About those Saudi allies . . .
You may want to pay more attention to them if you're really serious about this whole "War on Terror" thing.
The killing fields that are stocked with Saudi jihadists now include not only Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, but Somalia, Malaysia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sudan, the Philippines, Yemen, and, of course, Saudi Arabia itself.
The main funding source for every radical Islamist movement in the world today, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas, has Saudi origins, and their funders include the country's billionaire businessmen and its royal family.
ABC's "World News Tonight," anchored by Charles Gibson, got it right on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks with an impressive segment documenting how Islamist terror begins — and ends — with Saudi Arabia, its people, and its government.
Not that the NY Sun has ever been the most reliable source of information out there, but its been pretty clear to anyone paying attention, that since 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, that that country may not be quite the "moderate" ally Bush and his supporters continually try to portray it as.
It also makes a grand lie out of the, "you're with us or against us" rhetoric. The reasons for the American refusal to confront the Saudis over their role in international terror financing and indoctrination through Salafist mosque funding are many, but mostly all stem from their dependancy on oil and the Saudis role as a source for it. Do you think a USA that was energy-independant would allow this kind of behaviour from the country otherwise?
So a bad energy policy leads to a bad terrorism strategy, where the US battles a many-headed hydra on multiple fronts, creating more enemies as they go, but ignores the body from which most of those heads are springing.
