Hi Steven Rogers; Re: "If Saudi Arabia "destabilizes" - translated, if it falls into the hands of a fundamentalist Government ... Off the top of my head and with no deep thought, I'd say a possible response might be to seize the oil fields, depriving the fundamentalists of their only significant source of revenue, contain the rest of the country as much as possible, and give the fundamentalists some time to piss the population off before making a further move."
Seizing the oil fields is an "act of war", and would be used by the budding (or is the correct term something that implies more age) fundamentalist government to unite their people against us. If you can name a single example where such a military attack against a nation in the throes of a popular rebellion had the opposite effect, please advise. We'd soon be in the position of having to take over the rest of the country as I have no doubt that it would start mounting terrorist actions against us.
When the same sort of thing happened in Iran the US didn't do anything, except the traditional containment.
One of the advantages of not invading another nation is that it leaves you with room for escalation. Once you've invaded, there really isn't much in the way of threats you can put on.
Taking the oil would look rather suspicious in the eyes of most of the rest of the world. People who believe that Islam should be allowed to run governments would be rather outraged that the US would do something like that. You didn't mention it, but I suppose that you're assuming some sort of altercation. God knows that any competent diplomatic corps can arrange for that. (For good advice on how, buy a Ouija board and channel Hitler.)
Unfortunately, I think Saudi Arabia could very well be destabilized towards fundamentalism. I'm not making any predictions, but I would be surprised to see the monarchy still running things 20 years from now, and I don't see how the new regime could be born peacefully.
We were very lucky that it was essentially foreign influences that turned Afghanistan into an Al Qaeda stronghold. That made our intervention there much simpler. For example, the Taliban set up defensive lines outside of the major cities. At the time, this seemed like just another stupid military move (similar to the one that the Iraqis did when they set up a defense in Kuwait), but more careful consideration, in the wake of what happened to the surviving Taliban who were caught by the Afghan civilian, suggests that the Taliban set up their defensive lines out of the cities because they had no support in the cities. The same applies to the Iraqis in Kuwait, they couldn't set up defensive lines or guerilla operations in Kuwait City because the Kuwaiti civilians did not support them.
If the Taliban had been a popular fighting force, they presumably would not have had to worry about civilians narcing them out to the US, shooting at their backs, etc., and they would have set up their defenses in the cities. That would have meant far greater civilian casualties, and far more effective defenses on the Taliban's part. Against a popular fundamentalist regime, the we're not likely to have the luck we had in Afghanistan.
-- Carl |
