Saudis and US: Dog and Tail

Excellent commenter Lafayette Sennacherib suggests that the Saudis are in fact clients of the US. I disagree.

LS:

You talk about 'the Saudis' as if they were independent operators; they're not - they wouldn't last a minute without US support, same too with the elites in Egypt and Jordan.

And most accounts suggest that Wahabbism is quite separate from the Saudi royal families; it's something they've made an accommodation with - they let them have their way in 'moral matters' to keep them quiet. I don't have the answers, but for 'Saudis' ultimately read ' US' elites - they have to do what they're told in the end. To what end, I don't know.

To which I respond:

Right, but what you mean when you say that they would not last a minute without US support is that the US for all intents and purposes is propping up an unpopular regime. It is unpopular because it is so pro-US! If it goes, you get radical Islam bigtime. Hamas X 10. You get more or less Al Qaeda in power in Arabia.

LS, you don't understand. You're like those Leftists who argue that the US dog wags the Israeli tail. Forget that. It's the Israeli dog wagging the US tail. The Israelis don't necessarily do what we want them to at all. But do we do what the Israelis want us to? You bet your sweet bippies.

If Israel is a colony of the US, then it is a very strange case of a colony actually controlling its colonizer in some important ways. That would surely go down in the annals of colonialism as a most strange transformation of colonial theory.

You don't understand. US power is what is keeping moderate regimes in power over there. That's good for the US, good for Israel and good for the War on Terror. In Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen - none of those places have free elections. Nor does Algeria or Mauritania.

There are scarcely free elections anywhere in Arabia. Truth is that no one in Arabia wants a pro-US regime. When you have free elections, you usually get of a radical anti-American regime of one sort or another. That's the bottom line. Hence, after the Hamas fiasco, the US is not in any hurry to promote free elections in the Arab World.

The Saudis do not have to dance to any kind of US tune. The US tells them to clean up their education system which is fomenting radical Salafist terror, the Saudis do little or nothing, then say they made good progress, and the US commends them in a fake report. That's how it goes.

The regime itself does not really promote terrorism per se, but they do in a roundabout way through their education system, state preachers and worldwide Wahhabi mosque funding.

The Saudis have us by the balls. By the oil balls. Furthermore, there is a complex alliance involved that the US elite is getting rich off of, and that alliance is not going to do anything to attack the Saudis.

The truth is that as long as Saudi Arabia, or any of the Gulf regimes, is a staunch US ally, the notion that the US is fighting any sort of a War on Terror is risible. How can we be fighting a Terror War when we are allied with those who are causing all the terrorism?

The people of the Kingdom are Wahhabi because this is what the people want. True, the people tire of Wahhabism, but they really don't know much else. The Royals are split. Some are pro-Wahhabi, and others are reformist. It's very complicated.

The game the regime has been playing since 1979 or so is Take Your Terrorism Elsewhere - Don't Target the Kingdom. Some even think that the royals support Sunni terrorism outside the Kingdom in order to kill off the young men who might make war on the Royals. That was the deal that the Family cut with bin Laden - Keep Your Terrorism Out of Arabia and We Will Not Bother You.

A secular culture like Syria or Lebanon or Libya does negligible damage to world's fabric, yet they are ferociously attacked in Washington and Jerusalem as the Terror Masters.

They are only demonized in that they are strongly anti-Israel and that those are the last countries in the region who have failed to become US allies. The lesson in Arabia is that you will become a US ally, or the US will try to destroy you in one way or another.

Further, the Iranian regime hardly sponsors terrorism anywhere other than in Palestine. They do support Hamas, it is true. They do want us out of Iraq and out of Afghanistan, because we are using those nations as bases to threaten Iran with.

But if you look elsewhere in the world of terrorism for the hand of Iran, it is not to be found. In the world of Muslim terrorism, all hands tend to point in one way or another back to the Gulf. Not just Saudi Arabia, but the entire Gulf. The staunch US allies in the Gulf. The money, the ideology, the troops, the mosques - they all come from the Gulf. From private oil money in the Gulf.

And that has almost nothing to do with the US, except that we are willing to overlook it in favor of our alliances with all of the Gulf regimes.

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