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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (36931)	8/12/2002 8:19:45 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "And Saudi Arabia IS THE HEART of the problem ..." Actually, Saudi Arabia is a small percentage of the problem. US foreign policy is universally hated in the Arab countries. I think we agree that getting the Saudi Arabian public to see things our way is quite hopeless. You want the Islamic Fundamentalists to take over another big oil producer? That's simple. Destabilize Saudi Arabia. I, and a lot of other people, including the Saudis, think that invading Iraq is a good way to get the ball rolling. Official Saudi (or Iraqi) financing of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism (who did the WTC) is quite small compared to official Iranian financing of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism. The reason is simple, Saudi Arabia is a reactionary monarchy, Iraq is a secular socialist dictatorship, while Iran is a revolutionary Islamic state. If you succeed in destabilizing Saudi Arabia, the result is very likely to be another revolutionary Islamic state, and the support for terrorism will increase. Oh, so you're going to take over Saudi Arabia and prevent them from supporting terrorism? That would be a joke if it wouldn't put the US into the losing side in WW3. You know, when someone is pissed at you, there are three things you can do. You can ignore it, you can stop doing what it is that pissed them off, or you can cow them into keeping their feelings completely internal. During WW2 the Germans and Japanese were definitely very pissed at us. (In addition to attempting to thwart their global power scheme, we bombed the piss out of them.) We solved that little problem by forcing them to kneel in surrender. We did this by killing and maiming very substantial percentages of their populations. That solution is not available in the Middle East. It is beyond US power, as limited by diplomatic and political reality, to make any nation there kneel. Hell, even Iraq tells us to go hang, this despite the fact that we've militarily got them in a hammer lock. (By the way, where's our "nuclear shield" effect? We should be able to get Iraq to do whatever we want by threatening to nuke them.) -- Carl