Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

SDB has a couple of interesting posts today.

First, he discusses the enormous obstacle to Middle East peace that is Yasser Arafat. This is what makes the whole Middle East peace thing so frustrating: in a perfect world, it would be pretty obvious that getting Arafat off the world stage - - most likely by killing him - - would help things, but I'm just not convinced that the void created by Arafat's departure would be filled with anything better. But then, leaving him in place certainly isn't working out, either. I don't think there can really be peace as long as Arafat is alive, but I don't think the chances for peace significantly improve with him dead, either. Ugh. Talk about your quagmires: the Middle East has been one for how many thousand years now?

Second, SDB points to a news item in which some unnamed Saudi official claims that Osama Bin Laden specifically recruited a majority of Saudis for the 9-11-01 operation in order to make Saudi Arabia look bad. Now, I don't read this person's comments quite the same way SDB does - - SDB seems to think the Saudi source is claiming that the whole purpose of 9-11, from Bin Laden's perspective, was to discredit Saudi Arabia by virtue of fifteen of the highjackers being Saudis. It seems to me that what's being claimed here is not quite that, but rather that Bin Laden, having decided to execute a major operation against the US and on American soil, chose to do so in such a way that an additional benefit would be to discredit Saudi Arabia.

According to the ABCNews story, US terrorism experts pretty much reject the Saudi official's theory, anyway. They think that the explanation for Bin Laden's recruitment of mainly Saudis for 9-11 is more prosaic: there simply are more Saudis to recruit for terrorist activities, and they're easier to get in place for their strikes (or at least they were, back then). I suppose it doesn't occur to the quoted Saudi official that maybe his country is already discredited, in that it's apparently easy to recruit Saudis to be terrorists in the first place.

("My heart bleeds peanut butter"? That metaphor's just weird! Between that and his "vanishing pants" thing of a few weeks ago, I'm starting to form some really odd mental images of Mr. Den Beste…)