You can backtrack basically all active jihadist groups that attack west back to to the Saudi funded ideology. Even ISIS is offshoot of Wahabbi/Salafism. The "traditional" Islamist like Brotherhood put their efforts in Arab countries. Saudis are not in control of these groups, but they are responsible for the ideology.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people associate being a Salafi with the various terrorist groups.
I have never heard a Salafi scholar promote any acts terrorism. In fact, every single high-ranking scholar in Saudi Arabia (those who call themselves Salafi), are all opposed to groups like ISIS, Al Qaida, and Al Nusra. There are dozens of audio clips on Youtube from such scholars who clearly warn the Muslims from these types of groups.
There is also a great book that references many of the Islamic verdicts given by the contemporary Salafi Muslim scholars that dispels much of the "Wahhabi" myth:
Saudi Arabia is not going to collapse anytime soon. The thesis (budget deficit of $98B budget leads to political instability and collapse) simply doesn't make sense when you look at their finances. Some facts:
* Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, last year at only 1.6%. Their credit rating is A+ to AA; they can easily issue more debt.
* Has $640B of assets overseas
* Has $10 trillion of proven oil reserves, even at today's oil prices
They easily have enough money to handle this. An oil downturn like this won't wreck the country. Heck, there are a half-dozen countries in much worse positions that are way more likely to collapse than Saudi Arabia (i.e. North Korea, Greece, Argentina, Ukraine, Venezuela, Brazil). You could write an article like this for each of them. It's not hard to find problems in any country.
I'm guessing the authors are not happy with Saudi Arabia's treatment of political dissidents, and wrote an article to match.
I've worked a fair amount in Saudi Arabia, and yeah, even by (low) Gulf standards it's a deeply fucked-up place and definitely a ticking time bomb. A few things people don't realize until they've actually been there:
- Not all Saudis are rich. Quite the opposite, there are destitute beggars on the streets of Riyadh. The women were the saddest side, kneeling by the roadside begging for alms in their all-enveloping pitch-black abayas in the scorching 45-degree heat (110+ F).
- The extent of the sex segregation. If you're female, you're literally a prisoner of your own family, as you can't go anywhere in Saudi without a car, women aren't allowed to drive, and women also aren't allowed to enter the vast majority of shops, restaurants etc on their own.
- Riyadh's population is projected to hit 10 million by 2020. It was originally a dinky oasis in the middle of the desert, with enough resources to support maybe 500 people. If anything ever disrupts the constant stream of imports paid for by oil money, the results will be apocalyptic.
- The state is deeply corrupt. Want a business visa? You can wait forever for the Chamber of Commerce to rubber-stamp your invitation letter... or you can pay a "facilitator" several hundred bucks and have it the next day. This repeats at every level, only with the sums going up an order of magnitude every time.
- "Hypocritical" doesn't begin to describe the opulence of the Sauds (the ruling family; yup, Saudi Arabia is the world's only country named after its rulers). For example, the massively lucrative alcohol smuggling racket is generally acknowledged to be run by one of the princes (of whom there are hundreds; Ibn al-Saud was such a horny old goat that he had 45 sons who survived to adulthood and had children of their own).
- Unless you belong to the 0.01% with enough wastah (connections) to flaunt the rules, there is fuck all to do in Riyadh. No cinemas, no clubs, no bars, not even shisha shops (they're banished beyond city limits). Can't drink a coffee with an unrelated woman at Starbucks without risking arrest, can't even go to the shopping mall on the weekends if you're a "bachelor" (unamrried male). So people either play a lot of Playstation and drive dangerously, go to the mosque, or go nuts.
- The education system is completely useless. All companies in Saudi are operated almost entirely by imported labor. I was working to set up a new mobile phone operator, with a motley crew of American, Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Sudanese etc, all hard-working and competent. And then there were the token Saudi dudes, who generally both had no idea about technology and couldn't speak more than few words of English... but each company had to hire a few to fulfill their "Saudification" quota.
