12 Steps For Saudi Arabia

Washington Post ^ | 06/27/04 | Jim Hoagland

[Pokey78]

Note to Abdullah S.:

I'm not sure you have really thought through the 12-step recovery program that you and Saudi Arabia must develop to deal with the addicts of terrorism and utopian Wahhabist Islam in your midst. You still focus on their behavior. Concentrate first on the only thing you can truly control and immediately change your behavior.

In a speech from your virtual throne, you have offered an amnesty for al Qaeda "militants" who in effect do not yet have blood on their hands. This offer does have behavioral virtues: Your words put a decision in the addicts' hands and acknowledge that it is up to them to change. This has echoes of a concerned person's Step 1, of letting go emotionally.

[Windsong]

"But only you can begin the national process of deeper recovery: of admitting that the alliance that the royal family struck with the misogynistic and anti-democratic high priests of the Wahhabi sect helped create the al Qaeda monster and has fed it ever since. That relationship must now be transformed if not abandoned.

"Transformed"? Yeah right. In order to cleanse the Saudi's, you'd have to remove Islam. Secularism and/or Democracy alone won't do the trick. Iran is in the same boat. Their students and protesters think that a secular government will cure all their ills. Not so.

Islam is the problem.