arabia also suffered a huge hit to its favorability rating among Americans in the wake of 9/11. It went from 47% favorable and 46% unfavorable in Feb 2001 to 29% favorable and 67% unfavorable in Feb 2019, almost 18 years after the 9/11 attacks. In a traditional Arab society where collective responsibility is pretty much a given, there’s no question that the bin Ladin family has a lot to answer for.
thanks for all that, very interesting
the one item we definitely don’t need is all these Islamics in USA!
the dangerous results of that are so obvious already...
and growing by the day
as more and more and more flood into America
Look at what happened afterwards. Iraq was invaded, and the US was spending billions to reshape the Middle East. The plan failed because Iraq turned into a quagmire and killed American support for more countries to be invaded. Instead, no war with Iran happened and the power vacuum was filled by the Iranians.
If there’s anything to be learned by this, is that these interventions are doing nothing but bankrupting and weakening us.
Bankrupting? That's way exaggerated. Government spending (federal, state and local) is about 40% of the economy. All of our spending in the Middle East and Afghanistan combined* is $75b a year, or about 0.375% of the $20T economy. It won't come close to bankrupting us. We spent the equivalent of 200% of the economy over 4 years of WWII and we came out just fine.
Liberals scream** about defense expenditures all the time, and I used to believe them. Then I looked at the numbers and realized that they're full of crap. Note that when Eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex, we were spending 10% of economic output on defense. We're now spending 4.5%.
* Page 16 shows a line-by-line itemization.
** To a liberal, every dollar of the economy not spent on the welfare state or hiking civil service salaries is a dollar wasted.
If you think the trillions of dollars we spent fighting those wars was better spent than on domestic issues, than I don’t know what to say.
We could have built the Wall dozens of times over with it.
[Al-Qaeda is a Saudi proxy army. It was made up of mujahedeen which nobody disputes were Saudi proxies, and Bin Ladens family is tied to the hip of the Saudi Royal Family. Then suddenly 9/11 happens and Al-Qaeda hates the Saudi government, despite being armed and funding to engage in advancing the same geo-strategic interests and receiving continuous support from the Saudi government.]
Arabs don’t take their marching orders from the government. That’s why they make such lousy soldiers, from the perspective of the ruler. Nobody wants to die for the leader - everyone wants to be last man standing. Read a Middle Eastern history book about all the different regimes that have come and gone and it’s full of intra-regime intrigue - fathers killing sons, siblings killing siblings, sons killing fathers, grand viziers killing sultans, generals rising in revolt, etc.
The idea that the Saudi royals are feeding their subjects Wahhabism and making them radical rather than singing along to avoid being killed is a joke. In these places, every man thinks he could be sultan, and pointing to the irreligion of the incumbents is an excellent way to rally followers and raise the flag of revolt.
[If you think the trillions of dollars we spent fighting those wars was better spent than on domestic issues, than I dont know what to say.
We could have built the Wall dozens of times over with it.]
The Chamber of Commerce keeps funding incumbent RINO’s and multiple primary opponents to the point that no single challenger can beat the incumbent RINO. If you have $10m to spare to fund a PAC that attacks Graham while simultaneously promoting one of his challengers, I suspect you could probably defeat Graham while electing that challenger. But it’s a lot of dough, and there are a lot of open borders RINO’s.
There is no threat to the United States from Iran. That’s a stupid joke.
And billions more in weapons to the Saudi Barbarians is a disgrace.
All vomit-inducing and disgraceful.
[The Saudis did radicalize their subjects. They drove out the Hashemites when they conquered Mecca and imposed Wahabbism. And they have spent billions of dollars promoting Wahabbism across the globe.The Sauds were the original patrons of Al-Wahhab himself. I’m not suggesting Arabs would be like Europeans if the Saudis were overthrown, but there’s not much daylight between Al-Qaeda and the Saudi government. They have been proxies for them for years. ]
I don’t know why he would go this route other than to piss off Congress. To date, no sale has been successfully blocked by Congress, only partially. For Congress to disapprove, it has to pass a Joint Resolution and then override a Presidential veto. Not likely to happen. The “partial” block was when the Reagan administration wanted to sell EWACS, Sidewinder missiles, and Stinger missles to the Saudis. Reagan compromised and did not sell the Stingers.
[I dont know why he would go this route other than to piss off Congress.]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.