To Stop Terrorism – Stop Saudi Arabia

Source DC Bureau.org

Washington – As pundits offer their views on the shortcomings of President Obama’s plans to deal with ISIS, the subject that does not come up is the nation that has exported this twisted view of Islam throughout the world: Saudi Arabia. So why would President Obama not tackle the Saudi royal family head on and demand they stop their 15,000 very rich cousins from funding the mosques, madrassas, and foundations that spread this perverted form of Islam that has destabilized the world?

The answer is oil and Israel.

The United States has cultivated a secret relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia that is not talked about on the talk shows. There is no call to arms in Israel when Saudi-funded groups like the al-Nusra front, the Syrian Al Qaeda, operate near her borders. In turn, the Saudi royal family does the same for Israel.  When Israel developed nuclear weapons, the United States foolishly allowed the Saudis to fund and encourage Pakistan to develop a nuclear arsenal.  The result: the first Islamic nuclear bomb. That policy decision resulted in massive nuclear proliferation: to North Korea and Libya through Pakistan’s AQ Khan network, and to India and South Africa through Israel.

The United States repeatedly looked the other way as both countries transferred our military technology to places like China and Pakistan. Some of it ended up in North Korea.  As the American taxpayers funded Israel’s Lavi airplane, a high performance fighter, the Israelis sold the secret designs to the People’s Republic of China.  The Saudis transferred some of the most secret NSA software to Pakistan. These were considered minor transgressions. U.S. policy makers thought they needed to turn a blind eye to protect our financial interests with the Saudis and keep Israel safe.

This arrangement seemed manageable until the idea of a Caliphate took hold in the aftermath of George Bush’s war to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq. While United States troops fought in Iraq, Saudi money poured in to create Al Qaeda in Iraq, Yemen, Africa, and Lebanon. In effect, the Saudis were funding the extremists who were killing American soldiers. Instead of invading Saudi Arabia, the home country of the 9/11 hijackers and the one that financed them, George Bush used American forces to fight Saudi Arabia’s Sunni war against Iraq and Iran’s Shias. Americans were caught in an ancient religious war of which we had no real understanding and our troops died by the thousands because of our leaders’ stupidity.

It was a foreign policy blunder that is hard to match in American history. President Obama is left with the remnants, and he has not had the courage to deal with Saudi Arabia as the enemy they are. The complication of Israel drives this reluctance to take on the Caliphate at its financial and inspirational source.

Washington is sanctioning the Saudi misadventure in Yemen, where it is using its incompetent armed forces to back up its terrorist force of Al Qaeda in Yemen, even though its goal is to defeat the Shia. That is among the same goals as ISIS.

While few Westerners mourned those who died in Beirut in two ISIS bombings a day before the Paris attacks, it is the same ISIS in Lebanon as Paris, nothing but a Saudi-funded front which has repeatedly attacked Shia in Lebanon.

So political opportunists and fools blame the world’s Muslims for the acts of a handful of rich Gulf State princes who use their wealth to spread their perverted views of Islam. They are the real enemy, not the millions of Muslims who want to live without bombs dropping indiscriminately or having their children forced into a death cult.

As the world tries to make sense of the insane brutality of ISIS, the inevitable political finger pointing at innocent Muslims is now feeding the ugly side of humanity that blames the convenient and politically weak after a tragedy.  Remember the airport screeners who were fired after 9/11 by the thousands? They were George Bush’s 9/11 scapegoats. They had nothing to do with the success of those attacks, but they paid the price. George Bush ordered a long term FBI investigation into the bin Laden family operations in the United States stopped almost immediately after taking office. He ignored intelligence warnings that began during the presidential transition right up to the day of the 9/11 terrorist attack. But he and his family paid no price for his actions.

George Bush did not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia when he took office. Members of the bin Laden family were his friends and financial backers of his Texas oil ventures. The fact that they had roots in the most extreme Muslim sect of all – Wahhabism – did not seem to concern him.

Those who practice Wahhabism prefer to call it Salafi. It was created by a politically ambitious preacher from a remote area of Saudi Arabia called Nijad named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792).  This preacher argued that Muslim practices of shrine and tomb visitation were wrong and amounted to praying to idols. It was al-Wahhab’s alliance with a tribal politician named Muhammad bin Saud that eventually gave the most extreme form of Islam the political clout it needed. The alliance between followers of ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad bin Saud created the House of Saud. The discovery of oil made the extreme form of Islam perfect for controlling the desert tribes, especially Saudis who were not rich cousins. Al-Wahhab’s teachings are now the state-sponsored official form of Sunni Islam in 21st century Saudi Arabia. It forms the basic theology of Al Qaeda and ISIS – brutality in the name of God. The religion is the institution the royal family uses to keep the Saudi people – most of whom do not practice the Wahhabi form of the religion – in line. The Saudis spend hundreds of millions of their petro dollars exporting the religion to mosques and madrassas across the world.  The bin Ladens, who came from Yemen, contributed their wealth to spread the word to curry favor with the royal family that employed their construction business. It was that activity the FBI was investigating that the Bush administration stopped eight months before the 9/11 attacks.

Let me remind people that it was the leading Saudi fundraiser for Mecca who met with some of the 9/11 hijackers at his hotel near Dulles airport the night before the attacks. When the FBI wanted to interview him, he faked a heart attack and the Bush administration cleared the way for him to leave the country without being interviewed by the bureau.

Some months ago Barack Obama had an in-your-face look at what the Saudi royal family thinks of the United States when the newly crowned king decided to snub the president by not attending a summit of Arab leaders to discuss terrorism. The truth is there is no need for him to discuss terrorism here.

Our mindless policy toward Saudi Arabia is to defend the indefensible and ignore their activities in funding terror. In return, they keep a covert relationship with Israel and buy billions and billions of dollars worth of stuff from American companies. The mess the Middle East has become is rooted in a desire to get the Saudis to share the nation’s oil wealth by buying our weapons, to compete with Israel for our politicians’ loyalty, and to sell the royal family as much as we can before radical Muslims finally overthrow the regime or it bankrupts itself. It is not exactly a policy based on the moral high ground.

President Obama is right not send a large number of U.S. forces back into Iraq and Syria. The more effective response would be to turn off the wealth in Saudi Arabia to organizations with ties to terrorist groups with our political, military, and diplomatic clout. Before he leaves office, Obama owes the nation to stop the Saudi and other gulf state funding of terrorism once and for all.