People in the US must be asking once again why their troops are in the Middle East after last week’s bomb at a US base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. About 200,000 troops are in the Gulf, 5000 of them in Saudi Arabia. The presence has been maintained since the Gulf War, but it cannot have anything to do with protecting human rights or democracy because Saudi Arabia is almost medieval in its political institutions. No; the presence can only be to secure the flow of oil to the US and other western nations and Japan.
Is the presence worth it, or likely to be effective in the long-run? The main trouble for the US is that the Saudi regime that it is supporting is not a very palatable one. It shows a face of strict Islam by imposing strict Islamic law. But the rapid modernisation; the personal behaviour of some members of the royal family; and the family’s invitation to US troops has upset many strict Muslims, apparently to the extent of using violence.
It has glaring similarities with the situation in Iran before the fall of the Shah and the creation of an Islamic state very hostile to the US. If that happened to oil-rich Saudi Arabia, it would be a catastrophe for the US. The presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia is more likely to bring on that change than prevent it.
The bombing was tragic an inexcusable, but it would be more tragic if it caused the US to increase its presence, thereby increasing the size of the fundamentalist target and perhaps ultimately bringing on the very thing the troops presence was designed to stop: the jeopardy of Saudi oil supplies.