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Some excerpts of this excellent interview with Joe Biden:
Question: Is the situation so dire that the administration of Saudi Arabia, the monarchy, is likely to be destabilized, is likely to be overthrown?
Biden: Let me say what I mean. The question is how urgent. It is dire in the sense that there's no underpinning, there's no legitimacy, to this royal families continued political domination. They made a Faustian bargain with the religious organization who are made up of extremely conservative Sunnis, referred to as Wahhabis, who have had as their habit and continue to have as their habit exporting extremism in the Madrasas, the schools they build all around the world, and in the way in which they educate the Saudi youth. And the way they keep any notion of modernity -- as it relates to spreading to the population at large -- at bay. And so it is an incendiary bomb that is likely to explode. Whether it occurs in a year, in a month, ten years, I don't know. But I would be dumbfounded -- if my granddaughter, who is now ten years old -- when she is thirty five years old and a professor at some university -- whether or not the royal family is still in charge.
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Question: If Saudi Arabia is on the verge, or potentially able to implode; is it also equally able to explode in our direction?
Joseph Biden: It's already exploding in our direction. And that's why we have to get over this notion -- it's a little bit like having a gas station on the corner. You don't like the proprietor very much but he keeps pumping the gas. And now you find out in the backroom they're cutting heroin and cocaine and they're distributing it to all the drug dealers in the region. Obviously that gas station now becomes your problem. It gives you gas but it's a problem. Saudi Arabia is becoming our problem as well as our ally.
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Question: At the end of the day is the overriding concern that we have in this country their oil?
Joseph Biden: Bingo bango. Put it another way. Can you imagine us wasting any time if there were no oil?
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Question: Last question. Is there any doubt in your mind that the November election is a foreign policy election?
Joseph Biden: None whatsoever.
Question: It's not about the economy in the United States.
Joseph Biden: Oh, it is about the economy. Look all these other things matter. As my dad said, 'If everything's equally important than nothings important to you.' Let me put it this way, if we get the next four years as badly wrong as we got the last four years in foreign policy, it'll take a generation to correct it. If we get the next four years as badly wrong as we've gotten the economy, we can correct it in four years. We can have a horrible tax policy that does great damage to our economy, and over a matter of a couple years, internally, at our own doing, we can change it. We can put in place a social policy that's mistaken on education and change it in one congress. We cannot continue the erosion of American influence, confidence in American judgment and American wisdom, and think you're going to turn it around in four years or six years or eight years. We can do that on welfare reform. We can do that on tax policy. We can do that on education policy. We can't do that on foreign policy. It's like turning around a super tanker or stopping a super tanker. It takes miles. It takes miles. So in that sense there's never been an election since the end of World War II that has as much of a consequence for America's place in the world as this election that is coming. It's the single most important election that has occurred in your lifetime or mine whether you're for Bush or for Kerry, a radically different view of the world.
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