Since the United States is not leading the anti-Islamist forces in the Middle East and protecting the relatively moderate Arab states, the new leader is…Saudi Arabia.
But, you say, isn’t Saudi Arabia also Islamist? Well it’s as Islamic as you can get without being revolutionary Islamist. Isn’t Saudi Arabia profoundly anti-Jewish? Yes, but it mostly just talks about it. Isn’t Saudi Arabia anti-democratic? Yes, we’d prefer the United States but President Barack Obama is busy with other things.
Obama wants Middle East Muslims to love America. There are only two problems:
1. His policy doesn’t work. They don’t love America.
2. The Muslims he keeps appealing to are those who are radical and pro-terrorist. For those who are Muslims but don’t want to overthrow their neighbors, go to war with Israel as soon as possible, throw out U.S. influence, and transform their countries into something like Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, Obama is a problem.
So the Saudis are doing what I’ve been telling the Obama administration to do for 2.5 years: Form an alliance opposing revolutionary Islamism. Of course, the Saudis won’t include Israel (at least publicly) and they won’t get Europe, but at the moment they’re all we’ve got.
This was completely predictable.
It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when the Saudis become the only game in town, but I think you’re right. The Saudis coddled, and in certain respects even helped to conjure, some of the dark forces, but that also means that they might be well equipped to fight those forces – let’s hope, because the transnational progressives are delusional and/or intellectually corrupted.
You know things are going to hell in a handbasket when the Saudis are driving the anti-Islamist engine.
One has to admit this salient truth-US leadership has sunk to the depths of insanity when merely a decade past the 9/11/01 attacks-most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia!-are now leading the push against Iran.
As crazy as it sounds, this time I trust Saudi Arabia to do the job which Obama will NOT do.
The stuff of nightmares…..
Having the Saudis drive the anti-islamist engine is like having a death row inmate drive the prison bus. It can only end badly.
Exactly, SG-1. The Saudis started the entire problem in the first place 6 decades ago when they seized the oil fields developed by private companies and started using the oil wealth to promote Islam. To this day, they remain the leading force for “revolutionary Islam”, ie, Islam as such. The problem is now much bigger than Saudi Arabia, and it won’t end if we eliminate a lot of Saudi sheiks, but it won’t end if we don’t eliminate them. And Rubin is deluding himself to think Saudis are part of the solution.
In what world can the Saudis be considered even remotely anti-Islamist?
They ARE Islamists. They are against other Islamists. That is not anti-Islamist – that is just being against other versions of crazy morons taking their place.
We’re talking about people who have 2 hr. marriages and make up weird names to call a thing so it doesn’t appear to be interest on a credit card. It’s like being told not to use a bed and then saying it’s a box with 4 legs and everybody saying, “Okay, it’s alright then.” They spend half their time figuring out ways to get around the rules of their own constrictive religion and the other half trying to export it as a hobby.
Are we gonna start calling a bunch of Wahabbi idiots a box with 4 legs? Is a Nazi okay outside a tank rather than inside? That’s why they use passenger jets – they don’t have any tanks.
What’s the alternative?
I mean, it is all so … insane … But, in a world where our government, in the name of “democracy” is aiding “rebels” against madman Gadaffi — many of which rebels are Al Queda and have sent the majority of fighters into Iraq to kill US soldiers ….
is there anything to say?
Like the other Arab countries, Saudi Arabia is very well-armed with some of the most advanced Western weaponry. According to Wikipedia, the Saudi army possesses “a combination of French- and U.S.-made armored vehicles: 315 M–1A2 Abrams, 290 AMX–30, and 450 M60A3 main battle tanks; 300 reconnaissance vehicles; 570+ AMX–10P and 400 M–2 Bradley armored infantry fighting vehicles; 3,000+ armored personnel carriers, including the Al-Fahd, produced in Saudi Arabia; 200+ towed artillery pieces; 110 self-propelled artillery pieces; 60 multiple rocket launchers; 400 mortars; 10 surface-to-surface missiles; about 2,000 antitank guided weapons; about 200 rocket launchers; 450 recoilless launchers; 12 attack helicopters; 50+ transport helicopters; and 1,000 surface-to-air missiles.”
