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Comment by wayoutthere | Hacker News Reader

As always, colonialism is the problem. They went from a colonial society with British overseers to a feudal society with Arab masters. Success in Saudi Arabia has always been about your family name and nothing else. I really don't blame the individuals since that's the worldview they grew up in, but yeah it's a shock when that worldview runs into the limits of reality.

If there's a silver lining, it's that they don't have the knowledge in-country to operate and maintain the hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons we sold them and are almost entirely reliant on US contractors. If the US stopped protecting the Saud family, they wouldn't last a month (China prefers to back Iran in the region).

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How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems? I always see colonialism or the “random” borders drawn by the British being blamed for the problems today. It’s almost been 100 years (1932) since the kingdom was founded.

This isn’t a jab at your comment more of a question. Here’s an article that talks about Arab army’s inefficiencies and has a lot to do with the family holding power over others.[1]

[1] http://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2000/12/why-arabs-lose-...

There's no real time limit on this stuff. For example I blame the mongols 800 years ago for China's current problems.

At some point, you're being insulting by implicitly stripping everyone of the agency to deal with their own lives and problems. I don't think the last people in China that have ever had agency were 800 years ago. I don't know where that line is, but ~40 generations is definitely on the other side of it. (Probably isn't a "line" anyhow.)

A person has agency. People don’t.

Isaac Asimov’s concept of psychohistory isn’t as much fiction as it seems, groups of people have huge inertia.

A lot of the borders, and consequently sociocultural issues in central europe today are caused by kingdoms a millenium ago.

Great example in Portugal - election results predicted by the pace of the Reconquista: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1181292177130999808.html

Your counterargument proves too much; if "people" don't have agency then you can't blame anyone for anything, including being unable to blame the Mongols for anything about modern China. The concept of blame becomes entirely pointless.

This may, in fact, be true. But in this specific context, it's an argument that proves too much.

Psychohistory is pure fiction. The closest real equivalent is economics and economic predictions are essentially always wrong. I don't remember where exactly, but I recall reading that someone had done a mass study on economic forecasts and discovered that the only time they're correct was when they were predicting a continuation of whatever the current trend line was. Forecasting never managed to predict an actual change to the status quo, making such forecasts useless.

We can't even measure GDP accurately in quarters already passed, let alone predict what it will be in future, and surely predicting the movement of GDP is the most basic task a psychohistorian could possibly set themselves.

Our ability to make predictions based on psychohistory is pure fiction — but that doesn't mean that the rest of the comment in false. I think it'd be a real challenge to accurately predict the weather 168 hours from now, but that doesn't mean that the weather a week from isn't theoretically knowable or that it's not based on a series of knowable actions and reactions between now and then.

If you assume people are just molecular reactions in their brain that could, theoretically, be modelled like any physical system then sure. But otherwise there's no useful way to predict the response of whole societies to arbitrary events beyond trivialities anyone could predict.

Maybe he forgot to put /s. At least that’s how I read it

It's like this anywhere. Just think of any big Western city's housing situation. Most people don't want to pay all their salary in rent, yet consistently we vote and act to make it so. No agency.

It's a deterministic viewpoint. I don't think it's insulting, or at least I prescribe no morality it. It's just stuff that happened.

But at that point, can't we blame European colonialism on the Mongols too?

I think a lot of modern history could be blamed on the mongols yeah. But you can go further back too and blame the Yamnaya too.

I blame the big bang for starting it at all.

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams

If you got 20 minutes, "history of the entire world, i guess" sums it up pretty nicely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

I can't say about Saudi Arabia, but in general across the developing world, the people who inherited power from the colonial masters were either connected to or influenced by said colonists. There was no real dismantling of the old power structure; it only changed shape and character.

Unless that original power structure is dismantled (a tough task since those in power entrench themselves against any insurrection), you can't fully say what a country's growth trajectory could have been. Botched though the surgery may be, the former colonies still seem to be connected to the colonists in some way.

If the goal is to actually understand the past's influence on the present, it is more useful to think in terms of cause and effect that 'blame'.

Talking about blame is about status and power games right now.

If you want to understand what happened, the changes colonialism caused cannot be reversed and first-order effects are still obvious today. If you want to blame people, well, people love to nurse their grievances.

