saudi arabia

Foreign Policy replies to my skepticism at the idea of Russia and China backing an oil-embargo package on the Iranian regime with this recent piece by Brookings’ Erica Downs on China’s looming oil-sector investments in Iran. Downs gives some reason for thinking that the United States has leverage with the Chinese:
Beijing recognizes that a nuclear-armed [...]

The Wall Street Journal posted a small piece — reprinting a Volokh Conspiracy post from last month — attacking Human Rights Watch for raising money in Saudi Arabia. It’s an alarming claim if, as the implication has it, the NGO is taking cash from the very government it purports to monitor. Sarah Leah Whitson, the [...]

Really, media? Is it really newsworthy that President Obama said thank you in Arabic to an Arabic-speaking leader and an Arabic-speaking press? Could it be that the reason he didn’t say “shukran” on the campaign trail was because he wasn’t addressing, say, the king of Saudi Arabia, rather than the “emergence” of his “Muslim roots”? [...]

President Obama has arrived in Saudi Arabia for the first leg of of his outreach to what-we-maybe-shouldn’t-call-the Muslim world and, unsurprisingly, Osama bin Laden has released his latest mixtape screed against Obama and the United States more broadly. This time, to blunt the message of reconciliation and respect that Obama intends to send in his [...]

In advance of President Obama’s long-awaited address to the Muslim world in Cairo on Thursday, the administration appears to be seeding the public-diplomacy bed. I can’t read Arabic, but my friend Marc Lynch can, and here’s how Marc puts it in the course of a longer (and quite valuable) post about Obama’s approach to Israel-Palestine:
General [...]

The hearing is wrapping up. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) laments that some of the Republican senators have left “thinking they wouldn’t get a chance to ask questions.” He wants another bite of the apple on CIA Director-Designate Leon Panetta’s rendition history. “Were you fully advised of the extraordinary renditions that went on” in the Clinton [...]

My friend Jeff Stein at CQ asks:

I’ve got an idea: Why not get the Saudis to pony up, say, 20-30,000 troops for Afghanistan, about the same number that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said Sunday might be added to the 30,000 we already have there?

So, OK, Saudi Arabia has a pretty impressive deradicalization program.
But would deradicalization work in Pakistan?
Doubtful, says Kenneth Ballen of an organization called Terror Free Tomorrow.
Why?

Since the 2003 Al Qaeda attack on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia has launched a robust and multifaceted campaign against radicalization that most observers consider successful.
Along with military and law-enforcement measures, the kingdom pioneered a strategy of “counter-radicalization,” using religious figures to directly contend that Al Qaeda was an apostate organization. How’d that work, exactly?