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| Arabia | |
| Saudi Arabia hits back at Perleâs âirresponsible statementâ | |
| 2004-01-13 | |
| Saudi Arabia angrily rejected Monday a âtendentiousâ campaign led by US hawks after an advisor to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lumped the kingdom in the âaxis of evilâ. State-monitored media led the charge warning that Washingtonâs own interests were being damaged. Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence service chief and today ambassador in London, branded Richard Perle a âZionist extremistâ. The envoy told the Al-Hayat newspaper that Perle âhas predicted the disintegration of Saudi Arabia and expressed his own point of view much more than that of Washington.â âPeople have been talking about the disintegration of Arabia and the overthrow of its regime since the kingdom was created in 1932,â said Prince Turki, a senior figure in the royal family. Saudi Arabia owed its existence to âGod, followed by its faithful people,â he added. The Okaz newspaper set the tone of the riposte in the media, which generally reflects official Saudi thinking. âThe hawks stubbornly follow the same political line they laid out for this administration to impose their hegemony over the world and not to lead it,â it said. âWhile the whole world refuses war as a means of settling conflict ... Washington is alone against the tide, losing friends and making enemies,â the daily said. Okaz warned that âby tolerating campaigns directed against its strategic interest, the (Bush) administration is acting against American interests.â The United States imported 13.46 percent of its oil from Saudi Arabia in 2002, the paper noted.
The Mecca daily Al-Yaum branded Perle a ârotten fruit ... dishing out accusations left and right.â âThrough its flagrant interference in the affairs of other states,â Washington was becoming âa tool destroying world peace,â added the Riyadh daily Al-Jazira. | |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #18 Sorry folks, Dad's leg was acting up and he got into the cheap stuff.... It is nice to be in the valley tho... you can't believe what real estate done here since CBS brought us California. |
| Posted by: Luke 2004-1-13 7:06:15 PM |
| #17 JFM Then he was head of nothing. LOL. Sneer. (you are French, right?) :;> |
| Posted by: grand pappy Amos 2004-1-13 7:03:25 PM |
| #16 Another of those image versus substance dichotomies. I'll go with substance, thank you. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-1-13 6:57:37 PM |
#15 we do not believe that the United States wants to improve its image in the worldDamn straight! Unless by "improve" you mean kick some more worthless, terrorist-enabling ass. Like yours, for instance. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-1-13 5:30:40 PM |
| #14 I have been thinking about how too destry all these shit spreading countries,lets just cut off thier food supply and let the rag heads starve to death.That way no fallout from nukes and we can use thier land for ourselves after we've cleaned up all the millions of thier shrivled carcases.Give them a real slow starving death. |
| Posted by: Jon Shep U.K 2004-1-13 2:44:45 PM |
| #13 "Prince Turki Al Faisal head of intelligence in Saudi Arabia" Then he was head of nothing. |
| Posted by: JFM 2004-1-13 2:35:49 PM |
| #12 Bomb-a-rama: First rule in the Arab Dictator Playbook...."when you are confronted with irrefutable evidence of ineptitude, stupidity, or previous friendships that have gone sour and are now biting you in the ass, ALWAYS blame the Jews!" Second rule....."always threaten to cut off the oil supply if the Americans expect you to act in accordance with civilized behavior." |
| Posted by: Desert Blondie 2004-1-13 1:16:14 PM |
| #11 "Pincer the bastards" |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-1-13 12:38:27 PM |
| #10 Someone should warn the Saudis publicly that playing the Asshat game will get you hammered into the glowing sands. The entire Wahabbi crowd needs to be ground into tiny slivers, leached into a concentrated sulfuric acid bath, and dumped into the "empty quarter" to bake for a few hundred centuries. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2004-1-13 12:32:41 PM |
| #9 Wasn't Faisal posting in Rantburg this last weekend? |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-1-13 11:34:36 AM |
| #8 âWhile the whole world refuses war as a means of settling conflict ..." Not noticably, m'lud. Seems like one of the more favored pastimes to me. Just look at Africa, SE Asia, S America... |
| Posted by: mojo 2004-1-13 11:31:29 AM |
| #7 Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence service chief and today ambassador in London, branded Richard Perle a âZionist extremistâ. Someone tell me again just what Israel has to do with Saudi Arabia's entanglement with terrorism? |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-1-13 10:33:49 AM |
| #6 Bit by bit, we're ratcheting up the pressure on the Saudi oil ticks. The latest step in that ratcheting up is Richard Perle's and David Frum's new book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which I assume was the trigger for this Saudi diatribe. I just got my copy last week, and am looking forward to reading it. I suspect that many of the people who've been advocating a showdown with the Saudis expected (and wanted) an abrupt, direct confrontation; but I don't think it's going to happen that way. Instead, the pressure we apply will be in stages, each too small to trigger a reprisal, that will culminate- perhaps several years from now- in a blunt, non-negotiable demand that they shape up or else. And by that time, it'll be too damn late for them to do anything about it. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2004-1-13 6:57:23 AM |
| #5 But GOD gave us the oil and GOD is all knowing and infallible. So what we are doing is right cos GOD gave us the oil. To severely paraphrase Napoleon - 'How many divisions does it take to prove GOD made a mistake?' |
| Posted by: phil_b 2004-1-13 2:33:34 AM |
| #4 Quite. Perhaps he's fishing? Perhaps it's a way of letting them (SA) know that unless they get their act together, they'll be put on the real shit-list - and doesn't the US have some troops in that area? Oh, and isn't there a large airbase in Qatar? Cue .com and the 40km strip... (I like this idea of getting the 40km meme into the public psyche!) |
| Posted by: Tony (UK) 2004-1-13 2:21:22 AM |
| #3 the United States wants to improve its image in the world I'd say our image has improved dramatically, just not the way the soddis would like. Just ask Colonel Mo. Anytime I hear some 'advisor' to the administration has gone off about something juicy, I always wonder what the REAL message could be. Is saddam talking about deals with soddi intelligence under turki? Moving money around for AQ from the peninsula? Is the flag going up to the soddis to start having heart attacks? Just makes me go 'hmmmm'. |
| Posted by: 4thInfVet 2004-1-13 1:20:01 AM |
| #2 Ain't there a bunch of Shites on the east coast in need of liberatin' from those bad Wahabis? |
| Posted by: ed 2004-1-13 1:07:01 AM |
| #1 Prince Turki was the former head of Saudi intelligence who made a devil's deal with bin Laden and may well have known that 9/11 was coming - he was stripped of his post of intelligence guru after 30 years and made ambassador to London only a month before the attacks. Whether he knew or not, he stands to lose quite a bit more than his title if the US starts digging deeper into the more Machiavellian aspects of the Saudi hierarchy. |
| Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-1-13 1:01:03 AM |