Empire claptrap.

• Position: U.S. policy of intervention in other countries can backfire as in the Saudi Arabia base bombing - Column

When a bomb exploded in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in late June, killing nineteen American servicemen and wounding some 300 more, the Administration and much of the media tried to cast the event in the usual manner: The United States, trying to do good, was once again victim to irrational, inexplicable acts of terror.

President Clinton trumpeted "America's mission of peace and freedom" in Saudi Arabia, and made the deaths out to be the wages of modernity. "While the modern world brings to all of us many new opportunities," he said, "it also leaves us more open to the forces of intolerance and destruction, and especially to terrorism."

The bombing fueled prejudices about those crazy Arab fundamentalists, and it reinforced a late twentieth-century American whine: that our good deeds abroad are underappreciated by those ingrate foreigners. They don't understand that we're there to protect them. Bob Simon of CBS News said the Saudis don't seem to grasp that were it not for the U.S. military presence, Saddam Hussein would be sitting in Saudi Arabia right now.

The Washington Post editorialists chimed in about the "risks and burdens of world leadership" that Americans must bear, no matter the costs.

This is the rusty claptrap of American empire. No one voted us leader of the world, and we're not in Saudi Arabia to protect the Saudi people, much less to uphold peace and freedom.

The United States is in Saudi Arabia for one reason--oil. The Saudis are the world's largest oil producers, and our economy thrives on oil, now more than ever. Rather than curb our appetite, and become less dependent on Saudi oil, we've increased our consumption. To defend that gluttony, and to defend the U.S. oil companies that profit from it, we've stationed 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia since the Persian Gulf war, which itself was fought for oil.

It's 6,748 miles from Washington, D.C., to Riyadh, but the United States acts like Saudi Arabia belongs to us. At least since Richard Nixon, every Administration has claimed Saudi Arabia as a vital U.S. interest. It doesn't matter that we've hooked up with a corrupt, brutal, and absolute monarchy. What matters is the crude.

The Saudi government has an abysmal human-rights record. According to Amnesty International, the regime tortures prisoners, it denies defendants facing the death penalty the right to formal representation, it coerces confessions and allows those confessions as evidence, and it beheads those found guilty of capital...