The End of an Alliance: It's time to tell the House of Saud goodbye

National Review, Oct 28, 2002 by Alex Alexiev

The analysis above points to several conclusions. In the immediate term, it is clear that the U.S. cannot count on cooperation from Riyadh in its efforts to destroy the terrorists' worldwide funding network. The reasons for Saudi intransigence are systemic and thus not subject to easy change. This means that Washington must increasingly rely on unilateral methods, without undue concern for Saudi sensibilities. A much more aggressive policy is called for in shutting down the activities of implicated Saudi charities and front organizations. Many of these organizations have been compromised to such an extent that the only reason they haven't been banned from the U.S. already is Washington's reluctance to confront the Saudis. Internationally, if U.S. authorities have information on, say, funding of terrorists by Al-Haramain in Bosnia, they need to work only with the Bosnian government in order to close them down. Saudi involvement, as experience has shown, is likely at best to be unhelpful, and at worst to compromise the operation.

We should also take a closer look at various activities that were hushed up in the past for political reasons. In 1995, Treasury Department agents initiated an investigation into the shady dealings of a number of Saudi U.S.-based charities with suspected extremist groups. Inexplicably, the investigation was summarily shut down by political fiat of the Clinton administration. Had this and similar investigations been allowed to proceed, U.S. security might have benefited immensely; serious warnings of possible al-Qaeda terrorist operations like 9/11 had been issued already in the mid 1990s.

We have to be aggressive-and this means that conflict with the Saudis is unavoidable.

A second important implication of this analysis is that we have to wage a political struggle-a war of ideas-against Islamist extremism. There is incontrovertible evidence that radical Islamist ideologies have gained a significant foothold among American Muslims, courtesy of Saudi Arabia. Cracking down on Saudi infiltration should help us deal with the problem. It should be clearly understood that Islamic extremism is not a matter of religion, but a matter of criminal sedition that should not be tolerated any more than Nazi conspiratorial activities and indoctrination would have been tolerated during World War II. This means that we should make use of the full gamut of law-enforcement methods applied to seditious organizations.

Ultimately, though, radical Islam as an ideology is best dealt with by ideological and political means-in other words, political warfare. And the extremists have two obvious and significant vulnerabilities we should exploit: the ideology of jihad and the nature of Wahhabi subversion worldwide.

The jihad ideology motivating radical Islamist terrorism is not only unrepresentative of the Islam practiced by the vast majority of Muslims, but in many ways runs counter to it. Despite claiming incessantly to represent true Islam, Wahhabis and their fellow extremists espouse violent doctrines that are often in conflict with the faith's tenets. They are also a tiny minority; fewer than 1.5 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims subscribe to the Wahhabi or similar creeds. All of this is easy to prove and well known to mainstream Muslim believers; the reason little of this is being heard in the media is simply money. In the U.S., virtually all organizations claiming to represent American Muslims are financed and controlled by the Wahhabis, who deliberately silence other viewpoints. The decades-long U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia has contributed in no small measure to the credibility of that state and, by implication, the reach of its ideology. A break with Riyadh would undermine both.