Incredibly good
Reader comment on item: Arabia's Civil War

Submitted by Ilona Melstrads (United States), May 14, 2003 at 15:11

The article reflects the author's outstanding mastery of history; otherwise he could not have provided such an illuminating summary in so few paragraphs. The summary places the main events in a perspective I have not encountered before: the religous + military on the one hand and the political on the other.

When one looks at economics and the British, Russian and American victory in WW II, in which Saudi oil and its development by the West was so important, one is almost made a believer in some kind of special Providence! What made it so relatively easy for Roosevelt and others to persuade the Saudi government to help? If the Saudi Royal family had resisted, could the US have actually taken over the country? One doubts it, but maybe yes, as with the Philipppines. And then what? The US was clearly ideologically unprepared.

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