A comment I put over on Gateway Pundit. This issue has been bothering me ever since I saw Abu Aardvark'spiece on his blog and Noah Shachtman's attempted skewer over on Wired. It wasn't until I read the Saudi piece that the "compare and contrast" difference struck me.
There's a similarity between fobbing off the Golden Mosque bombing on zionists and current US strategy to fob off most attacks in Iraq on Al Queda in Iraq. In both instances, it's a bad habit but one I'm comfortable with in the US case and not so much in the Saudi one. The difference is that the US distortion is for a specific purpose and time limited. By allowing this fiction, we encourage non Al Queda groups to put down their weapons in the hope that their acts will be glossed over and they can still successfully integrate into a new, democratic Iraq. It's a time-limited strategy that will eventually disappear with this campaign in the War on Terror. There is a reasonable exit and the overall effect is to save lives. That makes the lie an acceptable wartime gambit.Posted by TMLutas at August 5, 2007 09:44 AMThe Saudi case is different because it does not appear to have an exit strategy and has been going on for decades. The demonstrated overall effect is not to save lives, but to geographically shift where lives are lost, jews instead of arabs, Israelis instead of Iraqis and Saudis. That result is not worth the cost.