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We must, I suppose, take him and Cheney and Rummy and all the rest at their word. They wouldn’t scare us if they hadn’t done all they believe they can do. So, naturally, the mind turns to all the things they haven’t done: as I write, young Saudi males are still arriving at US airports on routinely issued student visas. If it lessened the ‘inevitability’ of that second attack just ever so slightly, wouldn’t it be worth declaring a temporary moratorium on Saudi visitors, or at least making their sojourns here extremely rare and highly discretionary? Oh, no. Can’t be done.
Ask why the Saudis are allowed to kill thousands of Americans and still get the kid-gloves treatment, and you’re told the magic word: oil. Here’s my answer: blow it out your Medicine Hat. The largest source of imported energy for the United States is the Province of Alberta. Indeed, whenever I’m asked how America can lessen its dependence on foreign oil, I say it’s simple: annex Alberta. The Albertans would be up for it, and, to be honest, they’re the only assimilable Canadian province, at least from a Republican standpoint. In 1972, the world’s total proven oil reserves added up to 550 billion barrels; today, a single deposit of Alberta’s tar shales contains more than that. Yet no Albertan government minister or trade representative gets the access in Washington that the Saudis do. No premier of Alberta gets invited to Bush’s Crawford ranch. No Albertan bigshot, if you’ll forgive the oxymoron, gets Colin Powell kissing up to him like ‘Crown’ ‘Prince’ Abdullah and ‘Prince’ Bandar do. In Washington, an Albertan can’t get ...well, I was going to say an Albertan can’t get arrested, but funnily enough that’s the one thing he can get. While Bush was governor of Texas, he even managed to execute an Albertan, which seems to be more than the administration is likely to do to any Saudis.
So it’s not oil, but rather that even targeting so obvious an enemy as the Saudis is simply not politically possible. Cries of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism’ would rend the air. The Saudis discriminate against Americans all the time: American Jews are not allowed to enter the ‘Kingdom’, nor are American Episcopalians who happen to have an Israeli stamp in their passports. But America cannot be seen to take any similar measures, though it has far more compelling reasons to.
James Woods puts it very well: ‘Nineteen of 19 killers on 11 September were Arab Muslims — not a Swede among them.’ But au contraire, in a world where the EU officially chides the BBC for describing Osama as an ‘Islamic fundamentalist’, we must pretend that al-Qa’eda contains potentially vast numbers of Swedish agents, many female and elderly. Even after 11 September, we can’t revoke the central fiction of multiculturalism — that all cultures are equally nice and so we must be equally nice to them, even if they slaughter large numbers of us and announce repeatedly their intention to slaughter more. National Review’s John Derbyshire calls this ‘the reductio ad absurdum of racial sensitivity: better dead than rude’.
Last October, urging Congress to get tough on the obvious suspects, the leggy blonde commentatrix Ann Coulter declared, ‘Americans aren’t going to die for political correctness.’
They already have.
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