The immortal words of Casey Stengel come to mind for the Bush Administration’s latest moves in the Middle East. Casey’s incompetent Mets were only losing baseball games. This bunch is playing with our country’s future.
The most recent tragi-comedy of errors is reported in today’s New York Times:
“The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to total $20 billion over the next decade at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.”
Counterproductive is a euphemism for exporting radicals to car bomb our troops there while King Abdullah tells Arab heads of state that Americans in Iraq are “an illegal foreign occupation.”
Next week, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will go to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis, please, to “make clear to Sunnis engaged in violence in Iraq that such actions are ‘killing your future.’”
At the same time, to allay the fears of our most reliable ally, the Bush team is promising to increase military aid to Israel to $30.4 billion over the next decade. There is nothing like a little arms race to promote stability in a trigger-happy region.
There may be some devilishly clever, subtle master strategy in all this but, based on past performance, they might do well to consider Casey Stengel’s advice for managing tough situations: “The secret is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”
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2 comments:
20 Billion dollars worth of weapons for the home of Al Qaeda and Wahabism.
How long before these weapons are used against us?
This mush is rather incoherent and as mean-spirited as most lib-leper offerings, though with a patina of literacy lacking on almost all other leftard posts.
Basic question: do you actually think the Saudi government had anything to do with 9/11? And are you aware that almost all the so-called "Saudi" participants were of Yemeni heritage? And what that means, given UbL's own Yemeni heritage?
Follow-up question: If we do take some sort of notional "high road" and not sell the Saudis the arms in question, do we simply lose money, or do we also lose some influence & leverage on a country key to the Middle East and Islamic world in general?
And finally: Do you actually labor under the misapprehension that a Democrat administration would NOT do exactly the same transaction with the Saudis, though perhaps with different US defense companies that were more generous to the campaign coffers of the Dhimmi-crat Party?
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