More gasoline for the fire please

Some things don't change. The US has a long history of supporting tyranny of the worst sort as long as it wasn't communist tyranny and as long as a country like Saudi Arabia with it's ritual beheadings, mutilations and brutal repression is willing to sell us oil, we will continue to give them weapons, even if some of those weapons might walk over the border into Iraq and shoot us in the bum.

It's looking like the 20 billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia is a done deal and there has been no talk of any requirement on the part of the Saudis to reform anything or to stop fomenting anti-American religious fervor, much less to put a halt to murdering their daughters for things considered normal in the real world. Saudi Arabia is a medieval country, but a medieval country that owns a big part of the Bush Crime Family; owns them so solidly that they can call our occupation of Iraq illegal when Americans are condemned for saying it. It's a medieval country that practices a degree of oppression almost unimaginable here, yet you won't hear any member of the Bush Crime Family telling us the world would be better off with a Saudi regime change or with some sort of Democracy. Instead we've made them the largest client of the US arms trade so that they can more effectively resist reform, practice Wahabbism and preach Jihad in the rest of the world.

In an e-mail to Raw Story, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said

“I believe that the $20B arms package just announced – and the diplomacy accompanying it – is a complete refutation of the Bush/Rice policy of refusing to coddle the autocracies of the Middle East,” Wilkerson said. “Because we are afraid of Tehran, we are willing to fund massively regimes whose interests are not only counter to our own but who are actively engaged in covertly undermining U.S. interests, from supporting anti-U.S. elements in Iraq to building and funding thousands of madrassas in volatile places like the Federally Administered Territories in Pakistan.”

I disagree in part. I think the Bush policy has been to coddle and protect their friends whether or not those friends mean our country well or ill. I think the Saudis see us as loathsome but profitable customers who will be replaced with bigger customers in due time, but Wilkerson is right that we are aiding and abetting our enemies.

If Bush somehow dreams that other mid-East nations can be persuaded to defeat and annex Iran if we sell them enough weapons and that we would benefit from it, then he is more of a dangerous idiot than I imagined. Add this story to the proposed sale of Iraqi oil to Israel and it is a public relations disaster that will surely fuel more insanity and terrorism and hatred.

There has been much written about the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton having made it hard for him to deal with emerging terrorism. I think that Impeachment may be the only remaining option for saving us all from the apocalypse Bush is hell bent to provide us.