Saudi Arabia is currently the target of a bitter media campaign in the United States. The campaign is as powerful and effective as if it were official. It betrays the US intention to Americanize, or impose America’s will upon, the rest of the world. For the past sixty years, the Kingdom has been a strategic partner of the US while, at the same time, holding fast to its own views on Palestine and other regional, Arab and Muslim issues.
When approaching the present problem we should try to begin from within ourselves. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that we are facing an America very different from what we have known in the past. It has changed totally. It is looking for an enemy and is behaving like a wounded lion. The Americans now believe that “whoever is not with us is against us.”
There are nonetheless two strong currents of thought struggling to dominate American politics. One is espoused by Noam Chomsky, a remarkable US political thinker. He demands radical changes in US foreign policy or the country will face a “revolution from within.” He has advised successive US governments since the Carter administration of the need to change the colonialist and supercilious approach to the rest of the world.
Chomsky’s views are not as strong as those represented by Thomas Friedman, who is firmly rooted in both his Americanism and Jewishness. Disagreeing with Chomsky, he argues that the US has always been in the right. When I asked Friedman during a recent visit to the Kingdom about his differences with Chomsky, he replied, “Just as you regard Osama Bin Laden as an extremist, we in the US regard Chomsky as an extremist.”
