rubydick
Shiny_Rock
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2004
- Messages
- 321
I go away to NY for a couple weeks and, wow, this forum dies. What gives? Where is the fire, the passion, the brimstone?
In hopes of reignighting the flame, I'm happy to post a few excerpts from a recent piece by Robert Fisk, my favorite Middle East correspondent.
Robert Fisk has forgotten more about the Middle East than what I and every flaming liberal and die-hard conservative on this forum has ever learned.
The terrible legacy of the man who failed the world
By Robert Fisk - 02 August 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article303129.ece
http://www.selvesandothers.org/article10657.html
So the old man will be buried this afternoon on the edge of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in a desert graveyard of no memorials.
The strict Wahhabi tradition - to which, of course, that far more famous Saudi, Osama bin Laden, belongs - demands no statues, no gravestones, no slabs. So Fahd will be laid in the desert sand, his head touching the earth, covered over and left for the after-life. Not a single stone will mark his place.
Would that some of our own great leaders would suffer such humility - if less ostentatiously so - on their deaths.
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has died after 22 years on the throne. His successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, will formally take his place tomorrow.
But the old king really died in 1995, when an embolic stroke disabled him, paralysed his mind, befuddled his senses - the 84-year-old Keeper of the Two Holy Places would often ask servants to pour coffee for Muslim guests during Ramadan - when drinking and eating is forbidden in the hours of daylight.
In effect, his half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah has been "king" since then and, now aged 82, is still, as the cliché goes, "clinging to power". Another half-brother - and all these half-brothers reflect the Bedouin background of the Saudi monarchy - Prince Sultan Abdul Aziz, will be the new crown prince. And he is already 81.
Those who claim the Saudi royal family is led by sclerotic old men have a point - but perhaps they do not go far enough. Like the massive Muslim oil nation to the north, Iran, Saudi Arabia has become a necrocracy: government by, with and for the dead.
For years, we had been saying that Fahd would die - at his massive family palace in Andalusia (he knew, of course, that this was once part of a fine Arab empire) or on his gorgeous, preposterous, jet airliners, their interiors designed to look like Arab tents, or just in that hideously famous swimming pool. He suffered from pneumonia and a high fever, officials would insist. Anything else was "malicious speculation" - which meant that it was all true.
This was the man, however, who had funded the Arab legions against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when, as we know, Bin Laden took the role of "prince" because Fahd’s real princes, including 7,000 official and unofficial ones, preferred the bars of Monaco or the whores of Paris to drawing the sword for the religion in whose lands stood their greatest shrines, Mecca and Medina.
And it was this same Fahd who brought down upon the Arab Gulf - and eventually upon the Americans - the wrath of Bin Laden and his al-Qa’ida, by asking the US to send troops to protect the land of the Prophet after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. And his fate might have been to have died in an assassination before; but it’s difficult to murder an already dead man.
This was the king who had poured his vast coffers into Saddam Hussein’s war chest against Iran, studiously saying nothing about the gassing of up to 60,000 Iranian soldiers and civilians during that conflict, in the hope that the Beast of Baghdad (our friend at the time, needless to say) would overthrow that far more terrible beast, the revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini....
In hopes of reignighting the flame, I'm happy to post a few excerpts from a recent piece by Robert Fisk, my favorite Middle East correspondent.
Robert Fisk has forgotten more about the Middle East than what I and every flaming liberal and die-hard conservative on this forum has ever learned.
The terrible legacy of the man who failed the world
By Robert Fisk - 02 August 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article303129.ece
http://www.selvesandothers.org/article10657.html
So the old man will be buried this afternoon on the edge of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in a desert graveyard of no memorials.
The strict Wahhabi tradition - to which, of course, that far more famous Saudi, Osama bin Laden, belongs - demands no statues, no gravestones, no slabs. So Fahd will be laid in the desert sand, his head touching the earth, covered over and left for the after-life. Not a single stone will mark his place.
Would that some of our own great leaders would suffer such humility - if less ostentatiously so - on their deaths.
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has died after 22 years on the throne. His successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, will formally take his place tomorrow.
But the old king really died in 1995, when an embolic stroke disabled him, paralysed his mind, befuddled his senses - the 84-year-old Keeper of the Two Holy Places would often ask servants to pour coffee for Muslim guests during Ramadan - when drinking and eating is forbidden in the hours of daylight.
In effect, his half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah has been "king" since then and, now aged 82, is still, as the cliché goes, "clinging to power". Another half-brother - and all these half-brothers reflect the Bedouin background of the Saudi monarchy - Prince Sultan Abdul Aziz, will be the new crown prince. And he is already 81.
Those who claim the Saudi royal family is led by sclerotic old men have a point - but perhaps they do not go far enough. Like the massive Muslim oil nation to the north, Iran, Saudi Arabia has become a necrocracy: government by, with and for the dead.
For years, we had been saying that Fahd would die - at his massive family palace in Andalusia (he knew, of course, that this was once part of a fine Arab empire) or on his gorgeous, preposterous, jet airliners, their interiors designed to look like Arab tents, or just in that hideously famous swimming pool. He suffered from pneumonia and a high fever, officials would insist. Anything else was "malicious speculation" - which meant that it was all true.
This was the man, however, who had funded the Arab legions against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when, as we know, Bin Laden took the role of "prince" because Fahd’s real princes, including 7,000 official and unofficial ones, preferred the bars of Monaco or the whores of Paris to drawing the sword for the religion in whose lands stood their greatest shrines, Mecca and Medina.
And it was this same Fahd who brought down upon the Arab Gulf - and eventually upon the Americans - the wrath of Bin Laden and his al-Qa’ida, by asking the US to send troops to protect the land of the Prophet after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. And his fate might have been to have died in an assassination before; but it’s difficult to murder an already dead man.
This was the king who had poured his vast coffers into Saddam Hussein’s war chest against Iran, studiously saying nothing about the gassing of up to 60,000 Iranian soldiers and civilians during that conflict, in the hope that the Beast of Baghdad (our friend at the time, needless to say) would overthrow that far more terrible beast, the revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini....
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