I was speaking in a larger sense. That is not an army they can really threaten anyone in the West with. They practice a quieter financed based religious imperialism.
Does anyone doubt that if they had the West’s capabilities they’d subjugate the entire region? They did when they could centuries ago and only stopped when they ran out of old and tottering Byzantines to replace.
The fact that the later Ottomans made their capital the former Byzantine one speaks to occupying a power vacuum rather than being an innovative imperialism like Alexander or Rome.
The Saudis are in a very real sense, like Louis Farrakhan, Nazis without an army. In Egypt it is said that Wahabbi Salafists are more popular because of Egyptian workers in their hundreds of thousands coming back from the Gulf states infused with Wahabbi values.
In the case of this administration, nature abhors a vacuity.
In the case of the Arabs, the soul fills a void…with another void.
In each instance, they do their best work tearing things down, not building them up. And then they begin offering “protection” from the very natural consequences of their own acts of demolition.
When a Mafia don, an Arab or a leftist offer to “protect” you…it is best to remember…that most of the protection you need…is from them.
There’s a Laurel & Hardy film where they’re in the desert, and in the sky appears a “flock” of elephants with pink ears flapping. Hardy sees them and says, “Oh, look,Oli! The Elephants are Flying South for the Winter!”
Correction – that was Stan Laurel who said it, not Hardy. It doesn’t seem to matter, though.
In reply to James May: You are right about the Wahhabi’s- As of around 1973-2002, the Saudis have pumped an estimated 87billion dollars to open Wahhabi schools in the U.S. What disturbs me are a couple of aspects- The one being that they are not constrained in any way shape or form to divulge their curriculum, and that curriculum is anti- everybody, unless you are Muslim, really; the students that were interviewed said that they are learning to fight and kill Jews, that it is O.K. to hurt or steal from a non-Muslim, and that “it is better to shun and dislike (hate) Christians, Jews and even Shiite Muslims”. This was reported by Washington Post reporters, as told in Frontpage magazine, “The Wahhabi Fifth Column”. The other disturbin fact is that in spite of the fact that these ‘schools’ exist on American soil, it is ‘only subject to the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’. This is the Islamic Saudi Academy, one of many, this particular anomaly located in Northern Virginia. With this brand of radical Islam being bred right here in the U.S., and with the integration being so readily accepted by our government and dept of education, Americans may as well be ready for Islam to beshoved down our open throats in the next decade, especially since this president has already bowed subservience to the King of Saudi Arabia, it is almost a done deal, unless we Americans wake up and involve ourselves in legislating our Constitution, and reminding those in office to stick to their promise to protect and serve their constituency.
How wonderful to read an article that describes facts on the ground rather than the ideological bilge that comes from the commies that run the MSM and the USA.
Well, how stupid is this??!! We know the Saudis hate America; we know they’re all radical muslims; we TALK ABOUT IT EVERY SINGLE DAY ON WESTERN NEWS; they KNOW we KNOW; and we continue to do NOTHING TO HELP OURSELVES “in the midst of all this GOSSIP!” How stupid is this??!!
This is beyond irony. All the way to … uraniumry! (I may have coined a great new word here people!)
Oops blew it. Uraniumy.
Sooner or later, the howling horde is going to bring down the government of Saudi Arabia. They’ll take over, and their first act will be to curse the US. Happened in Iran, probably going to happen all over the Middle East.
Pity about that, but as the left will say — it’s only what we Little Eichmanns deserve.
Saudi Islamist don’t like revolutionary islamist, is like saying the Nazis(national socialist) didn’t like the the Communist(international socialist). America is making the same mistake as she did in WWII by getting in bed with USSR against Germany. America weak-up all islamist (the Saudis Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Iran) are your mortal enemies.
Leo – I see you are well-read in Jonah Goldberg’s insightful book, Liberal Fascism.
The Saudi are the revolutionary Islamists. These are the radicals. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. The frinancing for terrorist is even more Saudi.
anyone forget how obambino BOWED to abdullah? showing deference in that culture means showing fealty or subservience, and obama darn well knew exactly what he was displaying!
