a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Thursday, January 22, 2004 The Anti-Saudi TicketI have nothing to say about Bush's state of the union address except that the man is no longer my president; he's fired. All I have to say about Iowa is that a four-way race is more interesting than the one we had before. But for me the crucial difference between Edwards, Kerry, Clark, and Dean comes down to Saudi influence. Who understands it, who can resist it?Early answers are depressing. Edwards almost sold his house to a Saudi agent; otherwise he seems to have no real ideas. Kerry tries make the right noise about the Saudis, but then his campaign so far has been dedicated to the Right Noise, at the expense of hard specifics. Clark has a specific plan to work with Saudi intelligence and troops in the Middle East to roll up Al Qaeda. That sounds wrong, but in fact it may be the first serious step to take; I don't agree with this Dartmoth guy who accuses Clark of "getting in bed" with the Al Sa'ud. Remember that most of Washington is already in bed with them. I'd think winning a commitment from the royal family of soldiers and good intelligence would require leaning on them harder than Bush has managed. Howard Dean sounds the most aggressively anti-Sa'ud; he understands what needs to be done. But he resists hard specifics, too. "You use economic pressure," he tells Jann Wenner. "Like how?" says Wenner. "We're not going to go into like how," says Dean. "As a potential president of the United States, I prefer to make my threats privately." Yes, well, that's wise. Saudi cash does have a way of slopping into presidential campaigns. If Dean isn't careful he might find himself running against a well-funded Kerry or Edwards. So everyone gets the problem; almost no one has the faintest notion of what to do. The punch line is that yesterday Richard Perle and David Frum wrote an op-ed piece in the Times on this very question. The Democrats, they write, "need to propose a policy toward Saudi Arabia equal to the magnitude of the Saudi problem." Right! "Such a policy would be based on this direct challenge: either the Saudis put an end to the direct flow of money from the kingdom to extremist organizations or else the United States will no longer have an interest in the continued tenure of the present regime." Exactly! "Can the Democrats credibly convey this message to the Saudis? Will they fight terrorism rather than chase terrorists? These are tests that they have thus far refused to take." Unlike, I guess, our man in the White House? Does anyone else smell fertilizer? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:39 PM | |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