Quality organizations take time and many generations to build, as does raising children and families with the values one needs to make progress as a family/tribe/community/country/world.

100 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but unfortunately, it can all be undone quite quickly. When older generations sacrifice short term gains for long term security is when progress can happen. Unfortunately, I don’t see much appetite for that where I’m from (the US), and once a sufficient number of people choose to take more from the system than they give, it will start decaying.

As a professor of political science once told our class...

"How do you solve long-running civil war?"

"Murder all the grandmothers."

His point being that they were (a) the only ones who survived into old age (everyone else getting murdered) & (b) were thereby the ones educating a new generation in the hatreds of the old.

He was only half-joking.

But it really made me think about, as you say, just how long it takes for institutions to be built in a society. Which is order-of-"the time it takes for mindsets to change (usually via death) or new generations to rise into power (~40 years)".

I'd never really thought about it that way before.

> unfortunately, it can all be undone quite quickly.

Or put another way, it's easy to push systems towards increasing entropy, but hard to push them in the opposite direction.

That's part of why terrorism (of any persuasion) often chooses targets of symbolic value, like social, political, and economic hubs. They are trying to push the target social system toward entropy.

The kingdom may have been founded 90 years ago and the sun set on the British empire, but you can't say other powers such as the US and Russia didn't take their place in the Middle East in another form.

See also the overthrow of Iran, 2 invasions of Iraq, hundreds of billions of US arm sales to both Israel and Saudi Arabia, indirect involvement in the invasion of Yemen, the Russian/US/Iranian proxy war in Syria, I'm sure there's much more.

I can't think of another region of the earth that has faced more foreign involvement in the past 50 years.

Not to mention the splitting up of the Levant into (Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine), then taking Palestine and giving it to the Jews while kicking out the local populations.

The US more or less just slotted itself in as the successor to the British empire after WWII. I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, but the US (like the Brits) is a globe-spanning naval power not unlike the Brits were.

Apparently a long time - especially since the British were never in Saudi Arabia.

They (Saudi Arabia) were a full participant in the partitioning of the Ottoman empire, and annexed much of the west side of the Gulf themselves.

Not directly, but the British and Americans were heavily supportive of the Saud dynasty, enough to have largely built for it its current place in the world. Aramco in fact originally stood for Arabian-American Oil Company, and was created by the Americans in order to work around the partitioning of middle eastern oil by Britain and France at San Remo. It wasn't even owned by the government until the 70s.

Sure, but oil wasn't found in Saudi Arabia until 1936 just in time for WW2 to wipe out the British Empire. This was well after the San Remo agreement.

The Saud dynasty did form an alliance with the US, but this wasn't until 1945. That's well after the what most people think of the colonial period, and the terms of the alliance were nothing like a colonial-style arrangement.

> Sure, but oil wasn't found in Saudi Arabia until 1936 just in time for WW2 to wipe out the British Empire. This was well after the San Remo agreement.

The effects of the agreement didn't magically go away just because the British empire was failing 16 years later though.

Being after the time people perceive as the colonial period isn't really relevant either, the arrangement is distinctly neocolonial rather than colonial and absolutely built the current strength of the Saudi regime. Of course that isn't to ascribe any unique evil to any of the players, the arrangement was very profitable for the Sauds and the Americans, and pursuit of profit, not geopolitical foresight is what drives any arrangement like this.

The arrangement where they sell goods on the open market and we buy them?

Not goods at all, nor really an open market. Permission to drill was granted to American companies in exchange for a share of the profits to the royal family, and from that point forward the American government began to defend the interests of its corporations geopolitically. Very normal sort of arrangement, but absolutely responsible for the power and strength of the Saudi regime today.

Saudi Aramco is owned by the Saudi government. The Saudis have repeatedly been a pain in the ass to the US including the embargo, long before Prince Bonesaw and the savage murder he orchestrated.

Aramco was an American company though. The modern Saudi Aramco was founded in 88, and the underlying assets weren't actually Saudi-owned at all until the 70s.

I think the best reason this keeps coming up is that entanglement with the West never stopped. Britain passed the economic and military reins to the states, but any useful summary of Saudi Arabia's economy/politics/culture today is going to have a disproportionate amount of text about Western relations (and where they come) compared to, say, popular opinions inside the country.

