It wasn't known until recently that King Fahd, our ally in the Gulf War, was in fact the prime mover, at a couple of removes, behind the terrorist-"refugee"/"immigrant" initiative that brought the beauteous Tashfeen (I've never seen harder and more hateful eyes on any other woman) and her mail-order U.S. "husband" to San Bernardino.
It's this discovery that merits a reappraisal of the friendship that was built up by earlier generations of Saudis and such exponents as Prince Bandar, the F-15-driving, urbane exemplar of the "new" Saudi monarchy. After Fahd's death, Bandar fell into shadow, and his name is heard no more, as he is now somewhere inside the palace and the royal dynasty.
Fahd's successor is supposed to have been the strict Wahhabist who made this and other transformations back to the past happen. Fortunately, they haven't reverted to taking dumps on the carpet in five-star hotel lobbies the way old King Faisal used to do on visits to the West in the 1950's (something my old man told me about back then: the bedou, and the stool, was strong with the old king).
But the real reason, beyond all the royal lobbying and influence-agent happy bullsqueeze applied by the Kingdom to U.S. policymakers, that Dubya wanted to minimize Saudi involvement in 9/11 (which let's not forget was still an OBL/KSM operation) and to separate Salafism from "real" Islam, was IMHO to discountenance the Salafists among other Moslems and, by discrediting them and demolishing their prestige, to avoid a Punic War with 1,200,000,000 potential screaming fanatics like the Fuzzy Wuzzies of 140 years ago.
Not slipping the punch, not going dark, not settling differences in the shadows with as few opponents as possible means going nuclear, turning Mecca into a 1500-foot-deep crater, and turning a GWOT into a GWOM, a Global War on Mohammedans.
Still want to sand down George W. Bush as a wuss and a traitorous NWO girlyman? Still want a GWOM with the Chinese watching?
I hope not. It might come to that, but can you really blame Bush for not wanting to go there? We will, if it turns out the Saudis have played us and ours false, in an effort to make our people and the whole West bend toward Mecca, but let's try to do it without a genocidal world war.
Good answer. I’m not convinced by the idea that a war on Jihad means a war on all of Islam. I’m more concerned that that failing to name the enemy means the root cause never gets addressed
As to our efforts to placate the “good Muslims” who will never attack us unless we offend them...well, how far do we go in letting them into the US, or is excluding Muslim immigrants too provocative?
Do we endlessly trim branches or get at the root? Is there a way to do it that doesn’t involve WWIII, and if Europe falls to the hordes coming in, what then?
Interesting times. It’s also interesting to note who the least Hawkish of the Republican candidates is on the debate stage, when it comes to using force. Trump, for all his puffed up image, seems to want to use leverage and deals instead of force where possible.