[quote]pushharder wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
He also violated a treaty signed in a tent in the southern Iraqi desert with a United States of America general officer.
Pat is one of what Robert Kaplan would call “The Arabists,” along with James Baker and all of those other guys:
He’s got a romanticized view of the Arabs.
Already went over that. The rest of the countries of the Arabian peninsula were next. You know it. I know it. GHW Bush knew it. You can hypothesize til the cows come home and devise all kinds of scenarios how a super powerful, super rich Hussein in charge of 50% of the world’s oil wouldn’t ultimately negatively affect the US and it allies but I probably aint a-gonna buy it.
It may have affected us negatively, it may not. I liked Osama Bin Laden’s idea on how to deal with that the best: allow mujahideen from all over the world come to ARabia and put Saddam back in his place. That’s what he proposed to the house of Saud and that’s what would have been best for us: Muslims vs. Muslims. Still, he can’t just sit on the oil and would have had to sell it to make money with it, right? We buy oil from Venezuela, despite fat, fat Hugo Chavez’ rants about US imperialism. We buy it from the Saudis and they hate our guts. But they love our money more.
Speaking of GHW, he threw the Kurds under the bus the first time around and thousands of them were gassed. His son allowed the Iraqi Christians to be ethnically cleansed. Saddam actually protected them.
He also violated a treaty signed in a tent in the southern Iraqi desert with a United States of America general officer.
That may be the only - the only - compelling reason to bomb him. You have more respect for flag officers than the rest of us.
The Saudis are indeed a bunch of filthy scum but you didn’t see them running around ruthlessly invading their neighbors. So that alone refutes your comparison.
Ohhhh, not by a long shot. First of all, Saudi Arab mujahideen fly all over the world with the kingdom’s blessing to help the Chechyans, the Pakis, the Afghans, the Filipinos - anywhere there’s jihad, Saudis are there with the kingdom’s blessing. OBL went on a speaking tour of SA after he got back from Afghanistan the first time. In case you’re forgetting, 11 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi (and we bombed…Afghanistan).
Secondly, the house of Saud uses its filthy lucre from oil sales to pay for ideological jihad, mosques, and terrorist funding everywhere in the world Muslims are found.
The Muslim Brotherhood also recruits people from the kingdom to fight.
All of this is true. None of it refutes what I posted.[/quote]
Just because the Saudis don’t get into tanks and storm across the desert does not mean they are not “invading.” There are other ways of invading than the cold war soviet model. Prince Bandar bin Sultan has a direct line to the president, for crying out loud. We still buy oil from them even though most of their population wants to wage a great jihad against us.
The only thing that actually prevented Saddam from selling oil was UN sanctions, which were rather pointless and did nothing. He wanted to sell oil. He DID sell oil when we let him. Does “oil for food” ring a bell? Like I said, the only other things the Arabs have are sand, camels, dates, and goats. When they run out of that, they’re probably headed back to the desert.
Now that we’ve removed Saddam, we’ve basically obligated ourselves to stay their forever, because the minute we leave, the Sunnis and Shia will start fighting and the Shia Arabs will align with their Shia neighbor Iran. Yay us!
