Stephen Schwartz has a long but terrific piece in Front Page today. I briefly touched on my two year experience dealing with Arabs. Schwartz calls their dialogues "a Hall of Mirrors". I prefer the term subtext. You always have to be aware that an Arab is functioning on three levels simultaneously; they have a 4,000 year fear of being caught. What they really mean in conversation is buried under symbolism. Schwartz:

I and the Saudi reformers who talk to me believe that the old argument that the Saudis supported al-Qaida out of fear they would be attacked was bogus then and is bogus now. They have not been attacked. They are not being attacked. Their princes and princesses continue to jet around the world, to shop and party, to visit bars and brothels, without a single one of them ever being harmed. And that is not because the terrorists were paid off. No terror movement in history could show that much discipline.

Very good read.