I pretty much agree with you. Where I’m still not convinced is that the King or elite government officials of Saudi Arabia were knowingly financing the taking down of the WTC.
That kingdom spreads a lot of money around, and I don’t doubt some funds wound up in the wrong hands. I’m just not willing to condemn the Saudi Leadership at the very top.
Why? Saudi Arabia has been a mitigating factor in the Middle-East for fifty years that I know of. When OPEC met and other radical members wanted to stick it to the West, the Saudis were always the cooler heads that prevailed.
The Saudis also invest their funds in the West. Taking down the West would not serve them.
I’ve seen arguments made that they also connive to bring down the West, and I’m not certain they don’t in some ways.
I do know that what comes after the Saudi Royal family will not be better. It will be much much worse.
I agree that Husein had to go. He was also giving money to the family of suicide combers in Israel, and I have never been convinced he didn’t have WMDs. Some have been found.
And I agree with your post.
Prior to 911, the Saudis saw an opportunity to build the caliphate in Central Asia on the bones of the old Soviet Union. Since the Soviet Union wasn’t quite dead, it looked like something we could also support as we assumed that anything the Saudis backed would be naturally our ally (especially in the last days of the Cold War).
So Bin Ladin’s camps trained jihadists from all the ‘Stans and sent them back.
I don’t think they knew he was doing side-work for Saddam, which is what I think 911 was. Or that he had his own agenda which I also believe 911 was. They (and maybe we) believed he could be controlled and focused in a useful direction. This is maybe similar to our recent attempts to re-direct Al Qaeda jihadists against our enemies. Neat trick if you can wean them off of the whole beheading-Christians thing.
“Al Qaeda” looked at Bin Ladin as their guru, but once home in their home countries they were receiving visits from Saddam’s intel agents with bags of money. So the exact lines of control of Al Qaeda become a bit murky. They are designed to be semi-autonomous anyway and look for opportunities.
Another thing: the Saudi royals have their own internal dissension. While the elite may be comfortable with the US as an ally, and even cooperate with the Israelis, there are other factions who want to be the elite and are sympathetic to Al Qaeda. And would gladly use them to bring down whichever faction has control at a given moment.
And the Saudi government is I believe trying to exert control over Al Qaeda, to get it back under their control so they can direct it against their enemies, while taking care to keep them outside the country. So recent operations using jihadists against Khadafi and Assad are in keeping with this idea. It was probably a brilliant idea if they could have kept them from committing horrors that wound up on page one.