Monday, June 21, 2004
Crisis in Saudi Arabia
Check out Slate's preview on the Saudi Civil War. It's only gonna get worse, if we expect it to ever get better.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was up in NJ/Phila. this weekend, which is the Metro area where the late Paul Johnson was from. The local and national media were interviewing people all over the area to find out what they think of the atrocity. As expected, the feelings ranged from complete anger ("I'd like to go over there with a machine gun and kill them all.") to not understanding why we're there anyway ("This is what happens when we try to police the world"). I was surprised though by how many callers to the local radio stations took their anger out at Bush. Granted NJ is a Blue State, but I'd expected the Saudis to take the most blame.
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The Saudi royal family is downplaying the insurgency as much as possible, which is understandable: If the jihadists were to overthrow them, the consequences would make the Iraq war look like a minor regional skirmish: Western Europe and Asia depend on Saudi oil as much as the United States does.
One way to understand how dire the current situation looks for the Saudis is by comparing it to Egypt's Islamist wars in the 1990s in which over 1,200 people were killed. Like the Saudis, the Egyptian groups first went after officials and policemen, who are generally regarded as "hard" targets. As the Egyptian government beefed up security and made life miserable for the militants, the groups went after softer targets, like the Coptic Christian minority and tourists. In Saudi Arabia, however, it seems that some authorities have softened targets that should be hard. For instance, a Riyadh compound that houses foreign workers, including a large contingent of military advisers, was made vulnerable last May when about fifty security guards were dispatched to the desert for impromptu training exercises. One survivor, an American military adviser, is certain that the security of the compound was intentionally compromised to facilitate the operation, which killed 36.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was up in NJ/Phila. this weekend, which is the Metro area where the late Paul Johnson was from. The local and national media were interviewing people all over the area to find out what they think of the atrocity. As expected, the feelings ranged from complete anger ("I'd like to go over there with a machine gun and kill them all.") to not understanding why we're there anyway ("This is what happens when we try to police the world"). I was surprised though by how many callers to the local radio stations took their anger out at Bush. Granted NJ is a Blue State, but I'd expected the Saudis to take the most blame.
