Posted on 11/22/2003 6:25:53 AM PST by knighthawk
The best line from the speech George W. Bush delivered in London on Wednesday was just nine words long. Referring to the throngs of British protesters railing against the U.S. President and the war he'd started in Iraq, Mr. Bush noted that Britain's "tradition of free speech, exercised with enthusiasm, is alive and well here in London." After the laughter subsided, he added: "They now have that right in Baghdad as well."
It was the perfect segue: at once deflating the political tension surrounding his controversial trip, granting a polite nod to the protesters, and presenting listeners with the irrefutable and solemn truth that, had those protesters got their way, millions of Iraqis would be celebrating Ramadan under Saddam Hussein's jackboot.
But the rest of Mr. Bush's speech was forward-looking. His central theme was that the"peace and security of free nations" rests on three pillars: (1) multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and NATO, providing they are "equal to the challenges facing our world"; (2) "the willingness of free nations, when the last resort arrives, to [restrain] aggression and evil by force"; and (3) "the global expansion of democracy, and the hope and progress it brings."
Each of these points deserves its own lengthy essay. But as space is limited, we will dwell here on the third, which we see as the most important. As the President said: "If the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and anger and violence for export. [Britain and the United States] in the past have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability ... Yet this bargain ... merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold ... No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient."
Violence. Oppression. Tyranny. All of these words applied to pre-liberation Iraq. And the strategy of appeasement Mr. Bush outlines certainly describes the West's coddling of Saddam during the 1980s, a time when the Iraqi leader was seen as the lesser evil compared to Iran's ayatollahs. But let's follow Mr. Bush's lead and look forward. In the post-Saddam world, which country best fits the President's description? Hint: It's not Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma or any of the other nations the U.S. President mentioned in his speech.
The country we are thinking of is Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Osama bin Laden, home to 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, the primary source of al-Qaeda's financing, and the open spigot from which pours the Islamist propaganda used to educate young Muslims in Madrassas around the world.
Indeed, everything in Mr. Bush's template fits the desert kingdom exactly: For decades, the United States has turned the other way at Saudi Arabia's vicious human rights abuses, its intolerance of any religion except its own puritanical form of Islam, Wahhabism, and its flagrantly corrupt monarchy. The U.S. treatment of Saudi Arabia has at times been out-and-out sycophantic. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, receives his own U.S. State Department security entourage -- the only ambassador in Washington to enjoy such an honour. In the days after 9/11, as the U.S. commercial airliner fleet was locked down, the U.S. government flew a plane around the country collecting Osama bin Laden's many relatives so they might be sent to Paris. All this has been done so that Westerners may continue to enjoy access to cheap Saudi oil, and for the privilege of protecting that oil from Saddam Hussein.
Now that Iraq has been liberated, the U.S. military has abandoned its Saudi bases. The original hope was that a new era of U.S.-Saudi relations might now begin, one consistent with the lofty values Mr. Bush expressed in his speech on Wednesday. But so far, this has proven to be a pipe dream. On Monday, the administration announced its new nominee for Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, replacing Robert Jordan, a Texas oil lawyer. The new man? James Oberwetter, a Dallas oil lobbyist.
Mr. Bush has earned the world's thanks for liberating Iraq. And he very much deserves the applause he received for his fine speech on Wednesday. But if the U.S. President truly wants to bring democracy to the Arab world, he cannot apply his principles selectively. Nowhere on earth has the United States more flagrantly tolerated "oppression for the sake of stability" than in Saudi Arabia. It is time for things to change.
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