#2 Saudi Arabia walking out of the OPEC cabal appears to be one of their 'paybacks' for allowing us to let them play that game.
We don't "allow" them to play that game. And it's not a game - it's a balancing act the rulers have to manage in order to prevent the kind of full-out internal revolt that happened to the Shah. Our enemies are the people of Saudi Arabia, not the rulers. It's not physically possible to prevent the Saudi population from perpetually working themselves up into a frenzy. Sayyid Qutb wasn't an agent of the Egyptian government, and he came up in an era when Nasser was spouting socialist slogans, not praises of Allah. The fact is that Muslims around the world recognize a higher power, and that higher power is not the rulers of the nations they inhabit. The people they recognize as taking dictation from that higher power is clerics, and the reality is that Islamic clerics are very, very hard to control, given that one of the principal tenets of Islam is that any Muslim ruler who acts against Islam is himself an infidel and must be slaughtered like an infidel. |