Hindsight

Posted on June 20, 2004 by Gene

Another civilian — this time, a South Korean — has been kidnapped in Saudi Arabia, with the kidnappers threatening beheading.
It’s strange, even though there are people dying everyday in the middle east, civilians and military alike, these single deaths bring so much more horror. One man, held in terror, killed in a horrible, barbaric way. If every victim of war were treated in this way, would we still go to wars?

Now the question: should all civilians be ordered to leave Saudi Arabia? What happens if the engineers and military leave Saudi Arabia? I believe that the Saudi royal family would be deposed, the nation would fall into the hands of fundamentalists, and we’d be screwed as far as oil goes.
Don’t you kind of wish, now, finally, that you hadn’t bought that SUV? That the government had mandated better mileage? That the electric car had caught on? Should our government, decades ago, have started to wean us from Saudi oil? Is it too late?