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The article points out something that hasn't been obvious to everyone, I periodically hear people calling for us to declare war on the Saudis. In effect, we did that right after 9/11. Its just no one here noticed, but you can bet the Saudis noticed.

Until 9/11 Al Qaeda was in effect a Saudi operation, tolerated by both the US and funded by the Saudis. Every insurgency from the Balkans across Asia to the Philippines has had Saudi funding, and had its members trained in Bin Ladin's camps. This is why neither Clinton nor Riyadh wanted to arrest Bin Ladin when he was offered by Sudan.

Clinton's policy was to slap at Bin Ladin if he went off the reservation and attacked US assets, but otherwise to leave him alone.

This policy originally arose out of the anti-soviet strategy of using muslim insurgents to dismantle the Soviet Union, but due to a lot of reasons the policy took on a life of its own after the Soviet Union collapsed. Not least among them is that generations of American public servants have had their retirement portfolio secured by Saudi investments that don't necessarily show up on any IRS form.

Bush Junior shifted gears almost from the time he came into office and embraced Putin and Putin's war against the Chechens, another Saudi subsidiary operation. After 9/11, though, GW has attacked Saudi operations one after another, overturning the Taliban and Bin Ladin and seizing Afghanistan from them, training forces in every one of the Central Asian republics to go after local Al Qaeda afiliates, attacking Abu Sayaf in the Philippines, going into Yemen and Somalia after them. Between Putin and GW, its been a bad couple of years for Saudi trigger pullers.

With the overthrow of Saddam, Bush has freed the US from its reliance on Saudi territory, and we've withdrawn our forces from there. That is an element of the invasion of Iraq few have noticed; during the nineties we were trapped by our need for Saudi cooperation so we could defend those same Saudis from Saddam. This has overshadowed our whole middle east policy for over a decade. By taking Baghdad, Bush has cut that knot and freed us from Riyadh, and Riyadh is feeling the cold wind blowing.

You will not see an open war unless you pay attention, because the ties between us are too complicated. Remember the list of 270 names found in Baghdad, listing those who had received bribes from Iraq, and know that whatever Iraq had in its files is nothing compared to what the Saudis have in theirs. So as wars go this one is going to be fought out very smoothly, through PR firms, through the political process as candidates position themselves for Saudi campaign money, and in the shadows where trigger pullers meet their end. It will be the weirdest war ever fought, no one will notice it, and it will end with Bush gone, or the Sauds overthrown.