Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
You may have seen something that purports to be proof of that. I have not and I therefor question the validity of the "causal linkage" portion that statement. It smacks of a standing broad jump at a convenient conclusion...

Had you said contributed in part, I would likely have just kept driving but "causal linkage" smacks of more positivism than seems warranted. I don't think this -- or the whole 'governance is the cause of it all' thing -- is nearly as simple as you'd like...
Actually, much of this is very simple, it is just inconvenient. Complexity if vastly over-rated and over-sold of late.

As to Dayuhan, the Saudi's are a major purchaser of US military hardware, yet while certainly their Wahabist doctrine makes them a sworn enemy of Shia Iran, that is their problem and not ours. They employ the majority of what they buy for internal purposes, as they know (as do the Iranians) we will come running if any true external threat should emerge. So, yes, protecting the Saudi regime has been a central component of our Middle Eastern foreign policy since at least 1944.

bin Laden and most of the 9/11 attackers, and the core of AQ are Saudi for a reason. They hate the Saudi regime and the US for a reason. We can ignore it or address it. So far ignoring it is not working.

We've invested Billions, perhaps Trillions in "complex." Would it kill us, given the failure of that to do much more than kill a bunch of individuals while at the same time stimulating the overall organization to grow and become more wide-spread and durable, to switch to cheap, simple, and smart for a change??

The nature of US - Saudi relationship; and the nature of Saudi governance, is the core of the war on terrorism. I stand by that. I have yet to see anything that would prove that wrong, but I am open to informed arguments on the topic.