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Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Middle East: With friends like these... - Pravda.Ru: "The East is to-day the place of change - of changes so great and swift that in comparison with it our Europe is standing still. We have been much engaged lately, making wars and peaces, looking at our own hurts, and trying to restore the balance of the times, and so we have not always been able to spare attention to what Asia is doing or thinking. We have tried to deal with her on the old traditional lines, and to our dismay she has not reacted properly. There have been outbreaks, unrest, protestations, and we, lacking the knowledge of movements there, have missed the sequence and find ourselves reduced to force, as our last remedy and restoration.'

These are apt words spoken not by a diplomat in New York, Paris or London, but by the legendary T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in 1920. It seems that once again the West is ignoring the signs of change, relying on old traditional lines."