Hi, Keith, The "RAND Report" isn't a RAND report. Rather the presentation that you are referring to is by a short-term French 'analyst' who is working out of RAND. I don't have a great opinion of RAND's political analysis generally, finding it sadly superficial and commercial, but in all fairness to RAND, I don't think we can blame the organization for this one-person show. I see the presentation (made to Perle's advisory group) as being part of the concerted effort to demonize Saudi Arabia.
Can you say more about the 'bonded labor'? Are these workers who are brought in by Saudi employers for fixed periods and who out of their earnings have to pay off the cost of their tranportation? I know of this pattern in South America. Is this what you are referring to? I know Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries for the last 3-4 decades via visits, academic study, participation in several projects there, and being part of the community of US-based Middle Eastern specialists, but Saudi Arabia after the 1930s has not been a focus of any of my studies, so I do not consider myself an expert on it. Your description of the British who are in jail caught me by surprise; I hadn't realized that they had been there so long or under the conditions you describe. There is an incongruence here; it has no been a Saudi pattern to treat foreigners the way you describe, and so I am wondering whether there might not be more to the story than we know? > At 12:51 12/08/02 -0700, you wrote: > >Gosh, Keith. I know quite a few Saudi Arabians, and quite a bit > about Saudi > >Arabia, and have none of the senses that you describe. None. As you say: " We'll have to wait and see." > > >Too many Europeans > >and Americans travel to other cultures with the attitude they can do > >anything they damn well please, and then howl with outrage when they are > >arrested for (usually egregiously) breaking the laws. > > Well, that's one way of putting it, I suppose, but I still think that if > the Saudi royal family and many of their rich businessmen who buy up > expensive properties in the west (such as some beautiful country estates > round here) and seek to live like us, then one might expect that > they would > do their best to bring their country out of abysmal medievalism, > start some > schools to teach skills to their young men, endow a few universities, give > their womenfolk ordinary citizens' rights and generally treat their fellow > Saudis with reasonable decency. I agree in general -- there is considerable hypocrisy in all this. Specifically, with regrd to universities, many such HAVE been endowed and boast some pretty well-equipped and staffed faculties. Generally, I think, some of the negative conditions you refer to stem not from the Saudi government but from religious fundamentalists so seek to impose their views on the general population. Here isn the US, we are also seeing a rise in religious fundamentlism, and are already, in the form of lowered standards of civil rights and judicial processes,among other things, suffering the effects. I believe it will take some years for America to clean-up this social pollution, for the "war on terrorism" has proven a wonderful camouflage for those who hold these fundamentalist and neo-conservative views. Cheers, Lawry
