Word: saudi
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...That brings us to Saudi Arabia, another soldier in our Iran picket line. The $20 billion in arms that Bush agreed to sell Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states is meant to deter the Iranians from taking the Gulf. All well and good. But the question remains, as always, whether the Arabs will figure out how to use them. They didn't in the last war in the Gulf (1990-91), when the Kuwaiti army collapsed in a blink. As the Saudi army did when Saddam attacked Khafji. Both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia at the time were armed with...
...Suspicions that some Sarkozy positions were manifesting split personalities increased on Thursday night, when the president reversed a spree of uncharacteristic - and highly controversial - praises of religion by declaring his devotion to the French state's tradition of secularity. During a recent trip to Saudi Arabia - a country whose official Wahhabism has been criticized from abroad as extreme and intolerant - Sarkozy claimed to know of no country whose "heritage, culture, and civilization wasn't rooted in religion". That followed his comments in the Vatican in late December, where the President praised faith and extolled "France's Christian roots". But given...
...this wasn't the first time Bush had jumped to a wrong conclusion in the Middle East. Now his coalition of the willing is dwindling, oil prices are soaring, and the Arab street is angrier than ever. Bush's approval ratings are lower than Osama bin Laden's in Saudi Arabia...
Bush's latest strategy involves trying to contain Iran by arming Sunni counterweights in the region, like Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. Such a strategy is rooted in the cold war mantra that even if a regime was a "son of a bitch," it should be supported as long as it was "our son of a bitch." It doesn't work. Washington supported both Osama bin Laden and Saddam in the 1980s on precisely this logic, but after 9/11, Bush himself acknowledged that coddling the enemies of our enemies had not made them friends; instead it had helped...
...Bush received his warmest welcome in Saudi Arabia, where King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud accorded him an honor reserved for special friends by inviting him to his horse farm outside Riyadh. But the Saudis didn't hesitate when it came to publicly disagreeing with Bush's views on various Middle East matters. Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, standing beside Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice, pointedly declined to endorse her call for more Arab gestures toward Israel or her relatively rosy assessment of political reconciliation in Iraq. After Bush jawboned the Saudis about increasing oil production to bring down...