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

To: Brumar89 who wrote (147962)	10/15/2004 12:45:08 AM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 281500

Since SA opposed the war and refused to allow any support activities for it take place on their soil, how do you figure it appeased SA? Don't take my word for this, take the word of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Sometime in the past week I posted a direct quote from a Vanity Fair interview with Wolfowitz where he admits that the war in Iraq gave the US the opportunity to pull troops from Saudi Arabian soil and park them in Iraq instead. Appeasing Saudi Arabia, by Wolfowitz's own admission, was at least an intended outcome, if not one of the actual reasons for going to war. His own words: There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things. I don't want to speak in messianic terms. It's not going to change things overnight, but it's a huge improvement. defenselink.mil Pretty short sighted thinking. Moving troops from Saudi Arabia was to have cut popular and extremist pressure aimed directly at the House of Saud, but it did not eliminate these pressures as recent attacks within Saudi Arabia have demonstrated. It has not reduced recruiting for al-Qaeda nor for any other terrorist organization, according to all reports. Quite the contrary, the action in Iraq has by all accounts spawned great new recruitment drives for terrorists, including the bomb clad martyrs which are appearing in more countries now than just Israel.