> - "Hypocritical" doesn't begin to describe the opulence of the Sauds (the ruling family; yup, Saudi Arabia is the world's only country named after its rulers). For example, the massively lucrative alcohol smuggling racket is generally acknowledged to be run by one of the princes (of whom there are hundreds; Ibn al-Saud was such a horny old goat that he had 45 sons who survived to adulthood and had children of their own).
IIRC, there was a "Locked Up Abroad" about this. The guy was quite candid about knowing that smuggling alcohol was illegal, but it was Princes and the like buying it from him. I think he ended up just getting deported.
All companies in Saudi are operated almost entirely by imported labor
Is this still true? I ask because when I was in grad school at the University of Arizona I taught technical writing to a fair number of Saudi (and Kuwaiti) engineering students. I don't know what happened to them after graduation, but I presume most went back to work in the oil companies. Maybe they ended up fulfilling the "Saudification" quota.
Medical professionals too are imported, mostly from Europe with English skills. Which means that as far as documenting things in Arabic, only the legal names of people and their relations would need such electronic support. Maybe a few others, but not much.
I am not sure what ramifications this has for patients.
"Kleptocracy" is much too mild and kind a word for Saudi Arabia. If all they wanted was to steal money, they wouldn't fund right wing religious fundamentalism, fly airplanes into buildings, and violate human rights.
The bigger problem in the future is Iran vs Saudi Arabia. Given they are the leaders of the two major sides of Islam and rivals in the oil business some day they will start shooting at each other. The Iranians may not be a totally unified country but they have experience at war and being a single people whereas SA does not have sufficiently internal loyalty to sustain any kind of real war. The house of Saud would run away with all their money leaving the country behind, somewhat like the Kaiser did at the end of WWI.
When I read the title, I thought this was about the fact that the current monarch broke the unwritten rule that power must be shared between all the families that originally formed Saudi Arabia (wifes coming from 40 different tribes).
This is a bit long but worth a listen. I have not found as good as an explanation in the written form:
> But the highly educated Sunni majority, with unprecedented exposure to the outside world, is unlikely to stay satisfied forever with a few favors doled out by geriatric rulers impervious to their input.
They pay 0% taxes. Hardly a small favor. But it will be an interesting economic experiment when Saudi Arabia is forced to raise some revenue from its citizens.
The system of buying patronage and relying on exploited foreign workers who outnumber citizens sounds exactly like ancient Rome. Big distinction is getting cash from oil instead of spoils.
Robert Bear, a former CIA case officer, wrote a book with this theme called "Sleeping With the Devil". He gives a history of the country, US relations with it, and argues that the situation in Saudi Arabia is not sustainable.
Bear might be better known as the author of "Hear No Evil", a memoir of his time in the CIA, which the movie Syriana was loosely based on.
The angle everyone forgets about when it comes to SA is that the British pullsbits strings more than any other entity. It really makes you question the British level of knowledge of 911...
The poster recommended listening to "their media" for a balanced view on Saudi Arabia, which is nonsense in a country without a free press. And also suggested that the alternative to Saudi Arabia was Iran. Looked like a typical paid commenter.
> If Russia falls apart it's a serious problem for everyone, because it won't fall apart quietly or peacefully.
It might still be an improvement over its current approach - which is not falling apart, but is neither quiet nor peaceful. There's a fair bit of political analysis that suggests that Russia is for example about to test NATO by starting a war with Turkey, and that it is deliberately killing civilians in Syria to increase the flow of refugees to Europe (which destabilises the EU, naturally).
I'll take a Russia falling apart noisily over a Russia attempting to hegemonise half of Europe again...
The damage done by low oil prices to Russia has been way overstated in the west.
The lower value of their currency has actually caused them to engage in import substitution (something Saudi can't do because they basically don't have any local industries) and started to make Russian industry more competitive in export markets.
This is basically what China did to itself deliberately in order to turn itself into an exporting and manufacturing powerhouse.
Russia is still hurting but there's a big silver lining for them that doesn't exist for, say, Venezuela.
Russia doesn't [by now] have any strong separatist movements to cause such disintegration. A few that were ethnicity-based are economic recipients, not donors - having Dagestan or Chechnya as separate entities makes little economic sense as they currently. In theory oil-rich producing regions would want nothing to do with oil-poor regions, but those are sparsely populated and staffed with migrant workers with little regional identity.
