OUR ENEMIES THE SAUDIS: Michael Barone pulls no punches in his description of Saudi perfidy, duplicity, and outright enmity. He’s dead right. We should be planning for a successor regime in the Saudi-controlled parts of Arabia. It’s going to collapse anyway sooner or later; we should make it sooner so that people in the region learn that there’s a price to this sort of behavior.

The Saudis stymied the FBI investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The Saudis refused a U.S. request in 1996 that they take custody of bin Laden; he went to Afghanistan instead. They refused in 1995 to hand over Imad Mughniyah, believed responsible for the bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. Far from aiding our efforts against terrorism, the Saudis have worked against them–to protect the terrorists in their own ranks. . . .

It may not be prudent yet to speak the truth out loud, that the Saudis are our enemies. But they should know that it is increasingly apparent to the American people that they are effectively waging war against us. And they should know that we have the capacity to destroy their military, presumably in a matter of hours. The Saudis’ eastern provinces, with their oil, could be given to their Shiite Muslim majority, now oppressed by the Sunni Muslim Saudi rulers. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina could be returned to the custody of the Hashemites (Jordan’s King Abdullah’s family), who unlike the Saudis are direct descendants of the prophet Mohammed. Let the Saudis have the sands of central Arabia and their bank accounts in Switzerland, hotel suites in London, and villas on the Riviera.

He’s right. The Saudis have had opportunity after opportunity to show that they’re worth saving, and they’ve missed those opportunities because, well, they’re not worth saving. And notice how the Hashemite Restoration idea just keeps gathering steam. Now where did I hear that first?