Saudi Arabia and the arms deal
 

Bush sells weapons to Saudi Arabia. 15 out of the 19 hijackers who did 9/11 came from there (official list) :

I am not saying "attack Saudi Arabia". If the USA is a friend of Saudi Arabia then it would be easy to find out who financed the hijackers and so on.

What's going on in Saudi Arabia :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/1874471.stm
http://growabrain.typepad.com/growab...h_abdullah.jpg

Are they.. holding.. hands..?

We should have attacked them ages ago. Instead we have an oil circle jerk going. It makes me sick.

Edit: Posted too early. As far as the Middle East goes, many if not most of the supposed terrorists, or more accurately destabilizing persons and organizations of a radical philosophical nature, are grown and bred in Saudi Arabia. While they are given the best oil deals, and aren't attacked, they still live under a repressive and unstable monarchy. This monarchy just happens to have strong and friendly ties to strong families and organizations in the US. Compare that to Iran, which actually stabilizes the ME.

(worries)

Were they phased plasma rifles in 40 watt range?

Two other reasons:

1) The U.S. needs money like this to fund wars.

2) The U.S. is banking on Saudi Arabia being one of the few Middle Eastern countries who won't side with Iran when things go down.


Do the details of 9/11 even matter? Bush did go into Iraq after all.

Yes the hijackers were of Saudi origin, but until you can make a link between the government and those Saudi citizens I don't see how selling weapons to another nation is problematic (given this particular argument).

The fact of the matter is, the Saudi military needs the arms to keep people like the terrorists from over throwing their monarchy. Without the support of US arms (and this goes back to Roosevelt) the House of Saud would have fallen long ago.

The question is what would replace it?

Better the enemy you know than the one you don't... no?

Doesn't this simply replace the arms race of the cold war, with another in the Middle East? This will not stabilize the region, but rather create greater threats between nations.

Is it necessary to ask who wins by this Bush policy?

The difference, here, is that the U.S. is by far the greatest military might in the world, and they are supplying arms to other nations over which they hope to hold great influence. Think Saudi Arabia and Israel. They look to these nations as a counterbalance to their greatest perceived threat: militant and rogue Islamic states. I suppose this is similar to the Cold War, when the threat was Communism. But I think this new situation is a bit more complex.

The reason why this is worse than the Cold War is because Americans are arming people in a region that doesn't necessarily share its values. How close in values are Americans, Saudi Arabians, and Israelis? This isn't the Communists vs. the Capitalists here. This is religion, resources, politics, and history--you name it.

America is feeding fuel into a bomb just waiting to go off.

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

There are too many unknown unknowns in this situation.