The situation in Saudi Arabia has been created by the Saudi's themselves - including the public advancement of people like Osama Bin Laden. The ruling family uses the Wahabi clerics and the Wahabi clerics use the ruling family. Both are morally, religiously and politically corrupt. The Wahabi clerics have no moral support from any other Muslims, including other Sunnis. Thus, they get billions from the ruling family to promote Wahabi schools for undeducated Muslim boys all over the middle east and Wahabi Mosques in the west. That is their price for supporting the ruling family. The ruling family extracts only one price from the Wahabi clerics. Their teachings cannot challenge the ruling family. Osama had to leave Saudi Arabia not because he ofended the Wahabi clerics, but because he broke the alliance between those clerics and the ruling family - if they supported him, they would have had to fight the ruling family; they were not then ready to do that.
It is a devils-pact that we should no longer support.
The U.S. is better positioned than any other country in the world to adapt and adjust to changes that would result from a disruption in the flow of oil from Saudi Arabia - better positioned than either China, India or Europe. Would those dispruptions equal or exceed the 1970s oil "embargoes"? Possibly, but we survived them and within a decade the adjustments had been absorbed into the economy and the Opec-cartel began to weaken. Fear of oil disruption should not stop us from changing our relationship with the Saudis. We will adjust and survive and excel, that's what Americans do.
We should directly, and publicly confront every Saudi statement and action, in and out of Saudi Arabia, that promotes, defends or helps educate new generations of west-hating young recruits for terrorism.
Saudi clerics and funds freely promote insurgent activities in Iraq, ex-Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan, Palestinian terrorists, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, fundamentalist, west-hating Muslim groups in all of Africa, west-hating Muslim Imams and Mosques in Europe and North America. They will willingly take back a Saudi captured in the West, but they never turn over to the west a known terrorist they capture and the west is never allowed unrestricted access to those they do capture. Saudi cooperation with the west, with respect to terrorism, is directed to defending the Saudi ruling family, not the west.
We should push Saudi Arabia into the hands of its own terrorists by publicly opposing many of their policies and forcing them to defend those policies and oppose us or lose the support of the clerics. If we keep uping the demands for moderation and ending their export of terrorism, then anything short of military confrontation with us will be seen, by the Wahabis, as weak and lead, in time, to a break between the ruling family and the clerics. The ruling family could only win the resulting civil war by abandoning its alliance with the Wahabi's and destroying them in the opening phase of that war. It will be long and bloody. If the terrorists and the Wahabis can be defeated in Saudi Arabia, then with the right external influences (covert) the winners could be the most moderate forces left in the ruling family. If the terrorists and the Wahabis were to win that civil war, then we can extinquish the Saudi oil wells, permanently.
By the time that civil war was over, we would have already made most of the technological and economic adjustments needed to rely less on the Saudi oil.
We cannot set back the promotion of Muslim extremism, and terrorism, if we cannot set back it's primary financial sponsor - Wahabi/Saudi Arabia. The school, Mosque, foundation funding method is simply a mask the Wahabis use for a program that is, at its heart, no different than the terrorists in its goals.
Let's end that program in the west and take the full consequences of doing so now, on our terms; not later, on their terms.
Thank you.