Saudi Arabia’s Laughably Stupid Plan for the End of Oil

While I share your sentiments I still think the House of Saud will be governing the Arabian for a long time yet. I would be the US, Canada and Great Britain break into smaller countries before Saudi Arabia does.

If I had a dollar……..

@ A

at the risk of pointing out the obvious, non-African Arabia is already several countries: the numerous Persian Gulf statelets, Jordan and large parts of Iraq and Syria and Palestine are all historically Arabia. Arguably, so are Yemen and Oman. As one thread of connection, the Hashemites, the predecessors of the Sauds in Mecca, have been the royal family of Syria (1918-1920), Hejaz (1916–1925), Iraq (1921–1958) and Jordan (1921-date). the political geography of the area has been fractured since before the Ottomans claimed the caliphate. the Saudi ambition to use the central region of Najd to dominate the east and west of the peninsula has not been an especially successful program historically, subject to challenge from many powerful opponents.

Im guessing he wants to copy dubai then

Welcome to the living Old Testament…

To follow up on that great comment by StewartM, below John Dolan (aka Gary Brecher) piece in the NSFWCorps when TechCrunch put out a story about how KSA could be the next Silicon Valley. The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Read. Saudi Arabia As The Next Silicon Valley”

How do you, you hot, heavily-recruited tech whiz you, begin your day? Maybe you and your significant other have a cozy little habit of going out for coffee before work?

Well, not in Saudi. This is impossible for all kinds of reasons. First: How you gonna get that significant other into your room? Or your equally significant self into his or her room? There is no such thing as privacy in Saudi. Every police officer on the street has the right to demand a marriage certificate from any male/female couple he sees. If you and your object of affection don’t have one, you cannot be in the same room together.

They’re not kidding about this. That’s what I’d really like to say to all the naïve Westerners who think the Saudis can’t really be serious about such things: They are… If your partner happens to be of the same sex, you might get away with it—that paradox social historians have noted about extremely repressive societies whereby gay liaisons are less carefully surveilled than heterosexual ones. But if your homosexual relationship is discovered, you can count on instant deportation if you’re lucky, and worse if the partner is a Muslim.

Now, let’s say you and partner have a document certifying the legality of your doin’s. Let’s go get that latte! Well no, not if one or both of you are female. Women are not supposed to be moving about in public, and when they do they are usually stopped by the police, who want to know basically who owns them and why he’s letting them walk around loose. Most small cafes and restaurants don’t admit women at all. Period. Women are admitted only if there’s a so-called “Family Section.” What that means is that one side of the restaurant is partitioned off with closed booths. Women are allowed to zip into one of those partitioned booths, and the man of the party then pulls the curtain open to order, closing it quickly lest someone see the women inside. He orders, then takes the food from the server so no one else sees the women. (And the food, when you get it, is very bad. The big restaurant in Najran was an imitation US fast-food chain called Kudu, inspired by Jack in the Box.)

Of course any female member of your party can only leave the house if she’s fully covered. When we arrived, we thought that meant the “Western female correspondent in Kabul” option. You know, the tasteful headscarf and long dress. Noooope. Katherine, already dressed in that style, was informed it wouldn’t do and handed the full kit: hijab (black headscarf), niqab (black face-veil), abaya (black dress long enough to sweep the dust). That’s compulsory. All day, every day. Great for a hot desert climate, as you can imagine.

And please—that shit about how this costume is “liberating”? Bull. Shit. As a Pashtun colleague complained, “They say the abaya is to free women to move about but a woman cannot move about!” He knew about that. He’d sent his wife and kids home to South Africa on vacation, only to get a call from Jeddah Airport. His wife, crying, told him the Saudi guards wouldn’t let her out of the country because she didn’t have a male guardian present. He actually had to fly from Najran to Jeddah to tell Saudi Immigration, “Yes, this is my wife, these are my kids, I give them my permission to leave.”

@Gabriel,

I gather John Dolan at some point took over the Gary Brecher name and column. But I have always had a feeling that someone else began the Gary Brecher feature, perhaps even a “real” Gary Brecher himself.

I would have to spend many hours reading all the War Nerd columns from Column Number One going forward to see if my memory-feel of a “change at some point” would still stand. I can say that what I regard as the previous ” Gary Brecher” never mentioned “faculty meetings” in a column.
But shortly after the handoff, the new “Gary Brecher” ( Garyjohn Dolanbrecher) put a referrence to “faculty meetings” as something he had used to have to go to into a column. That was clearly not the old “Gary Brecher” I had used to read.