The Eastern Province
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Bush administration is distancing itself from a Pentagon briefing that described Saudi Arabia as an adversary of the United States and a backer of terrorism, the Washington Post reports. The Post’s Thos. Ricks reported on Tuesday that the briefing to the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, had recommended that American officials demand that Saudi Arabia stop supporting terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets. The Post’s report prompted Secretary of State Powell to send a reassuring message to the Saudi dictators and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to tell a Pentagon briefing that the report doesn’t represent the views of the American government.
Not yet, at least. The idea of separating the Saudi tyranny from the oil rich fields that make up what is called the Eastern Province is one of the most important to come into focus in the wake of the attacks of September 11, which were perpetrated mainly by Saudi nationals. It was the subject of a much remarked upon editorial page article published in The New York Sun during its first week. It was floated in a nowfamous editorial that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 30, 2001. And an editorial called “Bluffing Bush,” issued in the April 25 number of the Sun, remarked that “in strategic circles outside of the administration in Washington, consideration is starting to be given to the idea of breaking up Saudi Arabia by throwing support to the indigenous population of its oil-rich Eastern Province, which has been ruled by the Saudi royals for years.”
Mr. Ricks’s report discloses the fact that an idea that once stood at the fringes of the American policy debate is advancing toward the center. We take this as progress. New ideas have to percolate. It took a while for the idea of Palestinian Arab democracy to get to the top while the New York Times and other opinion elites advanced the case for dealing with Yasser Arafat. Eventually, though, the idea did get to the top and a president brushed the opinion elites aside, went before the television cameras and caught everyone off guard.
