U.S. Struggles to Explain Alliance With Saudis

[applegrove]

U.S. Struggles to Explain Alliance With Saudis

By DAVID E. SANGER at the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/us/politics/us-struggles-to-explain-alliance-with-saudis.html

"SNIP.............


WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday confronted the fundamental contradiction in its increasingly tense relationship with Saudi Arabia. It could not bring itself, at least in public, to condemn the execution of a dissident cleric who challenged the royal family, for fear of undermining the fragile Saudi leadership that it desperately needs in fighting the Islamic State and ending the conflict in Syria.

The United States has usually looked the other way or issued carefully calibrated warnings in human rights reports as the Saudi royal family cracked down on dissent and free speech and allowed its elite to fund Islamic extremists. In return, Saudi Arabia became America’s most dependable filling station, a regular supplier of intelligence, and a valuable counterweight to Iran.

For years it was oil that provided the glue for a relationship between two nations that share few common values.

Today, with American oil production surging and the Saudi leadership fractured, the mutual dependency that goes back to the early 1930s, with the first American investment in the kingdom’s oil fields, no longer binds the nations as it once did.



..............SNIP"

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Oh, It's Legitimate.

Or, Impeccably Laudable.

Perhaps it is their

Otherworldly, Insightful Leadership?


What could it be?

[msongs]

2. O'il bite...what else COULD it be lol nt

[MohRokTah]

3. It began under FDR and hasn't changed one whit since. eom

[Rex]

4. Well now that we have some good footing with Iran, we find ourselves in a bind.

Seriously we do. I guess we could compare decapitations per country, but really any clerical politic that rules over a group of people will be found wanting. Fundamentalism is a horrible plague in many ways. The human race is heading toward a secular world.

Both have armies, we don't sell to Iran but we...oh wait we have hehe giggles *oops*.

I guess we will watch the saber rattling.

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. k&r

[leveymg]

6. The relationship has reversed. We are now dependent on their money

to sustain our elites. The answer to the problems associated with that dependency is plainly the same as the one taken by the Saudis in 1973 - nationalization of foreign held assets.