Saudi Arabia
T
Subj: ~ Arabian Civics ~Date: 10/10/01
he Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most insular, closed society on Earth. My trip there some years ago got as far as the gate of their embassy in Cairo. Saudi Arabia has never once in its history held an election, and is ruled by an absolute dictator who holds power by naked force, in part ours. The country's official constitution is The Holy Quran. Thieves are dismembered, smugglers beheaded, adulteresses no doubt occasionally stoned, all publicly, and Amnesty International honest to god reports someone was recently executed there for sorcery. Saudi women enjoy the approximate legal status of overdressed donkeys. Yet despite being an extreme right wing fundamentalist essentially medieval religious totalitarian dictatorship Saudi Arabia is nonetheless commonly referred to by our government in all seriousness as a "moderate" Arab state, "moderate" in this case meaning very loosely "our bitch". Anyway a citizen of this moderate Arab state, Osama Bin Laden, had some problem or other with the American "military" of late being in his "holy land" and the king, being of a different mind, ran him out of the country for his general mouthiness and then permanently fobbed him off on the rest of the world by canceling his citizenship. Our government for its part seems to have at the time dismissed as implausible the possibility that religious fervor might motivate people to acts of violence, and rather than not arm and support a despotic fundamentalist regime about as far from our political and cultural values as it was possible to get decided to keep doing this. Meanwhile it turned out that exile from his homeland made OBL if anything even less inclined to tolerate what he no doubt purely for propaganda purposes referred to as "infidels occupying the land of the two holy sanctuaries" and so determined to make the case other, and as there was not so much as a pretense maintained of any peaceful path by which he might otherwise pursue this really in and of itself not so very starkly unreasonable goal was by default left with no recourse but to pursue it by violence, a means with which experience had unfortunately left him all too familiar and clearly not too uncomfortable. He was joined in his efforts by a few of the more motivated members of a seemingly obscure and more than a little devout group of 1.3 billion people called "The Moslems". Bombs were exploded, missiles launched, planes hijacked, buildings destroyed, people killed. Everyone regrets that a little misunderstanding has spiraled so tragically out of control, and longs desperately for peace and understanding as soon as they kill all the inhuman monsters on the other side.~ Very Likely Not The End ~
OK long and short: The Saudi aristocracy will certainly not in its current absolute state persist into the 22nd century, and if it is not replaced perhaps soon by an at least somewhat democratic system, perhaps a constitutional monarchy of some sort, it will instead probably be replaced by a hostile and even more fundamentalist Islamic government after the fashion of Iran and Afghanistan. In a broader sense Arab or for that matter Moslem unification may or may not be for lack of a better phrase an historical inevitability, and it might arguably be best delayed, but if we think it might otherwise occur and wish to stop it we had best be correct in supposing we can, else should it nonetheless come to pass our opposition to it will likely make the event and its aftermath considerably, perhaps catastrophically, worse.