Reducing that to a question of "blame" I would agree is kind of an irritant 80+ years on... but it does serve the purpose of challenging other even more oversimplified views, such as assuming that the culture is predisposed not to thrive.

entanglement with the West never stopped.

But isn't that just because they are a single-resource export oriented economy? It's Dutch Disease[1], but hundreds of times larger?

Britain passed the economic and military reins to the states

Why are you bringing up Britain here? They weren't a colonial power in Saudi Arabia. The closest they came was Kuwait.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutchdisease.asp

> Why are you bringing up Britain here? They weren't a colonial power in Saudi Arabia.

Because I didn't know the history myself, tl;dr from Wikipedia:

Ottoman empire controlled the entire area at the turn of the century, to various degrees at various time. Al Rashid family allied with Ottomans. Al Saud family, under Abdulaziz (later, simply Ibn Saud), fought Rashids in the Riyadh region. During WWI, pan-Arab revolt against Ottomans encouraged by British. Ibn Saud mostly avoided participating in revolt to focus on defeating the Rashids, with the help of Ikhwan (Wahhabist) forces.

Pan-Arab revolt failed, but allies won, resulting in creation of independent Arab states. In years after the war, Saud and Ikhwan forces captured and most of modern day Saudi Arabia.

In 1927, the Ikhwan forces attempted to expand farther afield, into British-administered Arab successor states (Transjordan, Iraq, Kuwait). Saud disagreed, and a two year war was fought for control of Saudi Arabia. Ikhwan forces lost, most of their leaders killed, and the Saud family rules to today.

They had all the capital they needed to diversify their economy when it would have made a difference. Now it's too late and they will reap the consequences.

It's never too late, and they're working on it.

> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems?

Are we just going to pretend the UK hasn't almost incessantly meddled in the Middle East for the past 75 years?

> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems?

The Saudis (and other Middle Easterners) should own up to the issues challenging them, and work hard to overcome the colonialist past. That being said, colonialism continues to this day, just not in the outright visible way that happened previously. Just look at the West's interference in Middle Eastern politics.

Colonialism can be blamed for so much though. Long lasting and brutal effects on not just a geographic or economic area, but the emotional toll on the given people as well.

I don't mean this personally against you, but people who tend to talk this way often don't understand the sheer magnitude of what colonialism wrought upon the world. And I understand why; it's downplayed in the history taught in the developed world, and generally only brought up where it resulted in more or less "okay" situations once it had more or less passed, like the founding of America. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Britain was perhaps the most prolific, but it was far from the only nation doing this shit.

Belgium skull-fucked the Congo for nearly a century, and did pretty much every horrific thing they could think of: mass executions, cut off limbs when the people couldn't pay their taxes, bought "land rights" from the locals for gemstones not even remotely worth enough, murdered probably millions of men, women, and children. IIRC the last time I read about this, by the time they were done almost 2 in 3 Congolese people were dead or crippled beyond the ability to work. Those left had no leadership qualities or training, since leadership was always Belgian and they fucked off home. They didn't know how to do pretty much anything other than grunt labor, and suddenly when Belgium left, had to figure out how to assemble a Government.

The kind of damage that does is incalculable. Not just the economic damage, not just the ecological damage from the mining and farming, not just the emotional toll left on the populace, etc. This sends shockwaves through history that will likely take centuries if not a millennium to fully dissipate. And then of course after Belgium left, giving the country back to it's populace, they started funding various tribes sitting on the natural resources they wanted, to start civil wars that would then last EVEN LONGER STILL, doing EVEN MORE DAMAGE.

And this is what just one nation did to one other nation. Colonialism as a whole was a bunch of nations ripping up a sizable partition of the entire planet's worth of places and people, the effects of which, mainly cultural loss/damage, and the incredible wealth enjoyed by developed nations remain to this day and show no signs of slowing down, save for finally the topic of national reparations being on the table.

Edit: And of course colonialist problems or ones that look a damn lot like colonialism continue to this day, from the ship-breaking beaches where workers are paid pennies a day to scrap ships from the developed world, sold to those firms because it's cheaper that disposing of them in an ecologically friendly way, to the exports of trash electronics to various nations where they demolish their environment to scrape out a meager living. People will look at these things and say "well why can't they just have eco regulation and proper laws, and just say no?" and the answer is that a shit job beats starvation, but the fact that those are their only options is itself a relic of colonialism.

