Saudi Arabia to behead teenager for attending protest

[Hortensis]

81. You may be happy then that the House of Saud is

in the process of falling under the bus, KamaAina. It's so beset by problems that we could wake up any morning to find it's fallen. Daesh and other terrorist groups would also be delighted.

SA's government doesn't have many admirers in the U.S., to put it mildly, but there have been a number of very good reasons we didn't just slap on sanctions and turn away in disgust. For instance, SA is the main power keeping Iran's theocracy and other Shia Muslims in check. It's also been a stabilizing factor in the Middle East in other ways.

We're currently relatively independent of Saudi oil - for use, but the world economy is not. Not only has SA has always used surplus producing capacity to stabilize the world oil supply, but taking out Saudi's oil production, as might happen in the chaos after the fall of the central government, could literally lead to a collapse of the world economy.

BTW, thanks to Republicans' determination to lessen the power of government to interfere with business, the economic fire walls that we once erected to keep a domino-cascade of market failures from sweeping unimpeded across our economy have mostly been eliminated. The Sauds may have lots of company under that bus.

The Middle East presents many, many problems aside from but very intertwined with this that have to somehow be kept from blowing up in the world's face. And our power to do so is actually very limited, as has been proven many times over. It's not that we think it's okay to execute children, there or here, although, of course, some of us do.