Posted on 08/07/2003 5:18:52 AM PDT by SJackson
The United States and Saudi Arabia have arrived at a familiar moment in a love-hate relationship based on oil and cultural incompatibility. The two governments normally take a deep breath and decide that the benefits their strategic entanglement brings outweigh the problems it creates. But that stock-taking is not happening this time.
Problems are proliferating instead of being quietly disarmed by adroit diplomacy. Washington and Riyadh are slipping toward new confrontations over the future of Iraq, democracy in the Middle East and U.S. objections to Saudi financing and support for Arab terrorist groups.
These explosive issues already spin beyond the control of the diplomats and encourage the political leaders on each side to contemplate a silent but deadly thought of last resort: We can get along without you.
Containing the damage to this still useful relationship -- while prodding Saudi Arabia to change its most egregiously intolerant and incendiary ways -- tops the list of urgent and difficult challenges that Colin Powell's State Department confronts. Yet the Saudi challenge arrives as U.S. diplomacy seems destined to play a rapidly diminishing role in world affairs.
The current guessing game of how long Powell will remain as secretary of state is much less important than the question of whether he and his successors can adapt and be effective in the world shaped by 9/11 and the strategy of military preemption it provoked.
U.S. commitments to protect the Saudi royal family and oil fields from revolution or other disaster stretch back to 1945. But the involvement of Saudi citizens in 9/11, the kingdom's relative decline as the swing factor in world oil markets and the Bush agenda for regional change mean that Washington is no longer willing to overlook Saudi behavior that was left alone in the past.
"The old assumption was that the cost of terrorism was sustainable," says one senior administration official. "The horror of 9/11 showed that it is not. You have to deal with the threat now, before it strikes you."
Prince Saud did not mount his soapbox here believing he could force Bush to declassify 28 pages in a congressional report that finger Saudi financing for charities that support terrorist groups. A public release that would provoke official arguments over the report was the last thing the Saudi diplomat wanted. He was here as a politician, to show Saudi opinion that he was standing up in the belly of the monster.
"I understand the dangers," a senior Saudi official said to an American friend a few years ago. "But people in the kingdom think these contributions buy them paradise in the hereafter and protection here on Earth. It will not be easy to get them to change."
Guiding other nations to make difficult but needed changes is the heart and soul of diplomacy. How well Powell and his diplomats can do this in Saudi Arabia is now a crucial test to his still-unformed legacy.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Another Clinton legacy.
Sorry, but as much as I loathe The Clintons, this can't be pinned on them. The origins of this disaster go back several generations, to the transfer of responsibility for the protection of the West's access to Arabian oil from the British to us Americans.
Every administration since then, going back to at least FDR, has had to deal with the venal Saudi Princes whose modus operandi was to support the extreme Wahabbist sect in exchange for their political support, all while pursuing lives of sloth, lasciviousness, and opulence. This is a foreign policy that has aligned us with a regime more anti-thical to our values than any on earth.
The sooner we go our separate ways, the better.
Don't be fooled by the so-called need for Saudi oil: as a commodity, oil is fungible. We continued to buy Iraqi oil, and the Iraqis continued to sell it to us, throughout the 1990s. The Saudis are in a similar situation, in that they can't afford not to sell their oil.
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