Yet Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea managed to get over colonialism in just a few decades.

Please try incorporate all the data when formulating a hypothesis.

"Colonialism can be blamed for so much though."

True but one thing they can't be blamed for is the lack of infrastructure before they got there. Knowing that, they can't be blamed for the lack of infrastructure built after they left. Colonialism then is the same as corporatism today - there is a very large amount of value extraction, which good or bad, still exists. One can say that the cruelty has diminished somewhat, but perhaps that's because the wealth to be gained has only increased? Oddly though, this cruelty often means that the regions affected by it have better roads, cleaner water, at least traces of medicine, and on the whole better transit. Not always, to be sure.

So the brutality experienced by the Congo is okay because they left roads afterwards? That's a hell of a viewpoint.

Compare it to the deadliness of the preexisting tribes and it's an obvious improvement. Obviously no match for the reasonable sensitivity of society of today.

Feel free to believe the common lie that every indigenous was a graceful peaceful person that wouldn't hurt a fly. Hard to come up with a greater untruth than that.

I didn't say anything like that, nor do I believe it. But to say that the savages had it coming because they didn't invent the guns first is classic "the victor writes the history books" stuff and really indicative of how little you've left your personal bubble in life.

"Might Makes Right" is an appealing philosophy, until you're on the wrong end of it.

Nobody says the savages had it coming, but whenever you have the equivalent of a government or society of serial killers, human decency has certainly a right to tear that structure down. Being "indigenous" is not a get out of jail free card. If it were so, the germans would never have been prosecuted for war crimes.

If you believe that "home grown" totalitarianism or serial killing is okay as long as it's "home grown", I can't help but feel bad for your awkwardly backwards "nationalistic" views.

This is not to say that all indigenous are serial killers, but some regions are well known for such behavior among their indigenous.

Edit: I don't believe in racism. Only genetics and statistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

I have to say I'm impressed with your comfort levels of being this nakedly racist. That is unless the Congo was particularly violent which despite reading about it to a great extent, I never heard anything about.

I don't believe in racism. Only genetics and statistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Apparently, Congo is in the 50 most violent countries. That's also recent. It has no accounting for what they were, but I'm willing to believe it may have been worse.

> I don't believe in racism. Only genetics and statistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...

> Apparently, Congo is in the 50 most violent countries. That's also recent. It has no accounting for what they were, but I'm willing to believe it may have been worse.

Unless we have data that hails from the 1800's regarding pre-Belgium rates, which I'd say is pretty damn unlikely, I don't see how you can possibly make this point. It just sounds like good old fashioned racism with the window trimmings of science and data stripped of any and all context, which is a pretty standard fare tactic for a racist. "The crime rates are so high in Detroit, must be all the blacks!" Can't possibly be the catastrophic recession or the lukewarm response by the Government to address the problems, no, black people are just naturally violent. That's why we had to kill them and put them in chains.

Genetics actually pass significant personality traits down.

https://www.verywellmind.com/are-personality-traits-caused-b...

Genetics is suddenly very unpopular as it can predict negative traits. Imagine that.

Also, if you haven't noticed, the Aztecs were historically very violent people. If you look at the people of middle america, it's no surprise they are still violent today.

This happens when you have societies that do not adequately punish violence. Societies that reward violence will most certainly produce more violence.

There are some aspects of violence that can come from culture and perhaps aspects of racism or attitudes, as you mentioned in your other link. But its a vast overgeneratlization in my opinion to say that genetics is a core reason. Europeans who came to the us and owned slaves adopted ideas of racism to justify slavery that were different than what europeans chose to do. Britain has a different idea about black people as a whole than the us today, yet they have significant genetic imprint on us. The attitude of white people in certain groups today in the us (like where I'm from, the us south) who have racist attitudes about black people is different than our genetic cousins in europe.

In my background in the south, people want to justify their racism so they just say "I'm not racist, I am just making observations of people's behavior". That's just an excuse for being racist.

Ahem, football & hockey, anyone?

I'm sorry. Perhaps you should legalize a sport that purposely kills people. Tell me how that works out for you. And for the record, I don't care for football or hockey. They can both wither on the vine for all I care.

Granted.

