by Mike Still
Daily Collegian
U-Wire
We were quite young during Operation Desert Storm. Most undergraduates at Penn State were between first and fifth grade during our first major foray into Iraq, and it all seemed pretty simple at the time.
As a fourth grader, I remember looking at pictures of Saddam and thinking to myself, "That jerk!" Asked to name the three worst people in history, I would likely have said Adolf Hitler, the Emperor from the "Star Wars" trilogy and Saddam Hussein.
Did I really know many specifics on Saddam's evilness? Not really. I sort of had a general idea.
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This was before I knew anything about his use of chemical weapons on 200 Kurdish villages in the 1988 "al-Anfal" campaign, which left between 50,000 and 100,000 people dead, according to Human Rights Watch. This was before I knew anything about Saddam's practice of killing political dissenters, torturing their children and raping their wives and mothers.
On the flipside, just as sure as I was about this man being evil, I knew that our Desert Storm ally, Saudi Arabia, was good. Did I know specifically why they were good? Not really, again, I sort of had a general idea. I knew they were a traditional lot, who opposed Saddam's aggression against Kuwait, and were kind enough to allow access to their air bases.
It all made sense: Saddam evil, Saudi Arabia good. Not much more to it than that.
So 11 years later, another President Bush wants to invade Iraq. Does the equation still match up? Is it still "Saddam evil, Saudi Arabia good?"
Saddam is still evil, fo' shizzle (as the kids say).
But what about our continued ally Saudi Arabia? Is it still good?
More than a few Americans did a double-take when they learned that 15 out of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11 were Saudis. Two-thirds of the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay are Saudis. And, of course, that tall drink of water Osama bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. Doesn't this seem to indicate that, well, maybe Saudi Arabia is not as good as it seemed?
President Bush still appears to dig the nation. After all, in August, Bush told the Saudi Arabian envoy that increased anti-Saudi sentiment among the American populace that "cannot affect the eternal friendship between the two countries."
Friends forever, eh? I'm not in fourth grade anymore, and I don't buy it. We've all grown up a bit in the past year, and we can't look at Saudi Arabia as a benign ally the way we did in 1991.
We can choose to ignore it, but Saudi Arabia's oppressive regime, radical Wahhabism and promulgation of anti-American, anti-Semitic sentiment does more to create Islamist terrorism than anything that Saddam could do.
The power in Saudi Arabia rests within its royal family, a collection of several thousand ultra-rich princes. The princes bleed their populace dry; per-capita income fell to $6,700 in 1999 from $11,500 in 1980 despite huge oil revenues.
Under the dying King Fahd, the House of Saud allows no freedom of the press, no political parties to form, and it silences all forms of protest and dissent. The state newspaper, The Arab News, recently printed an expose in which it claimed that it was a Jewish custom to use gentile blood in holiday baked goods. The royal family held a telethon in which millions of dollars was raised to give money to the Palestinian suicide bombers (or "martyrs," as they would have them called).
Embraced by the royal family, the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam denies civil, social and political rights to all Saudi women. Earlier this year, 15 young Saudi women burned to death in Mecca because the religious police made them go back into a burning building after they fled without their head coverings.
Contrast this with civil society in Iraq, where women can drive cars, where women's sports are nearly as popular as men's sports and where women can even become esteemed doctors (indeed, a female doctor is in charge of Iraq's biological weapons program).
Combine the poverty of the Saudi populace, the oppression of expression and the tyrannical nature of Wahhabi Islam, add into this mix the fact that two-thirds of the populace is under 19, and it should come as no surprise that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were young Saudi Arabian men.
So we revise our fourth-grade Desert Storm assumption and state, "Saddam is evil and Saudi Arabia is bad." Now what? As the debate over war with Iraq continues, we need to remember that Saddam isn't the only oppressor in the Middle East.
Indeed, it's absurd that we worry about Iraq aiding al Qaeda, while continuing to ally ourselves with the nation that practically gave birth to the network. If we as a nation truly care about democratic values such as civil liberties for women, freedom of speech and press, and religious toleration, we must actively confront Saudi Arabia on these issues.
Overthrowing Saddam will do little to promote democracy in the Middle East or to secure America from terrorism if Iraq's next-door neighbor remains such an oppressive tyranny.
