AXIS OF EVIL ROSTER: Though not enumerated as such by President Bush, the Saudi regime is a charter member of the Axis of Evil. Unprincipled, conniving, dishonest, ungrateful and two-faced, the Saudi "royals" are the French of the Middle East. But the House of Saud (feel free to roll your eyes at that hoity-toity moniker) is countless laps ahead of the French when it comes to brutal repression of their own countrymen and financing the murder of innocents abroad. It was no accident that most of the September 11 hijackers were Saudis, and the Saudi regime's behavior since then — stonewalling US investigations of suspected Saudi terrorists, denying the US permission to use its military base in Saudi Arabia for the war on terror, and financing and publicly endorsing Palestinian suicide bombers — confirms that the "kingdom" has chosen sides in the war on terror against the United States.
Why, then, hasn't the United States acknowledged the obvious by designating Saudi Arabia as a terrorist sponsor? Oil, of course. Military historian
Victor Davis Hanson writes in the current issue of Commentary, " . . . Americans are finally seeing militant Islam not merely as a different religion, or even as a radical Jim Jones-like cult, but as a threat to our very existence. Saudi Arabia is the placenta of this frightening phenomenon. Its money has financed it; its native terrorists promote it; and its own unhappy citizenry is either amused by or indifferent to its effects upon the world. Surely it has occurred to more than a few Americans that without a petroleum-rich Wahhabism, the support for such international killers and the considerable degree of ongoing aid to those who would destroy the West would radically diminish."
If America's war on terrorists and the nations which employ them as mercenaries is to be successful, there must be a recognition by President Bush and US policymakers that the Saudi regime finances, encourages and protects terrorists intent on destroying America. And if oil concerns stand in the way of that recognition, then either expedite development of new domestic and foreign oil sources or seize Saudi oil fields.
