MICHAEL BARONE WRITES that the war on terrorism is not just a war on evil people, but on evil ideas. And Saudi money seems to be behind both:
Our officials haven’t wanted to acknowledge this, but evidence is coming out anyway. Newsweek reported November 22 that Princess Haifa, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, was sending money regularly to the Jordanian wife of a Saudi man who was signing it over to the wife of one of the two Saudis who befriended and supported two of the September 11 hijackers. U.S. News reported last week that government sources said FBI higher-ups seemed reluctant to follow up an agent’s lead indicating that the money trail to the hijackers could be traced back to the Saudi Embassy.
Complex web. Princess Haifa’s money, if it reached the hijackers, was only a tiny part of the flow of Saudi money to fund terrorism and propagate totalitarian Wahhabi Islam. Through phony “charities,” huge sums are sent to terrorists–$1 million to $2 million a month for al Qaeda, according to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report. Some of the money flows have been cut off by U.S. authorities. But sometimes the Saudis have refused to cooperate: In September they refused to freeze the funds of Wael Hamza Julaidan, of the Saudis’ World Muslim League. Why? Former Rand analyst Alex Alexiev writes, “Any genuine help by Riyadh in untangling the complex web financing extremism will inevitably implicate both the Saudi government and countless prominent Saudis.”
Kind of like those German weapons sales to Iraq. You know, some people say that we have to be careful not to be too assertive or the world will turn against us. I’m beginning to wonder if that didn’t happen long before September 11.
UPDATE: Patrick Ruffini notes:
[T]he Cold War was unique in that nobody lost it. In the end, everybody won. The scope of human liberty was expanded, and the former Eastern Bloc is now happily ensconced in the West — moreso, it seems, than France.
The notion that everybody can win from a sustained ideological struggle should profoundly alter our calculations about waging such a war in the Middle East. When applied to the current situation, it is a transformative assumption to count the people of Iraq as winners under regime change — but this also happens to be the truest and likeliest outcome of military action.
Well, some of the apparatchiks lost. But overall, the point is valid, and it’s likely to be valid for Iraq, too. As even the Iraqis seem to realize.