Word: saudi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...month before the invasion of Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked by an interviewer how he imagined the U.S. military would avoid the sort of local hostility there that its presence in Saudi Arabia had generated. Wolfowitz replied: "First of all, the Iraqi population is completely different from the Saudi population. The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being...
...assumptions he derived from his reading of the Sunni-Shia distinction. In many ways, they're a mirror image of the thinking in Washington two decades ago, when Shiite radicalism centered in Iran was deemed the most threatening. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. cooperated with Saudi Arabia in recruiting and arming hundreds of Sunni Muslim radicals to wage jihad. One unintended consequence of that program, of course, is the international jihadist brigade known today as al-Qaeda. But the operating assumption at the time was that the Wahabi brand of Sunni radicalism was innately conservative and therefore...
...Washington Post, argues that the recent "Zarqawi letter" proposing a campaign of terror against Iraqi Shiites, "even if it is a forgery, faithfully expresses al-Qaeda's attitude toward sectarianism." This, he deduces from the implacable hatred of Shiism at the heart of the Wahabi religious tradition in Saudi Arabia and its acolytes elsewhere, and in this article - and in a lengthier exposition in Foreign Affairs - he explains how the ousting of Saddam Hussein has made attacking the Shiites a more pressing priority for a segment of the Wahabi clergy in Saudi Arabia...
...major and growing oil producer run by an authoritarian nationalist willing to deal with the West but on an independent and often competitive basis. Its domestic politics are likely to offend the eye for some time to come, but so does the domestic politics of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and scores of other regimes with which the U.S. maintains important relationships. Like the Russian electorate, Western governments simply have no alternative...
...payment--regardless of his partner's income. At the other end of the economic spectrum, the law prohibits Senators' spouses from accepting gifts worth more than $250 a year. But if, say, a Senator left his wife for a man, the new boyfriend could take a Ferrari from a Saudi prince if he wanted...