Mark Steyn: Reality check

The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 06/05/04 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

[MEG33]

Thank you, Pokey!...I hear they are jockeying for position in SA ...which Prince gets the biggest piece of the wealth....

[Rummyfan]

What’s going on? Either the Saudi police agencies are totally incompetent, as suggested by their high level of casualties on these occasions. Or a significant proportion are hopelessly corrupt and on the take from the terrorists. Or they’re under the sway of some of the murkier members of the ‘royal’ family. Or they’re following orders from higher up the chain of command, maybe even from the long-time (three decades) interior minister Prince Nayef himself.

I choose ALL OF THE ABOVE! The Kingdom is hopelessly corrupt and will fall as a result of the war. We need to make it fall the right way.

[Carry_Okie]

Brilliant.

[Rummyfan]

At the very minimum, Washington needs to have solid, detailed contingency plans for securing the oil fields, and making sure the Hashemites are on stand-by to return to Mecca and Medina.

I'm sure these already exist.

[eureka!]

flag for later with thanks to Pokey for the full post...

[Snake65]

Dead on, as usual.

[headsonpikes]

bump.

[uncbob]

We should have seized the oil fields long ago and let these drones go to work for a living

[Mr. Jeeves]

That Crown Prince Abdullah, Prince Sultan, Prince Nayef and co’s brilliant strategy of denying that there’s a problem, buying off the terrorists, letting them escape and saying they’re all Zionists will be able to reform their failing state or at least hold the lid on?

Well, that's the Kerry Plan...and since we can already see that it's not working in practice in Saudi Arabia, why would anyone support a Presidential candidate who advocates it?

[Agent Smith]

"I'm sure these already exist."

The real question do we have the brains and will to implement them.

[Lurker]

Another great one by Steyn. Thanks for the whole thing Pokey.

L

[Tax-chick]

Several adjectives spring to mind for a man who claims that Zionism has the youth of Saudi Arabia in its grip — ‘bonkers’ or ‘desperate’, depending on whether you think he believes it. But ‘able’ would come pretty low down on my list.

Somebody please put Mark Steyn in charge of America's foreign policy!

[91B]

Let the jihadis have the KSA. At some point they are going to have to govern and make policy decisions. With all the westerners (and assorted other infidels) gone they will not be able to keep the oil flowing and the local economy will fall apart. The gulf emirates will move even closer to the U.S. and some of the governments in the region who are not now friendly towards us (Egypt for instance) will likely move closer to us as they are unlikely to want their citizens getting any crazy ideas about revolution when they go on a haj. Right now the Saudi princelings are not our friends; I find it hard to imagine that we will be worse off with avowed enemies in charge as opposed to enemies who pretend to be our friends.

[MeekOneGOP]

A FULL TEXT post ! Yay !!!

[alwaysconservative]

Thanks for the ping, Pokey! I hope President Bush's reelection team taps Steyn as a valuable "surrogate", and helps Steyn get HIS message out, because the more people who read Steyn, the more likely we have a Bush/Cheney blowout this fall.

[Tolik]

Thanks for the PING, Pokey.

Mark Steyn is brilliant:

And, given that it’s the Saudi government that funds all the madrasahs that form the ideological backbone of Islamist terrorism, is there any point in pretending that the House of Saud and al-Qa’eda are on opposite sides rather than twin manifestations of the same problem? The West backs the Saudi regime as a bulwark against local destabilisation, in return for which they underwrite destabilisation of the West across the entire planet.

That was the lesson of the Nineties: you try to fight a war defensively, you lose. You send the FBI in to look over Khobar Towers as a crime scene, and Prince Nayef obstructs your investigators. You try to lob a couple of cruise missiles at Osama in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence picks them up on the radar and tips him off. That’s the world John Kerry wants to return to. There’s no reason for Bush to join him there. It’s not possible to manage Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Syria and a myriad of smaller problems indefinitely. So manage the smaller problems and, when it comes to the biggest ones, confront them and fix them.

What exactly is ‘realist’ about continuing to back the Frankensaud monster? The present policy is all but certain to wind up delivering the peninsula and its oil into the hands of Osama’s buddies. In one sense, the war on terror is a Saudi civil war which the Saudis cunningly exported to the rest of the world. The trick now is to gift-wrap it and send it back home marked for the attention of Prince Nayef. Given the inevitability of disaster if we stick to a failed containment strategy, how could things be any worse if we went in for some creative disruption? At the very minimum, Washington needs to have solid, detailed contingency plans for securing the oil fields, and making sure the Hashemites are on stand-by to return to Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia can’t be saved, and the more we postpone reaching that conclusion and acting on it, the messier it’s going to be. Whoever you’re backing in November, the quiet life isn’t on the ballot.
 

[Tolik]

Agree. Add Victor Davis Hanson to the team and ask them to produce Infomercials. Or simply reprint their articles in all the major newspapers, even as a paid add.

[arthurus]

The Jihadis do not need the oil to run a 9th century society. And cutting off the oil will be a material defeat for the West that will wreck the Western economies. The West will recover with the coasts and ANWR opened up suddenly for oil and new nuke plants building but it will take 5-10 years and in the meantime we will be fighting a harder war.