Keeping Saudi Arabia’s royal family safe from radical Islamists is the West’s strategic concern and delusion.
The only intelligent question for America about Saudi Arabia is: Should we deal with the royals of the house of Saud or go directly to their bearded, Kalashnikov-toting Osama bin Laden-loving followers?
For half a century, the West has preferred to believe that its choice in Saudi Arabia is the moderate, friendly Saudi royal family or the wild-eyed, sandal-clad zombies of jihad, disregarding the seamless relationship between the two.
We have blithely ignored that Mr. bin Laden was a product and a protégé — even a full-fledged member — of the ruling establishment in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, his 52 brothers and other members of his family have intermarried widely with the royal family.
Since Abdulaziz Al-Saud founded his kingdom in 1932, power in Saudi Arabia has rested in the hands of one rabid group of Muslim jihadists: the 40,000 perfumed princes and princesses of the Saud tribal dynasty. They are the public face of Saudi Arabia, the folks who show up in the White House as ambassadors to America.
In Saudi Arabia, these royals nurture a vast entourage and infrastructure of palaces, attached mosques, religious schools, and charitable networks at home and, more important, abroad. These institutions are tied to elegant public princes, but also to many more we never see overseas. They dole out the money and in return demand blind obedience and a steady stream of Wahhabite devotees.
Saudi royal wealth has funded not only hundreds of religious schools inside the kingdom, but also hundreds more in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Britain, America, and Asia. The network stretches far and wide, and Wahhabi recruits create the fodder that supplies suicide bombers for Hamas, the Taliban, Iraqi jihadis, and Pakistani-British transit bombers.
There is little difference between the royals and their infrastructure. The idea of two camps is a fiction brilliantly spun by American public relations artists aided by legions of purchased lobbyists and American politicians.
So the question, again, is whether we want to deal with the royals or the nuts. I propose the latter. For starters, it serves transparency.
Why allow an enemy to hide behind seductive royals when most of the family consists of die-hard jihadists who fund Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic terror groups worldwide? The game allows “royals” to pose as friends as they supply our former presidents and politicians — President George H.W. Bush, President Clinton, President Carter, and our current commander in chief, among others — with hefty business deals and promises of more to, in effect, give cover to a jihad agenda.
Dealing directly with the bearded and the sandaled also makes America far more secure.
Thanks to the current system of bribery, the Saudis have gotten away with murder. In the 48 hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the White House — under pressure from the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar — permitted more than 50 members of the bin Laden family to leave America secretly when almost every other flight in and out of the country was grounded.
Detaining and questioning some of this group would have landed a few of them in Guantanamo and yielded crucial information, but they purchased a White House pass to escape. And had it not been for the “special relationship” between America and Saudi Arabia, 15 of the 19 hijackers who flew planes into buildings that day would not have been allowed to live and train here in the first place.
Most of all, the ability to call a spade a spade would increase America’s credibility in the Muslim world immensely. This royal family, so beloved by the Bush administration and other White Houses, carries out beheadings, cuts off legs and hands, orders women stoned for adultery, and has reduced half of its society to the status of concubine.
Dumping it will give a considerable boost to any noble American project in the Arab world.
