There were American Rat Congressmen involved with Saddam..... but America was not .
So it is with Saudi Arabia. There aqre disgruntled individuals but not the nation.
AQ is funded by money'ed Saudis, including royals. And among the royals are members of the regime. That much is public information. Until recently they were funding insurgencies in every country in Central Asia, the Balkans, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and on and on. These insurgencies all had several elements in common: Saudi funding; Wahab missionary activity also paid by the Saudis, and they were all trained by Bin Ladin at his Afghan camps.
You cannot separate these insurgencies from Wahab missionary work, nor can you separate them from Saudi funding. That is what makes them almost by definition Al Qaeda. We call them AQ because they are Saudi funded, Wahab inspired, Bin Ladin trained, and because Saudi volunteers are prevalent.
When you read about volunteers and mercenaries fighting among the Chechens, for example, they are referring to Saudis in great number. The Chechen leadership has been taken over by Wahabs and the leadership is Saudi funded.
During the previous decade, our policy was to look the other way. If you will remember, Clinton and Albright were steadfast in their support of the Chechens, regardless of the atrocities committed. They led us to directly support every Saudi-backed insurgency where we could, or turn a blind eye where we could not back them.
It was only with the advent of Bush's new Russia policy that we backed away from the Chechens, which must be understood as backing away from the Saudis. This was the first break in our relationship with the Saudis. And then after 9/11 we declared war on every one of the Saudi backed insurgencies in Asia, leaving only the Balkan insurgencies unscathed. That is the unspoken story of the war on terror, which is that we have in effect declared war on the Saudis and have set about to annihilate every one of their operations.
All of this while publicly embracing them and declaring our undying friendship with the Saudis.
We have, out of respect for our long alliance with them, avoided a public break with them, and we have offered them the chance to repudiate AQ, and to back us. But they can't repudiate AQ without declaring war on the Wahab faith that undergirds it. And at this point they can't do that without civil war even among the royals. You cannot separate the Saudi royals from AQ. To say that AQ and Bin Ladin are not Saudi operations is, I think, to misunderstand the nature of the Saudi ruling clique.
The only point at which the Saudis have broken with AQ is to oppose their operations within the kingdom. This is similar to our nineties policy which was to merely slap at them, to re-direct their attacks away from us, while supporting or ignoring their operations throughout the rest of the world.