[see below] I had said I could 'quibble' about the equation of Nassar and Saddam, but it's more than that. Hussein, like Reza Pahlavi, was a modernizer, if a corrupt one. The house of Saud is not. Religion is an occasional tool of our 'pragmatic' foreign policy. We contradict ourselves -that's what pragmatism means- but we also do it stupidly.