An editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal...
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE
The Saudi Threat
Riyadh is at the root of much evil.
BY RALPH PETERS
Friday, January 4, 2002 12:01 a.m.
The Bush administration has done a remarkable job, thus far, of counterattacking terrorists physically and psychologically. Pundits complain of imperfections, as they always will, but the administration has succeeded magnificently in a challenging military environment, while cutting through a great deal of diplomatic nonsense and received wisdom that paralyzed America during the Clinton years.
President Bush has reinvigorated America's strategic will and made a useful display of our might. He and his secretary of defense out-generaled our own generals, who had become timid when not defeatist. But all of this administration's admirable successes to date fall short of addressing the obvious source of fundamentalist terrorism, subversion and hatred: Saudi Arabia.
This is an oilman's administration, and long affiliation with energy affairs appears to have blinded an otherwise-superb strategic team to the abundant, well-documented evidence. Far from examining Saudi Arabia's deep and extensive complicity in supporting terror and undermining secular regimes throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the administration reflexively defends the Saudis. I do not believe the administration is intentionally dishonest--only that ties to the oil business and a half-century's assumptions prevent it from facing up to Saudi Arabia's support for, and funding of, the cruelest, most benighted and hate-filled version of one of the world's great religions.
A few months ago, I suggested on this page that the U.S. must overcome its Cold War-era obsession with stability and open itself to the possibilities of creative instability in a world that still has far too many dictators and corrupt, oppressive regimes. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, we get the worst of both stability and instability. While we automatically support the Saudis, no matter how high-handedly they treat us, and insist that they are the foundation of regional stability in the Middle East, the Saudis themselves have engaged in a decades-long campaign to destabilize secular and relatively tolerant regimes throughout the Muslim world.
Instead of an instability that opens the door to freedom, the Saudis foment instability that leads to still-greater oppression, backwardness and bigotry. By funding religious extremists from Michigan to Mindanao, the Saudis have done their best to destroy democracies, turn back the clock on human rights and deny religious freedom to Islamic and other populations--while the United States guarantees Saudi security. It is the most preposterous and wrongheaded policy in American history since the defense of slavery.
Consider, concretely, what the Saudis have done. While the average American newspaper reader knows that the majority of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis, that Osama bin Laden is a Saudi, and that Saudi money funded the attacks on the U.S., this is only a small fraction of Riyadh's misdeeds.
In Indonesia, a state whose only hope for survival rests on religious tolerance, the Saudis have funded and encouraged the most extreme Muslim groups. The syncretic, easygoing version of Islam that long prevailed in most of Indonesia is anathema to the Saudi Wahhabi vision of religion, and the Saudis have tried to undermine social rights, to suppress other religions, to poison the educational system--and even to determine the architecture of mosques. As a result, Indonesia is under externally induced stresses that exacerbate the state's home-grown problems. What might have been an example of how Islam can adapt to the future threatens to become yet another example of how Islam drags a country backward.
Pakistan, seduced by Saudi money, has sown the wind and is reaping the whirlwind. Saudi religious schools, mosques and bribes encouraged fundamentalist movements that have supported terror against the U.S., India and the more liberal elements in Pakistani society. The Saudi vision of anti-Western, crusading Islam essentially took over Pakistan's intelligence services and infiltrated the military, with the result that Pakistani support not only for the Taliban, but for al Qaeda, plunged the world toward Sept. 11. Finally the Saudis were essential sponsors of Pakistan's push to develop "Islamic" nuclear weapons, although the U.S. government ignored the evidence.
Saudi citizens and Saudi funds supported the Taliban's reign of terror in Afghanistan, enabling al Qaeda to become a state within a state. Saudi funds bankroll the fiercest anti-peace terrorist groups in the Middle East and pay the bills for ultra-extremist mosques and Islamic schools from Europe to South America.
Yet our nation's leaders insist the Saudis are not only our allies, but our friends--even as Saudis and Saudi money kill Americans and the Saudis refuse to arrest or even freeze the bank accounts of their implicated citizens. Meanwhile, we cannot use the air bases from which our forces are supposed to protect Saudi Arabia to protect ourselves, our female service personnel must go about in Islamic dress when they leave the quarantine of those bases, and religious hatred of the West is the national diet of information--and Saudi Arabia's only meaningful export other than oil. Our blithe acceptance of this is madness.
Since Sept. 11, the Saudis have mounted a well-funded campaign to convince Americans that they bear no blame for anything. But they're worried. It long has been a Saudi assumption that they could buy whatever influence they needed in America, and they have, indeed, had many an influential American on their payroll, from lawyers and lobbyists to businessmen and out-of-work politicians. They joke about us as they would about prostitutes, and regard us as no better, if more enduringly useful. Their strategy worked as long as the rest of America slept. But the Saudis learned, after the attacks on New York and Washington, that the American people as a whole cannot be bought. Not even with cheap oil.
The same voices that cautioned us to do nothing meaningful against terrorism now warn that any alternative to the current Saudi regime might be even worse. That is a coward's argument. The Saudi cancer will continue to metastasize if we shy away from treating it, and any new government on the Arabian peninsula is likelier to be scrutinized and contained than the checkbook terrorists of the royal family. Why not give change a chance, instead of supporting the most repressive and vicious monarchy remaining on this earth?
We must begin by confronting the Saudis and giving them the clear choice President Bush offered the rest of the world: Either you are with us in the fight against terror, or you are against us. There can be no middle ground--especially not for terrorism's most enduring sponsors.
We must work against the Saudis' campaign of religious hatred and subversion around the world. And we must begin looking for other regional partners, from a liberated Iraq to a future Iran. Finally, we must be prepared to seize the Saudi oil fields and administer them for the greater good. Imagine if, instead of funding corruption and intolerance, those oil revenues built clinics, secular schools and sewage systems throughout the Middle East. Far from being indispensable to our security, the Saudis are a greater menace to it than any other state, including China.
Terrorism is not going to disappear, no matter how successful our military, diplomatic and economic efforts. Those efforts can, however, greatly reduce the appeal of terrorism to prospective acolytes and diminish dramatically its power and reach, while denying hard-core terrorists safe havens.
Our efforts are off to a superb beginning, and there is much reason for optimism, so long as the strength of will of this and future administrations does not waver. But we will not get close to the heart of the matter until we face up to the hateful, medieval, murderous nature of the Saudi vision of Islam. Anti-women, anti-meritocratic, anti-democracy, anti-education in any meaningful, liberating sense, racist and profoundly anti-freedom, Saudi-sponsored religious extremism, funded by all the drivers of those oversized SUVs on American roads, is the most destructive vision in the world today.
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Mr. Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?"
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