Tasso  - 2013-09-11
Being a kid in the 90s I knew lots of other kids whose parents went to Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War. The number one opinion they all had was that it was more or less the most boring place on Earth: scorching hot, nothing interesting to see or do, all the locals, especially the ladies, were respectful but distant, and everyone who didn't think to smuggle had their potentially offensive Western literature confiscated by customs. One guy became the toast of his unit by smuggling paperbacks in in his socks with the covers torn off. I think one was an Agatha Christie and one was a Grisham. SHOCKING. Everyone also seemed to agree that those headscarves were pretty cool and they all came home with a couple.
From all this i learned that war is a lot like vacation with your parents: You're frequently bored, usually too hot, and everyone bosses you around.
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baleen - 2013-09-11 "How can we intervene in Syria? We are being hypocritical, because we don't intervene in Bahrain."
"How can we intervene in Bahrain? We are being hypocritical, because we don't intervene in Syria."
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EvilHomer - 2013-09-11 So we should bomb both?
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EvilHomer - 2013-09-11 P.S. Happy 9/11, poeTV!
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Oscar Wildcat - 2013-09-11 Happy 911 day, Homie! On 911 day, Rudy Giuliani comes down your still smoking chimney, bearing gifts of coal and paramilitary/intelligence contracts for all the politically connected little boys and girls.
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EvilHomer - 2013-09-11 I'm locked and loaded and very jumpy, so Rudy might want to pass up my house this year.
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Old_Zircon - 2013-09-11 MY father's best friend and research partner lived in Saudi and North Africa for about a decade doing geological research in remote desert in the late 70s and 80s, and his experience was pretty amazing from the sound of it. People I've known who went there with the military had a totally different impression of it, understandably. People didn't tend to open up to them much.
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Old_Zircon - 2013-09-11
I reconnected a bit a couple years ago with a guy I went to college with. He was the private English tutor to a Saudi prince for 2 years and still is for all I know. Sounds like it was a strange world to be part of but not as uncomomon as you might expect, there are something like 6000 members of the extended Saudi royal family.
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baleen - 2013-09-11 My brother's wife is Filipino, and her mother worked as a maid in Saudi Arabia. They treated her like subhuman vermin.
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memedumpster - 2013-09-12
Saudi Arabia is proof that countries get on our "sell military hardware and fellate" list rather than our "bomb to stone age, kill masses of citizens" list at random, probably at the flip of a coin, with no real world qualifiers whatsoever.
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Rodents of Unusual Size - 2013-09-12
Fascinating stuff.
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Gmork - 2013-09-12
What a bunch of faggots.
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