I would say Allies, but not friends. Being an Ally doesn’t necessarily include a parallel package of legal, moral or diplomatic rules.

It’s the reality of life in Foreign Relations.

The Saudis rely on the U.S. for protection against external elements just as much as the Israelis do. The Saudis appear more willing towards self-funding though due to their wealth. :)

With that said, it doesn’t mean that the Agenda of U.S. Policy is necessarily the agenda of the Saudi Royal Council or of its citizens. But hey, that’s life.

We could pull our “bull mastiffs” back home and the Saudis would be out there defenseless to Shiite acquisition plans.

You know that old phrase Ben, “Hold Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer.” Saudis aren’t exactly our enemies nor our friend, they are somewhere in between. We call them Allies. :)

So, yes there is some ummm…close clutching of the Saudis, but never any intimate relations that would require over night stays. :D

It’s part of doing business in a world where ideas of fairness or unfairness in the world does not hold to our own.

We (the U.S.) have to play the delicate game of Ally accumulation.

Yep, it ain’t pretty. I’ve been think of going into the balloon factory and cactus farming business myself. But I don’t have a country, maybe some day I can buy an Island and charter the U.N. for recognition as a sovereign nation where I too can raise cactus and balloons under the same roof. :D

“There isn’t any organized terror finance, and we will not permit any such unorganized acts,” said Brigadier General Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. About a year ago the Saudi government set up a unit to track any “suspicious financial operations,” he said.

But the Iraq Study Group said “funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.”

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/12/08/private_saudis_said_to_fund_iraq_insurgents/

Call It.

Sgt. Jerry Mills Jr., 23, Arkansas City, liked to hand out candy to Iraqi children and tell them his name was John Wayne or Clint Eastwood.Mills’ assignment with the 1st battalion, 13th Armor Regiment at Fort Riley was to go around looking for roadside bombs. He had been scheduled to finish his four years of Army service in June 2005, but the military extended it for six months.He communicated almost every day with his father, Jerry Mills Sr., who would get up at 4 a.m. Kansas time to chat online with his son.“Somedays he thought that we should be there doing what we were doing and other days he thought ‘This is ridiculous. We need to come home.’” Jerry Mills Sr. said. “I think it was depending on what was going on at the time.”One morning in late November 2005, Jerry Mills Sr. got up at the scheduled time and his son wasn’t online. He checked the Internet and saw someone had been killed in Taji, the part of Iraq where his son was stationed.It didn’t take long for his hunch to be confirmed. Jerry Mills Sr. got the news as he was coming home from his job at an elevator-components warehouse.“As soon as I pulled in, behind me pulled a black car,” he said. “There were four Army guys that got out and asked if they could talk to me.”Mills learned that his son and another man, Sgt. Donald J. Haase, had been killed on patrol by an improvised explosive device.Mills Sr. said his son was a good kid who never got in trouble, made up his own colorful words and phrases, and could make anyone laugh. He liked to debate and joined the Army so he could eventually attend law school.“He had a month to go, then he would have been home,” his father said.He also liked to fish. Earlier this month, Arkansas City hosted the “Sgt. Jerry Mills Fishing Derby.”

A bit of news that may have been overlooked. The 4-week training session instituted before leaving for combat has been reduced to 10 days. Add that to the weakening of the stadards of personel “hired” (allowed to enlist), such as those with criminal records and drop-outs, and what do you have?

Anybody who says the Democrats are the only ones playing politics with the troops is an idiot.

And by the way, what does it say about Bush’s wartime leadership when even the PENTAGON forchrissakes is leaking to the press?!?

Christ, Bush couldn’t lead a horse to water if he and the horse were standing hip deep in the Mississippi.

One nuclear war in this nation’s history is enough.

I have a better plan. How ’bout we get our kids the hell out of Iraq, and let the Iraqis settle their civil war themselves? You’ve already proven you’re willing to accept casualties in the millions by your “judicious” use of nukes.

No more war (no more Iraq)

No more dead soldiers

No more billions per month

We Win!!!!

I think that is what Bush labeled “pork barrell”

Yet another red herring.

The truth is that they’ve had all of us that they can stand.

We need to leave now.

“The bottom line is this: Congress’s failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated.”

On Wednesday Secretay Gates announced the Army would be doing this:

“The Pentagon has announced that all active-duty Army soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will serve three months longer than expected.”

But on March 23 the House passed an Iraq spending bill that includes this:

“The $124 billion legislation includes more than $100 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus billions more than Bush requested for combat equipment and training, for military housing and health care, to address the flaws in mental health care, brain trauma treatment and other issues that surfaced in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal.”

The bill would establish strict standards for resting, training and equipping combat troops before their deployment and lay down binding benchmarks for the Iraqi government, such as assuming control of security operations, quelling sectarian violence and more equitably distributing oil revenue. If progress is not made toward those benchmarks, some troops would be required to come home as early as July.

Apparently in Bush World passing a spending bill that fully funds the troops, expands funding for veterans care, demands a one year rest period and seeks to extract the troops from a civil war if the Iraqis don’t meet certain benchmarks — all in record time — constitutes “failing to fund our troops” and making “military families wait longer for their loved ones to return,” despite Bush’s escalation strategy that sends more troops to Iraq and Secretary Gates’ decision to extend their tours by three months. Paging Mr. Orwell. Mr. Orwell…

Sounds like the administration planned to announce the tour extension after the veto so they could blame the Democrats.

ThinkProgress highlights Dana Perino’s odd quasi-admission that President Bush didn’t know about his own policy. This would all seem to suggest that the plan to blame the tour extension on the Democrats was short-circuited by a DoD leak. And who’s politicizing the war and the troops?

If we did a bad thing in 1950 in Korea, own up to it. Lies don’t do anyone any good.

Excessive force by Marines in Afghanistan.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070414/ap_on_re_as/afghan_marines_shooting;_ylt=AqodaaP_INpHLqAxAmt_kNrMWM0F

Criminals (?) at the helm of US forces in Korean War.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070413/ap_on_re_as/shooting_refugees;_ylt=AhmpZw7wmXOEUPwWfksToEf9xg8F

It is my hope that such actions are exceptions rather than rule.