Saudi reigns

The Saudis are in the global saddle

31 October 2007

The kingdom rides the rest of the world like a horse

The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom.

The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan (the Nation) on 7 October. It showed a garage — ‘Reforms and Repairs’ — in which a broken-down, leaking car was labelled ‘judiciary system’, and an upside-down vehicle was marked ‘schools’. A week before, the same paper carried the dismaying news that an extremist Saudi website had posted 18 flight-simulation videos for training on Boeing 747s. The message is obvious: the spirit of 9/11 lives on in the kingdom.

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May 6th, 2008 11:31pm Report this comment

What are the real implications to huge debt beyond leaving it a younger generation of tax payers? Reason I ask is that I argued with a staunch Republican after the presidential election, and he asked me "what do you care about the national debt?", guess he was referring to my age (60 +). And being Mongo (not well informed), I did not have a good answer for him.,

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