Obama seeks to reassure Saudi King on Iran talks, Syria

During a meeting yesterday at the king's desert compound Obama and Abdullah also discussed steps to help opponents of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad while isolating extremists. Even as Obama seeks to bolster Syrian rebel groups, he said in an interview that he remains skeptical about whether using U.S. force would have made a difference. "It's not that it's not worth it. It's that after a decade of war, you know, the United States has limits," he told the CBS Evening News. It's "a false notion that somehow we were in a position to, through a few selective strikes, prevent the kind of hardship that we've seen in Syria." The U.S.-Saudi relationship has been strained by the administration's reluctance to pursue military action in Syria, secret Iran negotiations and its support for the Arab Spring overthrow of former Egyptian president and ally Hosni Mubarak, Kazinform cites Bloomberg. There's been a "basic breakdown of trust coming from Riyadh," said Robert Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official. "They just don't feel they have a reliable partner here." Read more