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We Need to Talk About Saudi Arabia

January 6, 2016

We Need to Talk About Saudi Arabia

Canadians may decry its executions and power moves, but we’re locked in an alliance.

SaudiSecurity_610px.jpg

Iranians protest executions outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran, Jan. 3, 2016. Raheb Homavanti, Reuters Media Express.

Dealing with Saudi Arabia is becoming a mug’s game for almost everyone in the West — Europe, the U.S. and Canada, among others. Time and again, the House of Saud makes us look like suckers, and the recent Saudi execution of 47 people in one day (mostly by beheading, a few by firing squad) is just the latest example. We know the Saudis are crooked, but they’re the only game in town.

Historically, the House of Saud has a lot of legitimacy. It ruled much of the Arabian peninsula in the 18th century, before the Ottoman Empire took over, and after the First World War it waged an Islamic State-style war against other factions and founded modern Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Well, “modern” is going too far. The House of Saud has been a close ally of the Wahhabis, who promote a fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam, and that version is far from modern. But Muhammad ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, was smart enough to strike a deal with the British after oil was discovered in 1938. That deal gave him British protection as well as a huge market; after the Second World War, the U.S. took over.

Thanks to such deals, the West has relied on cheap Saudi oil through almost 80 years of war and growth. But the moral price has been high: we have had to tolerate some pretty bad behaviour by the Saudis.

Recall the Saudi oil embargo imposed on the West after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. America, Europe and Japan staggered under the soaring cost of oil and gasoline.

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