I thought the first article was pretty bad. It quotes from some self annointed "expert" from "carleton university" (what?)

This fellow dismisses out of hand the notion that stationing our troops in saudi arabia had any strategic purpose. He derides the idea that attacking from Saudi Arabia provided any "military efficiency". Oh yeah, how are we going to invade Iraq and Kuwait -- only from the sea? I guess this fellow does not comprehend the utility of tanks and land based artillery in an invasion. Some expert.
He talks about invading from Saudi being a source of anger amongst the arabs, well what alternative would please them more, coming in from Israel? Turkey had refused using them as a base of operations, Syria, well forget it.

Another blinder of the article is its dismissiveness of the threats against the Saudi regime, which are in fact very real. Why else do you think they are so eager to have us there, and buy so many of our weapons? There are plenty of people who want to topple the Saudi regime, and I don't think us being there is the primary reason. By the way, what is the alternative to us being there, having some extremists govt take over with massive oil money to trash us? Oh great.

Another bogus implication of the article is that if we weren't in Saudi Aarabia, bin laden and his ilk wouldn't target us -- yeah right! The article doesn't even mention our support of Israel as a complaint against us, nor us being the "great satan" and decadent non-islamic westerners in general.

The article blames our "oil policy" for everything, but doesn't propose an alternative policy that would turn the world into a terrorist free utopia. I would infer that the proposed solution is for us to not be reliant on Saudi Oil, perhaps by building huge numbers of nuclear plants and radically increasing domestic production. Or maybe the author didn't think it through that far...

An interesting oversight of the article is failing to mention that Bin Laden and his family are saudi, his billionaire relatives still in the country and running much of the economy...