On Saudi Arabia

I surprised myself this morning when I realized that I'd made nearly 200 posts here (since August) without once mentioning terrorism. Maybe it's in part because I loathe the fear-mongering that has been done in the name of preventing terrorism, or the bad politics (and bad diplomacy) that has gone into fighting it, or how many personal freedoms we citizens have been all too willing to surrender since 9/11. But I digress.

More likely, the reason for my silence on the topic is that I try to shy away from topics that I know are divisive and provoke emotional responses (religion, abortion, Ground Zero mosques, etc.). I think that those are issues on which people are less likely to have rational discourse, and what I aim for above all else here is to promote rational discourse.

That said, what has always confounded me most about our response to 9/11--and the rhetoric surrounding that response--is our complete unwillingness to confront Saudi Arabia (home to 15 of 19 hijackers) in any meaningful way. That, in light of this article from The Independent, is what finally provoked this post.

Saudi Arabia is the single biggest contributor to the funding of Islamic extremism and is unwilling to cut off the money supply, according to a leaked note from Hillary Clinton.

The US Secretary of State says in a secret memorandum that donors in the kingdom still "constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide" and that "it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority".

In a separate diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks last night, the militant group which carried out the Mumbai bombings in 2008, Lashkar-e-Toiba, is reported to have secured money in Saudi Arabia via one of its charity offshoots which raises money for schools.

Why we haven't addressed this publicly--while spending so much time and money pursuing costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--is beyond me. Maybe I'm ignorant and just don't get it (yeah, probably). But this seems like seriously flawed foreign policy to me. To relate this to my post on Qatar after FIFA awarded it with the 2022 World Cup, how many governments like this are we willing to support in order to keep up our current energy policy? 

Say what you will about Wikileaks; I think that its ability to bring issues like this to light is of vital importance, regardless of the means. It has become relatively clear to me that there are more things than we imagined that our government thinks we are either too immature or too innocent to know about. In an administration that publicly prides itself on openness and transparency, the Wikileaks revelations seem to be dramatic departures from stated policy. At any rate, the Saudi Arabia article infuriated and confused me, and I thought I'd post it just to clear my head.


[The Independent]