U.S. military and intelligence officials should at thevery least, and immediately, run some rigorous planningexercises to test different scenarios and potentialactions aimed at reducing codependence and mitigatingrisk.
Why? Why cannot we just leave them alone? Why do we have to invade every country whenever there is an opportunity to do so?
Disappointing that people aren't thinking more critically about this article. Yes, no one likes the Saudis and they often act unethically. That doesn't mean they are on the brink of imminent collapse, and there is no real evidence given here to that thesis.
[+] [-] nabla9|10 years ago|reply
You can backtrack basically all active jihadist groups that attack west back to to the Saudi funded ideology. Even ISIS is offshoot of Wahabbi/Salafism. The "traditional" Islamist like Brotherhood put their efforts in Arab countries. Saudis are not in control of these groups, but they are responsible for the ideology.
Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/saudi-arabia...
Saudis Must Stop Exporting Extremism ISIS Atrocities Started With Saudi Support for Salafi Hate http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/isis-atrocities-st...
[+] [-] s_q_b|10 years ago|reply
I want those pages.
[+] [-] salafi|10 years ago|reply
I have never heard a Salafi scholar promote any acts terrorism. In fact, every single high-ranking scholar in Saudi Arabia (those who call themselves Salafi), are all opposed to groups like ISIS, Al Qaida, and Al Nusra. There are dozens of audio clips on Youtube from such scholars who clearly warn the Muslims from these types of groups.
Here is one such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xAZLE6JiqE
And another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNL9cwB-plY
And another (from arguably the most respected Saudi scholar): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J5s2PPwZcY
Here are two from a Muslim student of knowledge from the UK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05yw1IXM1k4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ocvexFXCo8
There is also a great book that references many of the Islamic verdicts given by the contemporary Salafi Muslim scholars that dispels much of the "Wahhabi" myth:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wahhabi-Myth-Dispelling-Fictitious...
I'm not here to preach; it just bothers me when people hijack words to push an agenda.
[+] [-] tristanj|10 years ago|reply
* Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, last year at only 1.6%. Their credit rating is A+ to AA; they can easily issue more debt.
* Has $640B of assets overseas
* Has $10 trillion of proven oil reserves, even at today's oil prices
They easily have enough money to handle this. An oil downturn like this won't wreck the country. Heck, there are a half-dozen countries in much worse positions that are way more likely to collapse than Saudi Arabia (i.e. North Korea, Greece, Argentina, Ukraine, Venezuela, Brazil). You could write an article like this for each of them. It's not hard to find problems in any country.
I'm guessing the authors are not happy with Saudi Arabia's treatment of political dissidents, and wrote an article to match.
[+] [-] _0nac|10 years ago|reply
- Not all Saudis are rich. Quite the opposite, there are destitute beggars on the streets of Riyadh. The women were the saddest side, kneeling by the roadside begging for alms in their all-enveloping pitch-black abayas in the scorching 45-degree heat (110+ F).
- The extent of the sex segregation. If you're female, you're literally a prisoner of your own family, as you can't go anywhere in Saudi without a car, women aren't allowed to drive, and women also aren't allowed to enter the vast majority of shops, restaurants etc on their own.
- Riyadh's population is projected to hit 10 million by 2020. It was originally a dinky oasis in the middle of the desert, with enough resources to support maybe 500 people. If anything ever disrupts the constant stream of imports paid for by oil money, the results will be apocalyptic.
- The state is deeply corrupt. Want a business visa? You can wait forever for the Chamber of Commerce to rubber-stamp your invitation letter... or you can pay a "facilitator" several hundred bucks and have it the next day. This repeats at every level, only with the sums going up an order of magnitude every time.
- "Hypocritical" doesn't begin to describe the opulence of the Sauds (the ruling family; yup, Saudi Arabia is the world's only country named after its rulers). For example, the massively lucrative alcohol smuggling racket is generally acknowledged to be run by one of the princes (of whom there are hundreds; Ibn al-Saud was such a horny old goat that he had 45 sons who survived to adulthood and had children of their own).
