Living in la-la land I don't get the Arabs. Here are excerpts from a Washington Post article on resignation toward the US invasion of Iraq:

Mohammed Saeed Tayyeb, a liberal Saudi lawyer who hosts gatherings of Saudi intellectuals and who appears regularly on television talk shows, said in a telephone interview from Jiddah that there was a lot of frustration over the looming conflict. "There is no way around riding the American train. We don't really know who the driver is, nor where he is taking us or at which station he is planning to stop or whether he plans to return. Yet if we stand by on the pavement, we are told we will sit alone and another train may crash right into us. There is a feeling among Saudis of having no choice," Tayyeb said. "We feel that this American friend, whose political projects we did not hesitate to finance has dragged us into a war, made us build bases we barely use and sold us planes and weapons we don't know how to operate. We bought all of that, but it did not do us any good," he added.

Does anyone else feel this is bizarre??? The Saudis are not passive partners. They knew very well that they were in trouble when Saddam took Kuwait, we didn't have to convince them to let us set-up bases. They don't buy weapons to just satisfy the US arms industry (though that might be part of it). As far as the part about political projects-we know what projects the Saudis have been financing, and we know what jihads their citizens have been engaging in, don't we? This feigned passivity is disgusting.

A big uncertainty for the Arab world is the role of Israel. If the Jewish state were to enter a war with Iraq, it could galvanize Arab states against the United States. "This would be hard to swallow," said Ansari, the Islamic law expert in Qatar.

What exactly would the Arab world do? Fight Israel and the United States? Between a rock and a hard place my friend.