Saudi Arabia and America's "Extraordinary Position" 

The Los Angeles Times, noting that Arab attacks put the U.S. "in an extraordinary position,"  editorializes that "perhaps no country is more important to the United States than its longtime ally, Saudi Arabia." The Times observes that the Saudi regime, "an absolute monarchy" and "deeply corrupt and repressive...[and] licentious, [is] ...now...targeted" for destruction by Bin Ladin. Adding that this "longtime ally" hampered the FBI investigation of the 1996 bombing of  the Khobar Towers" that killed 2 dozen American servicemen and women, still the foreign policy advice of the LA Times is: "Saudi...[bases] may not be as necessary as during the defense of Kuwait [and Saudi Arabia]."  Don't press them.

Oil -every reader will say is the source of America's now "extraordinary position."  The Times openly says this is why the U.S. should not "press the Saudis now."  Saudi Arabia is "the biggest oil exporter in the world." This point, and the one typically attached to it by those who have defended U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf for the past 70 years, namely that this "deeply corrupt and repressive...absolute monarchy" is also "the leader of the moderate Arab states."

What is wrong with this view?

In telling us now, just days after the September 11, 2001 attack "the time to push the Saudis has not yet arrived," it is fair to ask at what point would it have been the right time to consider the contradictions between oil and strategy involved in our connection to Saudi Arabia?  Now that the regime is in fact tottering and being targeted by Bin Ladin (whose family helped put the present regime in power), why are the defenders of our policy, the linchpin of the U.S. State Department's Middle East strategy over many years back to the second World War, continuing it at all? This LA Times "duty" piece for the Foggy Bottomers is not promising.

Of the several alternatives to the continuation of an extraordinary policy, a large part of one of them -moving our own oil province to the Gulf of Guinea where a set of desperately poor African nations are eager to have us and where the security dangers are minimal -is mostly unknown to Americans, including Black Americans. Where was the LA Times on this one? We know where the State Department was.

But there is a more immediate question about America's supine acceptance of the Saudi regime's conditions for American defense of Saudi Arabia and of other regimes in the region. If we now find ourselves in an "extraordinary position,"  --and the dilemma regarding the Saudis is only a piece of our larger extraordinary or even grotesque attempts to form a "coalition" against "terror" by using the regimes (including Saudi Arabia whose nationals were among the terrorists on September 11, 2001) -it's because our oil policy as well as our larger strategic policies have been driven less by oil than by our wish to get it "free." To get it without ever taking account of our real interests based in strategic realities. Respecting these realities, oil is not and shouldn't ever have been the focus.

We entered the Gulf region as the replacement for the British. They left the region with their tails between their legs; they were chased out. Agreeing, as it were, to begin with our own tails between our legs at the start, we've lasted until now. And so now what shall We do?

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