I will admit, I've always wondered why on earth we have troops in Saudi Arabia. As a response to the immediate crisis when Iraq invaded Kuwait, it made sense, but after that ... And now, in order to maintain a tenuous internal peace, the Saudi theocracy and monarchy are declining to actively support the US. They're not doing anything against us, of course; they're just not doing most of what we'd like them to do.
Now, the situation being what it is, we can't pull the troops from Arabia, useless as they are dangling out there. They don't deter Iraq, they aggravate everyone else, and they're sitting duck targets. But if we pull them, we're knuckling under to terrorists. If all they'd done was to attack the soldiers themselves, we could justify pulling them both for their own safety (ignoring the fact that soldiering isn't inherently safe) and because they weren't serving any useful purpose. Since they've attacked and killed within the US itself in order to get us to pull the soldiers, we can't. (And, of course, the attack also puts Saudi Arabia in a position where they can't ask us to remove the soldiers, much as they might like it. First, it would make them look like they were knuckling under. Second -- and most importantly -- they're probably afraid we'd say "no". And then what would we all do?)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!