But here's the engineering counterbalance: What is the utility of atrocity memories, for those who were subjected to them?

How does recounting an injustice help build a better future?

There are concrete steps: colonial injustice means there should be international financial renumeration.

There are emotional steps: reconciliation councils provide a place for telling, listening, acceptance, and forgiveness on all sides without violence.

There are... maybe policy steps: people were traumatized in this way, ergo this is the best way to incorporate that into where we want to go.

Past that, not so much.

I absolutely own my first world, non-minority entitlement here. But my point is that it's not productive to anyone (including those who suffered) to simply relive trauma. And that it's easy, especially on the internet, to get trapped in a narrative of retelling, expression of sympathy, and then nothing gets done.

Stories should be told to move people forward. And if they don't do that, then aren't they themselves tools of oppression?

> What is the utility of atrocity memories, for those who were subjected to them?

What do you suggest the Congolese tell their children happened for that block of time? What should they tell them when they ask about the mass graves? Their relatives who didn't survive, or the ones who did who just sit quietly in the corner and jump every time someone picks up a belt?

The traumatic history is their only history for this time period. That's not to say that nothing good happened anywhere, but this is akin to saying that the German curriculum should just pretend nothing happened between 1935 and 1950. Just because it was horrific doesn't change that it happened.

> I absolutely own my first world, non-minority entitlement here.

Are you, though? Because this is exactly how people talk to victims of rape or other violent crime; there's no use in recounting your trauma, just move on. As though that never occurred to them. As though that's not what they're trying to do, literally all the time. An emotional wound does not have a logical solution.

And the problem is impossible magnitudes larger when the victim wasn't a person, but a nation. I don't pretend to know what the average Congolese feels about this, but I have to figure those who know the history see the evidence and the landmarks of colonialism everywhere. And those who don't still suffer under it's long term effects.

> Stories should be told to move people forward. And if they don't do that, then aren't they themselves tools of oppression?

I would say they're effects of oppression. When you receive a really bad wound to your body, it leaves a scar. It probably doesn't hurt, maybe just feels strange when you move it just right, but it's there. Every time you see it, and for the rest of your life, you'll remember how you got it, whether it was a fun drunken stunt that went wrong, or whether you were ambushed in a park at night and nearly gutted for $12 in your pocket. You'll remember, you can't not. To say that the Congo and countries like it should just stop talking about their nation's collective injustice and just "get over it" is catastrophic simplification of a lot of human pain and suffering, and I'm sorry but when you're more closely affiliated with the side that did the oppressing than the suffering, it sounds a hell of a lot like trying to whitewash history because you don't like how it makes you feel.

If hearing this stuff makes you feel shitty, good. That's the correct reaction to learning about horrific events that have contributed, non-trivially, to the lifestyle you have. Now the next step, if you're inclined, is to get involved in activism that seeks to at least attempt to make these countries whole again, to share the benefits that the developed world has seen, and not just in the "whatever falls off the table is yours" way, but to find them a seat at that table.

As a counter to what you suggest can't happen or hasn't happened in the Congo, google 'Rwanda reconciliation' to see how a nation can, within a remarkably short space of time, attempt to overcome the perils of its recent history.

Take a step back, reread what I wrote, and ask yourself if I was saying they should just "get over it."

If you have a point to make that's not outrage-driven, I'm happy to listen.

100 years is not a long time. My grandfather just died at age 99. The reverberating effects of the Russian empire conquering Finland in 1809 are basically never going to stop affecting my family unless we decide to move back to Scandinavia once global warming has made it less cold. :-)

It's reasonable to expect any major effect to take several generations to revert to mean. If the person who suffered the effect is alive and plays a part in raising a child, the effect will continue to reverberate.

The brits really really fucked things up (along with the other european countries drawing up the borders). That bad border drawing messed things up.

Other countries mess things up too of course, including the us. For example, the us just caused major problems with suddenly moving out of the way of the turkey invasion to the kurds. Maybe the us declined to get in a war with turkey to stop it or whatever it was, but we fucked things up by moving out of the way.

> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems?

The problems in the Middle East region need to be solved, and only then this will be possible. Almost everything - from the current state in the various dictatorships over Kurdistan to the Israel/Palestine conflict (and even much stuff in the Asian continent, like the Pakistan/India conflict!) can be traced to the disastrous end of the British colonial era.

