Crossroads Arabia (www.xrdarabia.org) is a weblog owned and written by John Burgess. The blog’s stated purpose “is to comment, knowledgeably about Saudi Arabia, from an American perspective.”

Burgess, a former US Foreign Service Officer, worked for 25 years primarily in Arab countries, including two tours of duty (1981-83, 2001-03) in Saudi Arabia. Still keenly interested in Middle East affairs, Burgess returns to the region regularly. In fact, he was in Saudi Arabia just a few weeks ago to attend the ground-breaking ceremony for King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

“I try to get back to Saudi Arabia to be sure that what’s in my mind about the Kingdom is really the case,” said Burgess. “This time I noticed the changes in the way women are wearing abayas. Also I saw that the cars were less expensive than in past years. This could be a sign of the increasing youth population or cutbacks in personal spending.”

According to Burgess, there are many supposed pundits who comment frequently about Saudi Arabia and the Middle East but who never personally visit the region and learn everything about it secondhand. Crossroads Arabia tries to put out a more comprehensive picture of the situation in the Kingdom and is also a balance to some of the crazier, paranoid information that seems to proliferate on the Internet and through US media sources.

“I find it easy — too easy — to find US media stories about what’s wrong with Saudi Arabia,” Burgess said. “Almost never is there a report on what’s right, about what’s changing for the better. While I don’t ignore the negative, I do try to point to the positive, the curious, those things that show that people, no matter their nationalities, are essentially the same underneath. You can always get a round of applause in the US for criticizing the Kingdom — and there is plenty to criticize. But every nation has issues and there is plenty to like too about Saudi Arabia, starting with the Saudis.”

It took a while for Crossroads Arabia to build up readership after Burgess left the US State Department. However, this year, to date, the blog has had some 130,000 unique readers, cumulatively reading different posts 2.6 million times — also known as “page views.”

“I’m pleased that 21 percent of them spend at least 30 minutes at the site; this suggests that they actually are reading what I post,” Burgess noted.

Asked what he thought about the current brouhaha caused by the US State Department forcing Foreign Service Officers to take up posts in Iraq, Burgess felt that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had made the right decision.

“When an individual joins the US Foreign Service he or she must agree to worldwide availability,” said Burgess. “This point is made very clear. It is not up to individual officers to choose where they are willing to be posted and the State Department has put forward several incentives for those who serve in Iraq.”