Secular government?
In Saudi Arabia?
This country is ruled by a medieval style monarchy! Every minister is a member of the ruling family, while the King styles himself protector of Mekka and Medina.
Women have practically no rights, Christian religion is publically banned and until recently, it was forbidden to take pictures of people (now you can if they consent).
Not to mention rather cruel punishments like beheading, stoning and chopping off hands. And of course they use their fellow muslims from poorer countries as quasi slave labour.
The Quran is the Saudi constitution, nothing else.
There is absolutely NOTHING secular about the current government of Saudi Arabia. The one thing why there won't be a fundamentalist turnover in Saudi Arabia is that the country is allready as islamic as it gets. Osama bin Laden can be regarded as a social revolutionary for his own country
The country may be friendly to the US, but that is foreign politics. Internally, Saudi is far worse than Iran, comparable to Taliban Afghanistan.
But sale of advanced weapons to SA perhaps won't do much harm, as the ineptitude of the SA military is legendary. Not so much the ineptitude but rather the lazyness of the genuine Arabs to do the more dirty aspects of soldiering like maintenance or digging. Without western maintenance specialists, the air force would be grounded within weeks, for example. Also recently I read a story about german NBC troops training Saudis. For the night, the Saudi unit was to dig in in the desert. The german instructors dug themselves in but the Saudis did not move: "Arabs don't dig"; they declared, pulled out their cellphones and after a few hours, some busloads of Filipinos, Indonesians and Pakistanis came and started digging....
:rotfl:
