Barbaric enemies … and friends
by digby
As you listen to right-wingers fulminate about the need to protect civilization from the encroachment of the Islamo-barbarians, consider this:
Hugh Hewitt: And a last question about the current events. Today, Saudi Arabia is communicating by various means, very bluntly, that they’re close to rupturing relations with us over the president’s fiasco in Syria. How serious should Americans take that attempt by the Saudis to raise a red flag over the competence level of the White House?
Dick Cheney: Well, the fact of the matter is, Hugh, that you’ve got a lot of people in that part of the world that historically have been friends and allies of the United States. They’re people we worked with in Desert Storm. And they have been good friends. They’re people we can count on. And they’re now absolutely convinced they can no longer put any faith and trust in the United States of America. Part of it is because of the incompetence of the administration. And the whole Syrian episode, he drew a red line, then he didn’t pay any attention to it when they crossed the red line with respect to use of chemical weapons, and then he came back and said boy, we’re going to do something. And then they announced they were going to strike Syria, and then they said well, it’s not going to be a very big strike. And then said well, we’re not going to do it, we’re going to go to the Congress. And if you’re a friend and ally of the United States in that part of the world tonight, you’d have to say what’s this guy all about? Can we count on anything he’s told us? And is the historical relationship between us and the United States worth anything? At the same time, our adversaries out there no longer fear us. And I think the incompetence of this administration in the way they’ve handled these kinds of affairs, especially in the Middle East, is one of the worst aspects of this presidency.
Then consider this:
Three Syrians and an Iranian convicted of drug trafficking were executed by the sword in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the interior ministry announced.
Syrians Hamud Hassoun, Hassan Musalamani and Yussef al-Halqi were all arrested with a “large amount of banned amphetamine pills”, said three separate statements on the official SPA news agency.
The agency did not state if the three, beheaded in the northern Jawf region, were part of the same drug-trafficking ring.
An Iranian, Reda Idrisawi, was put to death in Eastern Province after he was convicted of trafficking “a large amount of narcotic hashish by sea”, another SPA statement said.
The beheadings increased to 45 the number of executions carried out in the desert kingdom this year, according to an AFP tally.
As Conor Friedersdorf pithily observed a couple of months ago after reading that Hewitt transcript:
It is actually impossible for any American political figure to have more chutzpah than Dick Cheney, because no one’s influence on public life has been more ruinous. His role in Middle East policy in particular will go down as one of American history’s most catastrophically costly displays of geopolitical incompetence. I have no doubt that he loves his country every bit as much as he loves a day out hunting with his friends. In both cases, he does about as much damage as buckshot to the face. At this point, it would be unseemly if he publicly criticized even the most careless hunter. He ought to shut up about Middle East policy too.
Friedersdorf also reminds us that most of the hijackers on September 11, 2001 were Saudis. How rude of him.
None of that is to say that ISIS isn’t barbaric. They most certainly are. But it’s important to remember that some of our “best friends” in the neighborhood aren’t any better. And uber-hawks like Cheney are fine with that.
Update: I forgot about this from last April. I’m going to guess Cheney doesn’t have a problem with it:
Saudi Arabia has introduced a series of new laws which define atheists as terrorists, according to a report from Human Rights Watch.
In a string of royal decrees and an overarching new piece of legislation to deal with terrorism generally, the Saudi King Abdullah has clamped down on all forms of political dissent and protests that could “harm public order”.
The new laws have largely been brought in to combat the growing number of Saudis travelling to take part in the civil war in Syria, who have previously returned with newfound training and ideas about overthrowing the monarchy.
To that end, King Abdullah issued Royal Decree 44, which criminalises “participating in hostilities outside the kingdom” with prison sentences of between three and 20 years, Human Rights Watch said.
Yet last month further regulations were issued by the Saudi interior ministry, identifying a broad list of groups which the government considers to be terrorist organisations – including the Muslim Brotherhood.
Article one of the new provisions defines terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based”.
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