When even the Wall Street Journal starts talking, seriously, about a US take-over of the Saudi oil fields, you know the relationship is in trouble. [Requires an e-mail registration.]
Today the dominant fact of the U.S.-Saudi relationship is that this “friend” is a principal source of funding for al Qaeda. The U.S. Treasury has identified several Saudi charities and a prominent Saudi businessman as bankrollers of terrorism. The Saudi response has been to decline to participate in an international consortium of more than 80 nations that have agreed to block the assets of terrorist groups.
This affront comes on top of the Saudi refusal to cooperate with the U.S. investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, in which 19 American servicemen died. Since last month’s terrorist attacks in the U.S., numerous connections have also emerged between Saudi Arabia and the hijackers, some of whom carried Saudi passports. Many of those currently under arrest are Saudis, but the official Riyadh reaction has been to overlook these facts. All of this despite the fact that 5,000 U.S. troops are based in the Kingdom–less to protect American interests than to protect the Saudis from Saddam and other neighborhood bullies.
[…] The U.S. is so fearful of “instability” that it’s afraid to criticize the current regime, much less encourage it to move in a more democratic direction. But the status quo is hardly stable. The U.S. has looked the other way while the Saudi ruling family has stifled even moderate challenges to its power. This in turn has bred radical Islam as the only outlet for dissent, which the Saudis have attempted to buy off with cash for fundamentalist mosques and schools that promote the most venomous anti-American sentiments.
Trouble indeed.
(Via InstaPundit)