- Unless you belong to the 0.01% with enough wastah (connections) to flaunt the rules, there is fuck all to do in Riyadh. No cinemas, no clubs, no bars, not even shisha shops (they're banished beyond city limits). Can't drink a coffee with an unrelated woman at Starbucks without risking arrest, can't even go to the shopping mall on the weekends if you're a "bachelor" (unamrried male). So people either play a lot of Playstation and drive dangerously, go to the mosque, or go nuts.
- The education system is completely useless. All companies in Saudi are operated almost entirely by imported labor. I was working to set up a new mobile phone operator, with a motley crew of American, Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Sudanese etc, all hard-working and competent. And then there were the token Saudi dudes, who generally both had no idea about technology and couldn't speak more than few words of English... but each company had to hire a few to fulfill their "Saudification" quota.
Random stories if you'd like to read more: http://driftingclouds.net/tag/saudi-arabia/
[+] [-] matwood|10 years ago|reply
IIRC, there was a "Locked Up Abroad" about this. The guy was quite candid about knowing that smuggling alcohol was illegal, but it was Princes and the like buying it from him. I think he ended up just getting deported.
[+] [-] jseliger|10 years ago|reply
Is this still true? I ask because when I was in grad school at the University of Arizona I taught technical writing to a fair number of Saudi (and Kuwaiti) engineering students. I don't know what happened to them after graduation, but I presume most went back to work in the oil companies. Maybe they ended up fulfilling the "Saudification" quota.
(That's a great post overall, by the way.)
[+] [-] cordite|10 years ago|reply
I am not sure what ramifications this has for patients.
[+] [-] tome|10 years ago|reply
How about the "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan
[+] [-] DonHopkins|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorfsmay|10 years ago|reply
This is a bit long but worth a listen. I have not found as good as an explanation in the written form:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hh8isVX3H9w
[+] [-] roymurdock|10 years ago|reply
They pay 0% taxes. Hardly a small favor. But it will be an interesting economic experiment when Saudi Arabia is forced to raise some revenue from its citizens.
[+] [-] tootie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|10 years ago|reply
At least we haven't sold them nukes, at least not the public knows about.
[+] [-] falsestprophet|10 years ago|reply
Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has intermediate range nuclear-capable ballistic missiles that were purchased from China.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24823846
[+] [-] rjsw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y04nn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|10 years ago|reply
It's dangerous, sure, but I would not bet on it being effective in defending their interests
[+] [-] scott_s|10 years ago|reply
Bear might be better known as the author of "Hear No Evil", a memoir of his time in the CIA, which the movie Syriana was loosely based on.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stickybit512|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arca_vorago|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justincormack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|10 years ago|reply
In the harsh world of realpolitik no one cares if Venezuela falls apart, except for the Venezuelans.
If Russia falls apart it's a serious problem for everyone, because it won't fall apart quietly or peacefully.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swombat|10 years ago|reply
It might still be an improvement over its current approach - which is not falling apart, but is neither quiet nor peaceful. There's a fair bit of political analysis that suggests that Russia is for example about to test NATO by starting a war with Turkey, and that it is deliberately killing civilians in Syria to increase the flow of refugees to Europe (which destabilises the EU, naturally).
I'll take a Russia falling apart noisily over a Russia attempting to hegemonise half of Europe again...
[+] [-] crdoconnor|10 years ago|reply
The lower value of their currency has actually caused them to engage in import substitution (something Saudi can't do because they basically don't have any local industries) and started to make Russian industry more competitive in export markets.
This is basically what China did to itself deliberately in order to turn itself into an exporting and manufacturing powerhouse.
Russia is still hurting but there's a big silver lining for them that doesn't exist for, say, Venezuela.
[+] [-] prostoalex|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gasull|10 years ago|reply
U.S. military and intelligence officials should at the very least, and immediately, run some rigorous planning exercises to test different scenarios and potential actions aimed at reducing codependence and mitigating risk.
Why? Why cannot we just leave them alone? Why do we have to invade every country whenever there is an opportunity to do so?
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meapix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golemotron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] et2o|10 years ago|reply