This
developing story about the Saudi money trail to al Qaeda terrorists might turn out to be a dead end. But there are hints and implications that the US government is trying to do "damage control" on this issue. This
after trying to make the most tenuous of connections of Iraq to al Qaeda. The Bush administration needs to stop playing favorites on this issue, or tweeners that lean toward an Iraq invasion in part because of the trust we have in the administration's abilities to gauge threats accurately and objectively will fall away. And of course, need we say that it undermines the moral case for the war when it starts to seem as if we are trying to protect one oppressive autocracy to take down another oppressive autocracy.
This shit needs to stop.
PS: I want to be clear that part of my anger/irritation comes from my feeling that while regime change in Iraq would benefit the American economic elite (transfer of energy contracts), a Saudi revolution would undercut the lucrative relationships between the US and Saudi plutocracies. I am not one to see these sort of conspiracies in every act of American foreign policy-but I can't help but think that the personal/financial relationships that the Saudi plutocrats have cultivated over the past few decades gives them breathing room that other thugs around the world do not have. In the case of Saudi Arabia, I begin to wonder whether its stability is more a concern for those do not wish to destroy their cash cow more than anything else (ie; fear of a fundamentalist coup, disruption of oil supplies, etc.).