USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011211.2020 (On Screen): So with the collapse of the Taliban, and the absence of street riots in the Muslim capitols of the world, and the likelihood that the US might take the war on the road to other Muslim nations, the big question was how the Saudi government would deal with the it: which way would they lean? Towards us or against us? They had been blowing hot-and-cold, being nice to the US but denouncing us internally, and that obviously wasn't going to play any longer.

The new attitude seems to be, "Those Americans are really pretty nice fellows; but the Jews, on the other hand..." The US is deep down good; a true friend of Saudi Arabia. The extent to which it has seemed otherwise in the past has been due to it having been mislead by those awful evil Israelis, who are the true source of everything foul in the world. And there's a definite attempt to downplay the way in which the United States has been killing Arabs.

For example, this story reports on the action to clean up the last remaining al Qaeda stronghold in Tora Bora. It talks about it as if it were an internicine struggle between the (Muslim) Afghans fighting against the (Muslim) Al Qaeda (including many Saudis), and hardly mentions the role of the US in the action. There's a token mention of US bombing, but most of the emphasis is on the attack by "Afghan fighters". The reality is a bit different: when the Afghan fighters (local Pashtun) have tried to advance on their own, they've generally been repulsed by the al Qaeda forces. It's only been when the US had obliterated a section of the al Qaeda defenses with airstrikes that the Afghans have been able to move in and chase away the few survivors. But since the goal of this report is to deemphasize the role of the US in this war as much as possible, that can't really be said. Nonetheless, the report is reasonable even and straight, with no obvious attempt to smear anyone.

By contrast, there is no attempt to avoid editorializing on this one:

Israel continued its policy of repression against Palestinians as its helicopters destroyed a base of President Yasser Arafat’s elite Force-17 guard in the Gaza Strip yesterday while troops in the West Bank shot dead two Palestinians at a checkpoint.

In article after article, they suck up to the US. There's a feel-good piece about American Muslims celebrating Ramadan (though it takes a few swipes at the Jewish Controlled Media™); a statement from the Saudi ambassador to the United States stating that relations between the two countries simply couldn't be better (despite the attempts of the Jewish Controlled Media™ to try to sour relations between them), and a full-scale assault on the JCM™ and how it misrepresents Saudi culture in the West. Are we sensing a theme here? Despite worries to the contrary, the Saudi government (and, apparently, most of the other Arab and Muslim government) are being very pragmatic about this. They've decided that they're not really interested in becoming martyrs for Islam. I believe that this means that there will be relatively little negative political fallout in the Muslim world if the United States does end up having to become militarily involved in Iraq or Somalia or other Arab nations. It's clear that Riyadh believes that it has no chance whatever of dissuading the US from any such action, but that any attempt at doing so would be very dangerous for Riyadh, or at least for the Saud dynasty. (discuss)