Democracy in the Middle East, Almost

The Washington Post reports on Colin Powell's recent trip to Saudi Arabia:

[L]ast week as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with Kuwaiti and Saudi officials ... Powell told reporters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Friday that the push for greater freedoms in the Middle East was "not a matter of satisfying the United States; it's a matter of satisfying the aspirations of the people in the Arab world."

The Post praises "President Bush's call for democracy in the Middle East," and democracy is the principal justification for the Iraq war this week.

But wait! Our allies the Saudis might be having a bit of a problem with that whole "democracy" thing. Just as Powell was praising their upcoming elections, TNR was reporting:

Saudi authorities rounded up and imprisoned several democracy activists who had formed a human rights group. The arrests, however, did not make much of an impression on Powell, who at a press conference praised America's relationship with the Saudi autocracy as "quite strong" while, beside him, Prince Saud Al Faisal dismissed the arrests as "an internal issue."

Even the Post only said that Powell had "expressed concern" over the detentions, which were briefly mentioned in the middle of their article:

[S]hortly before Powell arrived, Saudi officials arrested 10 reformist figures, including a university professor, after they had called for the monarchy to move toward a more constitutional model. ... Saud, the foreign minister, said, "These people sowed dissension when the whole country was looking for unity and a clear vision, especially at a time when it is facing a terrorist threat."

Er, right. Hey, didn't you used to write speeches for the East Germans?

The U.S. has a long history of supporting the Saudi monarchy even as it stifles dissent. The liberals who complain about our questionable support for Israel don't complain as often as I'd like about this; Israel is only a shadow of this hypocrisy. TNR quotes one Saudi: "The authorities want to teach the liberals a lesson that they do not care what America thinks and that they can put them in jail at any time."

The problem isn't that the Saudi's don't care what America thinks. The problem is that America doesn't care what the Saudi's do.

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