TWELVE YEARS TOO LATE

U.S. Military Will Leave Saudi Arabia This Year (Vernon Loeb, April 30, 2003, The Washington Post)

Having removed the government of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, the U.S. military will end operations in Saudi Arabia later this year, freeing the kingdom of a major political problem caused by the visible presence of U.S. forces in the land of Islam's two holiest shrines, defense officials announced today.

Shutting down U.S. flights from Prince Sultan air base and moving the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center from here to nearby Qatar mark the beginning of what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has described as a major realignment of U.S. military forces, not only in the Persian Gulf, but also in Europe and the Far East. Meeting this morning with service members here inside a giant aircraft hangar, Rumsfeld said he is attempting "to refashion and rebalance those arrangements so that we're organized for the future." [...]

Saudi Arabia's royal family, which regards custody of the shrines at Mecca and Medina as a sacred mission, long has been uneasy at the visible U.S. presence, which is resented by many Saudis and other Arabs as intrusion on holy soil. The basing of U.S. troops here has been denounced repeatedly by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, who has demanded their withdrawal since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

While Saudi Arabia balked at assuming the same high-profile role in the latest Iraq war that it did in the 1991 Gulf War, the royal family quietly agreed in February to virtually every U.S. request for military and logistical support, including use of the operations center here and the staging of Special Operations forces from bases in the country. Saudi Arabia also boosted oil production before the war to help stabilize world oil prices.

Despite this cooperation, the Saudis remained highly sensitive about the presence of U.S. military forces in the kingdom, both before and during the war in Iraq, which was unpopular among the Saudi people.

It's sad but instructive to consider that it was the classic inability of democracies to finish off the wars they wage--in the case of the 1991 war it was the failure to carry on to Baghdad and remove Saddam--which led to our having troops based there all these years and that at least contributed to Osama's psychotic hatred of the U.S. and thereby to 9-11. Unfortunately, the lesson it teaches seems unlearnable, and so we'll bail out of the War on Terror long before it's over, thereby setting up the next round of wars down the road. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 1, 2003 1:01 PM