Uh, Syria was a French mandate.

Because Sykes agreed to grant it to France.

The longer I live the more I realize that nothing is ever "solved."

while that might be true, some things do get to a steady state that feels like a solution.

For example, most europeans do not worry much about the next war between france/germany/italy/spain/austria.

The "war is a constant between large powers in europe" issue appears to be solved enough, for now.

Colonial policy didn't stop.

> How much time needs to pass before the British aren’t blamed for the Middle East’s problems?

As long the English insist on sticking their noise -- and soldiers and arms and spooks -- in that area's business I would think.

Ironically, Saudi Arabia is one of the places where colonialism wasn't really a problem.

Saudi Arabia was under Ottoman "control" (in quotes, because the idea of control in the Ottoman empire varied greatly) until WW1. After WW1 it became independent under Abdulaziz.

Saudi Arabia was never under British control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Saudi_Arabia#Unific...

The British supported the Pan-Arab uprising, so they were involved in the politics of the region for quite a while now.

Sure, but:

a) The Pan-Arab uprising was a pretty minor affair in Saudi Arabia - mostly it was just an extension of the existing war/rivalry between the house of Saud and Al Rashid.

b) It was WW1. The most of the world was at war, and it is unreasonable to expect the Arab world to be unaffected.

The culture of clan loyalty predates British rule by a couple thousand years. It will be difficult to overcome.

So their inability to adapt to a modern world is our fault? I find that hard to believe when they as a society have had way more resources than the rest of the world for quite some time, and haven't really done much with it.

This is a good response to your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21312537

Societies that have failed despite having lots of resources because of cultural deficiencies or lack of intelligence, well, that could be applied to the whole of Africa. But that's really opening a bad can of worms ;-)

You don't have to open the can of worms. Resource curse is a recognized phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I can imagine it's because it is very easy for corruption to absorb the wealth. The government has full control over the mineral rights of its land so authoritarian governments spend all of the money on foreign goods because they don't care about their domestic economy and simply trade the goods in USD [1] or some other stable currency that isn't tied to their country.

If you go into race war here we're going to have to ban you again.

Sorry.

I agree with your point about colonialism at the top level but not all the US protection narrative. Here's the thing, historically the way these things break their past structure is only when the people rise up violently and fight for a better system. If most people are happy to eke out an existence, then things will only get worse.

Even look at the US, how long can the economic divide continue to grow? Eventually we will see mass protests across the country to take our government back from the companies and lobbyists that currently decide everything.

Religion has to factor into this equation.

In what way? Islam caused that entire region to become a hub of knowledge. A lot of advanced that exist in the West today can be traced back to that era (e.g. the word "Camera" is of Arabic origin).

I think you're right about the colonialism part but I think it was the Ottomans not the British, the British were involved for a fairly limited time, the Ottomans dominated for centuries.

> colonialism is the problem

Once again, Copenhagen law of moral entanglement at work: any involvement in any complex moral situation makes you automatically responsible for it.

Quick quiz: who ruled Saudi Arabia until 1917 and how long did the British mandate last?

>As always, colonialism is the problem.

Yes, the period of colonialism that lasted a few centuries is to blame for the all the many years before and after of the Arab world fighting among themselves, as well as subjugating their population with backward, barbaric laws, to this day.

Was it Prince Harry or Prince William that ordered the Saudis to slaughter a journalist in a foreign embassy?

> as well as subjugating their population with backward, barbaric laws, to this day.

> Was it Prince Harry or Prince William that ordered the Saudis to slaughter a journalist in a foreign embassy?

What are you even talking about? This is very simplistic reasoning. The British have always been involved in Saudi politics since the founding of the Saudi state, and to this day. Just because they don't order direct execution of individuals does not mean disgusting crimes were not committed. Not to mention that it's not just the British that were and are messing with the politics of the Middle East to this day (does Sykes–Picot ring a bell?)

>it's that they don't have the knowledge in-country to operate and maintain the hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons we sold them

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bin Laden and his boys managed to work out how to use the tools and techniques we gave him. So I'm thinking the probability is fairly high that this new generation of "freedom fighters" will also take to our training pretty well.

Only real uncertainty is how many American lives it will cost down the road?

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