Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Will Saudi Arabia ever change?
There's a very thoughtful look at this question in the New York Review of Books. One of the books reviewed is Tom Lippman's SAUDI ARABIA ON THE EDGE (Potomac: 2012)
2 comments:
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Not in our lifetime and only when women have the courage and solidarity to demand their basic human rights
ReplyDeleteWe have to remind young officers that the lens of the civil rights movement put a unique perspective on their worldview. They grew up (largely) with the institutionalized assumption that girls, boys, races, and ethnicity are all transparent. People are people.
ReplyDeleteIn most of the rest of the world where they will go ( combatants ), this lens is not present.
It is important to dig back into your analytic bag of tricks to the cold war and recall that perspective dictates real world action. Regardless of your point of view, executing any form of change will largely mean compromise with a very slow moving perspective of those in the local region.
Oppression is extremely easy. It requires only the application of very little force in a very public way. Thus, in Saudi Arabia capital punishment is public - by beheading.
Odd to see a headless corpse crucified. Not an extremely rare event on the Arabian Peninsula.
Prey fear a predator more when they watch him kill. It makes the herd uneasy for days after a lion takes a wildebeest.