Word: arabia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After a cheek-to-cheek greeting on the tarmac Wednesday, President Barack Obama walked the red carpet with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to the foot of an airport escalator. There, the President paused a fleeting moment in the blistering desert heat, ceding the right of way to his host. But the King would have none of it. So the two men rode together, feet on the same step. The extent to which they're in step on Obama's bigger agenda, including an effort to relaunch the Middle East peace process and repatriate Guantánamo detainees, remains...
...landmarks, the stars and stripes flapped alongside the green Saudi flag to honor Obama's visit. A graphic logo on Saudi television's coverage of the event depicted Obama and Abdullah in the corner of the screen, their faces nearly touching. (See pictures of Obama in Saudi Arabia...
...country of most of the 9/11 hijackers. The Kingdom supported Operation Desert Storm in 1991, in which a U.S. multinational force drove Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, and its Prince Sultan Air Base served as a command-and-control center for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Saudi Arabia has also championed a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, offering full normalization of relations with the Jewish state if it withdraws from Arab territory conquered in the war of 1967. And as the leader of the Sunni Arab world, it has joined with Washington...
...Saudi Arabia is certainly a challenging environment for U.S. leaders, given its approach to questions of human rights and democracy. Ruled by a hereditary monarchy, the country is governed under a strict interpretation of Islamic Shari'a law that sharply restricts the rights of women, and it empowers clerical bodies like the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to police civil society. Days before Obama's visit, a man convicted of a double murder was beheaded by sword and then hung on a cross in a public square in downtown Riyadh...
...describes an ongoing political tension within the government between more secular reformists and traditionalists, for which there is no clear resolution. "Abdullah's strategy is one of political appeasement," Yamani wrote in a recent article on the nation's political situation, "to make just enough concessions to appease Saudi Arabia's subordinated and disheartened peoples and relieve pressure for reform...