“We have made it clear to all nations, if you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists; you’re an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account.”
That was our President speaking when he wanted to sound tough on terror. But evenhandedness and impartiality had nothing to do with the real intent of those speeches. If you’re jihadist-spawning Iran, you’re singled out for the threat of attack, but if you’re jihadist-spawning Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 9/11 highjackers, you’re offered a multi-billion-dollar arms sale.
American officials in Iraq now say that around 40 percent of foreigners involved in the “insurgency” in Iraq come from Saudi Arabia—that includes technical specialists, snipers and logisticians as well as “foot soldiers”—and that Saudis make up the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq.
The Bush administration has chosen to play up the role of Iranians in the chaos there while de-emphasizing the presence of Saudis, people for whom the Bush family and many people highly connected in Washington have a partiality (remember “Bandar Bush,” the Saudi official with whom the President had a cozy dinner two nights after 9/11?). Now that gambit is wearing thin.
The point is not that the U.S. should try a military hit on Saudi Arabia, but that the Bush administration needs urgently to distance our energy interests from the volatile Middle East as much as possible while honing much-needed diplomatic and intelligence skills to deal with the region.
The Saudis are irritated by the war in Iraq and increasingly unwilling to play the role of vassal to the United States, no matter how much money they get from oil sales; in April, King Abdullah publicly described the U.S. invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” To any American administration not infatuated with the U.S.’s self-description as a superpower, that wouldn’t be hard to understand.