Well, let’s see.
1. Religiously, as far as I can tell, Saudi Arabia makes Iran look postively liberal. They aren’t in the 6th century; they’re somewhere aound -2000.
2. They are one of the last true monarchies in the world. Adams (both of them) is turning over in his grave.
3. They have been spreading radical Islam around the world, in a way no-one else has.
4. They are legally at war with Israel. (Of course, so is Iraq.) Does anyone remember what happened whe nthe prince came to NY after 911 and tried t oblame it on the U.S. – and Guiliani hander him his check back?
Yes we remember when the prince came and tried to lie his way out of 9/11. They also have PBS and BBC lying for them. Ain’t dumb luck grand? If the oil had not been under Saudi Arabia only pigs would listen the Saudi.
Jack Durish – Frank Herbert’s Dune was set in the 1950′s politically and Dune is Saudi Arabia and the empire is British.
I recommend that everyone learns to write and remember to use a spell checker.
Sparrowhawk- George W. Bush had the unfortunate experience while growing up of meeting the hardest working most industrious Muslims in the World, the oil men. George H. W. Bush was doing business with them. As a result George W. Bush likes Muslims and is much nicer to them than is good for America.
Barry Rubin seems to be depending upon an internal Islamist fight to save the world. Who knows? Maybe the Muslim system will implode of its own internal inconsistencies.
Both George Bush and Barack Obama are complicit in the fact that the Saudis have the U.S. by the short hairs. Bush was more multiculturalist than Obama could ever be. He held hands with King Abdullah. He also claimed that Islam was a “religion of peace,” absolutely clueless about the meaning of “peace” as Muslims envision it. Obama simply hates this country, and defers to any other thug-in-chief he envies. Thus the bow to Abdullah. Thus the knuckle-fisting with Hugo Chavez. The bows to Communist Chinese leaders. And so on. Obama is simply the heir to U.S. policies on the Mideast, which, for starters, was the pragmatic forcing of Britain and France to surrender the Suez Canal to the Egyptians, by Eisenhower. Or the U.S. looking the other way when the Saudis and other tribalists nationalized Western developed oil fields. Face it, Mr. Rubin: The Saudis want just as badly to conquer the U.S. and make it “submit” to Islam as the Iranians or the Taliban. If the Saudis are “against” Iranian designs on the Mideast, it is only because they want to preserve their Dark Age regime.
wait a minute.
isn’t iran like 559595959 times more democratic than saudi arabia, which is a complete dictatorship????
another case where we support our friends, not the democracy?
Iran is under total control of Islamist mafia regime, a totalitarian dangerous regime which executes, tortures, rapes and maims hordes of its citizens every single day. Iranian people believe and fight for a system of government where all religions are separate from the rule of government, a secular system which Iran has historically been accustomed to it. Down with Islamic regime which has occupied my beautiful country of Iran for the past 32 years, has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children, women and men, and kept the entire nation captive and hostage to its barbaric Islamic rule. Down with Islamic regime and all who support and campaign for them.
Did anyone ever notice all the Islamic references in Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction story of “Dune” set 10,000 years into the future? I’m begining to fear that he was really prescient
Boy did it take you this long to figure out that Saudi Arabia is the world leader, and as the world leader you can do what you like. Saudi has been calling the shots since the Carter years, when the US rolled over on the oil crisis and the Iranian hostage taking. The US has been Saudi Arabia`s pit bull in the middle east since the 70`s. Our politicians will tell you we are over there to protect our interest, BULL SH-T we have been protecting the Saudi`s. Remember we found the oil, drilled the oil, refined the oil and let the Saudis kings just take it from us without a fight. Now that is being PC or stupid, you make the call.
It is not actually the ‘Free World’ if Saudia Arabia is part of it.
It is not actually the ‘Free World’ if Saudi Arabia is part of it.
Stan -
The Saudis and the Egyptians for that matter ARE Well Armed.Their problem is that they lack the industrial and human capability to maintain their stuff, as in “Does the KSA have the ability to overhaul, let alone manufacture an engine for one of its tanks without “advisors” in place? “Crickets…”
Dr. Shalit
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