Living in hostility

These were the sons of Ishmael...And they lived in hostility toward all their brothers. Gen 25:18

I am disturbed by the rhetoric coming out of Saudi Arabia lately. It seems the love-fest is over.

read on (you too, Elise, even though it's "political")....

I realize that our relationship is one of mutual expedience, and I understand diplomacy and foreign relations enough, I think, to recognize that with cultures as different as ours and theirs, we need to leave latitude for those differences without allowing those differences to undermine the benefits of the relationship. But it seems like Saudi Arabia has begun to sound more like Tehran instead of our ally in the region.

Never a friend of Israel, the Saudis have at least kept their mouths mostly shut on the subject. But recently, there has been some not-so-subtle comments about Israel. From the NY Sun :

Prince Saud, insisted yesterday that no amendments would be made to the Arab Plan, which mandates a return to pre-1967 borders for Israel, a transfer of East Jerusalem to Arab control, and the right to return to Israel for all the descendants of Arabs who fled or were chased away in the 1948 war.

"If Israel refuses, that means it doesn't want peace, and it places everything back into the hands of fate," Prince Saud told the Daily Telegraph. "They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war."

Accompanying that "remark" were these fine friendly encouragements:

Saudi King Abdullah, whose country is a close US ally, on Wednesday slammed the "illegitimate foreign occupation" of Iraq in an opening speech to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh.

"In beloved Iraq, blood is being shed among brothers in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and ugly sectarianism threatens civil war," Abdullah said.

So what, you ask, do we get out of this mutually-expedient relationship? This, evidently.

OPEC daily output fell by a million barrels recently, and global inventories this year have fallen the most in a decade.

Blame Ali al-Naimi, oil minister of Saudi Arabia, the world's largest exporter, who told OPEC members that production cuts would stop a six-month decline in oil prices.

Crude this year rebounded 26 per cent from a 20-month low to $US62.51 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia's Al-Naimi enforces policies to keep control of the market. When OPEC gathered in October to discuss its response to a plunge in oil, Al-Naimi said the group would "absolutely" cut daily output by a million barrels. The next day they agreed to a cut of 1.2 million barrels.

In January he said the market was back "in balance" and expressed confidence prices would rebound. Prices touched their low two days later and have been rallying since.

What is going on, and how should we be handling it? It seems like our responses to these have been tepid and unaggressive. Are we gun-shy? Are we too image conscious? Where is this going to lead?