I’m sorry to stay so

I’m sorry to stay so focused on the Middle East, but I have the sense that the future of the world is going to be decided there to a significant extent over the next year. Today the Washington Post ran a page 1 story by the estimable Thomas Ricks concerning a briefing given to a Pentagon advisory committee last month. (This is an old story regarding an old story–good enough for page 1 in the Post.) The Rand Corporaration briefer made the now somewhat obvious point that Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the United States and that we should treat it as such. It is a point that was made a couple months ago in a featured article in Commentary magazine by Victor Davis Hanson titled “Our Enemies, the Saudis,” an article I posted on this site at the time it was published. Ricks notes the Commentary piece toward the bottom of his story.
Anyone who has been awake and alert since Septmber 11 should have pieced the evidence together sufficiently to arrive at an understanding consistent with the one summarized in the Post story. The failure of the mainstream media to have followed up on the evidence and asked why Colin Powell and other government officials are attesting to the Saudis’ “full cooperation” in the war against terror is difficult for me to understand. Despite the pride journalists in the prestige press take in their supposed cynicism and nose for news, they are among the most credulous and easily gulled people in the world. The Ricks story has broken some kind of a news blackout in the mainstream press regarding the depth of the Saudi treachery and should have a significant impact on future coverage.
To get some sense of what serious news is missing from our mainstream media today, take a look at the current Debka. Debka asserts that the United States is in the final stages of completing airfields within Iraq that point to a three-pronged offensive: “In total hush, the US has embarked on advance preparations deep inside Iraq for the coming offensive against Baghdad. In northern Iraq, these preparations are in the form of crash engineering projects.
“According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly