False Ally, Saudi Arabia Facing Scrutiny from Congress

Despite the statements of President Obama and others that Saudi Arabia is an important ally, I, as noted in many prior posts, see Saudi Arabia as a leading, if not number one, financial supporter of  Islamic extremism and the terror that seems to go hand in hand with Islamic fundamentalism and Wahhabi strain of Islam in particular. Add to this Saudi Arabia' horrific human rights violations and the nation should be anathema to America and its founding principles.  Thankfully, members of Congress form both parties seem to be waking up to the reality that with a "friend" like Saudi Arabia, one doesn't need enemies.  The Washington Post looks at the much deserved Congressional scrutiny now facing America's false ally.  Here are excerpts:

A series of bills before Congress this month is the surest sign yet that Saudi Arabia can no longer claim the privileged status it has held largely unchallenged for decades in Washington.

As the fight over terrorism escalates, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are taking aim at the longtime U.S. ally with a double-header of legislative rebukes to the Kingdom over its alleged ties to extremists and military campaigns in Yemen. The first came Wednesday, when the Senate voted on a resolution to restrict arms sales to Saudi Arabia until it stops targeting civilians in Yemen. Congress is also preparing to override an expected presidential veto this week of a bill to let the families of Sept. 11 victims sue Saudi Arabia over alleged ties to the terrorists who carried out the attack.

While the two measures will not both get through Congress – there is wide support for the Sept. 11 bill, but senators voted down Wednesday’s attempt to stop the arms sale – experts say the current scrutiny of the U.S.-Saudi relationship is unprecedented.

“We haven’t seen this much anti-Saudi activity on the Hill in a quarter of a century,” said Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Institution’s Intelligence Project and an expert on Saudi Arabia. “Criticism of Saudi Arabia has come out of the closet, and I don’t think it’s going to go back in.”

Though the Kingdom remains a critical ally in the global fight against terror, Western leaders have publicly criticized it for financially and politically promoting an Islamic fundamentalist worldview espoused by many extremist groups. International human rights groups, meanwhile, have openly condemned Saudi Arabia for violating the laws of war in Yemen with “logistical, tactical, and intelligence support” from the United States.

Saudi Arabia has a serious image problem it must confront. . . . Nowhere is that trend clearer than in the Sept. 11 victims’ bill, which would give courts the right to waive claims to foreign sovereign immunity in cases involving terrorist acts on U.S. soil.

Riyadh launched a formidable campaign to kill the bill with Saudi Arabia spending in excess of $3 million this year on lobbying contracts, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act documents. . . . s Congress prepares to soon override an expected veto of the bill, Saudi Arabia has launched a last-minute lobbying blitz.

Representatives of the government and its allies have been frequenting lawmakers’ offices to plead for help.

According to a recent study published in the Guardian, one in three Saudi-led raids in Yemen hit civilians. . . . . Recently, images and videos from Yemen have suggested that Saudi Arabia is using U.S.-produced white phosphorus in Yemen as well.

Yet the measure’s authors say the arms sales are part of a greater, problematic trend that the United States is allowing Saudi Arabia to get away, literally, with murder.

“We have largely turned the other way and allowed for the Saudis to create a version of Islam which has become the building blocks for the very groups that we are fighting today. And we have plead with them, we have asked them to stop, and the evidence suggests they have not,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said during an event at the Center for the National Interest this week. 

[E]xperts said criticizing Saudi Arabia has become “almost fashionable” and congressional scrutiny of the alliance is only likely to grow more intense.

“I think the era in which you could get $110 billion worth of arms through the Congress with virtually no debate on the Hill is over,” he said. “And if there’s an ugly settlement over 9/11, and the Yemen war continues, that debate will get tougher and tougher for the Saudis to win.”

As noted before, a top American national security goal should be to expand alternate energy sources and a sharp decline in dependence on oil.  If America and Europe can reach self-sufficiency, then Saudi Arabia's ability to engage in economic blackmail will be gone as will its ability to fund terrorism.  Americans need to wake up to the reality that the Saudis and the toxic religion they support are our enemy.

The GOP's Wrong Headed Obsession with Iran

Listen to conservative talk radio or read the works of "conservative" pundits and the spittle flies as they attack the proposed Iran nuclear agreement and depict Iran as the number one purveyor of Islamic terrorism.  They all conveniently ignore the reality that it wasn't Iranians who perpetrated the 9-11 attacks on America.  No, that attack was undertaken by Saudi Arabians and despite this fact the always incompetent George W. Bush allowed plane loads of Saudi's to leave America even as all other air traffic was grounded.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's obsession with Iran and the conscious effort to ignore the reality that when it comes to sponsoring Islamic extremism, it is America's alleged ally, Saudi Arabia that is the largest backer of terrorism and Islamic extremism.  Why?  In my view, one word: oil.  Here are column highlights:

There are legitimate arguments for and against this [Iran] deal, but there was one argument expressed in this story that was so dangerously wrongheaded about the real threats to America from the Middle East, it needs to be called out.

That argument was from Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, the retired former vice commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, who said of the nuclear accord: “What I don’t like about this is, the number one leading radical Islamic group in the world is the Iranians. They are purveyors of radical Islam throughout the region and throughout the world. And we are going to enable them to get nuclear weapons.”

Sorry, General, but the title greatest “purveyors of radical Islam” does not belong to the Iranians. Not even close. That belongs to our putative ally Saudi Arabia.

When it comes to Iran’s involvement in terrorism, I have no illusions: I covered firsthand the 1983 suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, both believed to be the handiwork of Iran’s cat’s paw, Hezbollah. Iran’s terrorism, though — vis-à-vis the U.S. — has always been of the geopolitical variety: war by other means to push the U.S. out of the region so Iran can dominate it, not us.

I support the Iran nuclear deal because it reduces the chances of Iran building a bomb for 15 years and creates the possibility that Iran’s radical religious regime can be moderated through more integration with the world.

[I]f you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.

It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni jihadist groups — ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrasas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.

And we, America, have never called them on that — because we’re addicted to their oil and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

“While Iran has been a source of terrorism in supporting groups like Hezbollah, many American allies have been a source of terrorism by supporting Wahhabi ideology, which basically destroyed the pluralism that emerged in Islam since the 14th century, ranging from Bektashi Islam in Albania, which believes in living with other religions, to Sufi and Shiite Islam. 

[W]hen there is only one legitimate path [to God or Allah], “all others are open to being killed. That has been the single most dangerous idea that has emerged in the Muslim world, and it came out of Saudi Arabia

For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda. But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.” 

Saudi Arabia’s export of Wahhabi puritanical Islam has been one of the worst things to happen to Muslim and Arab pluralism — pluralism of religious thought, gender and education — in the last century. 

Iran’s nuclear ambition is a real threat; it needs to be corralled. But don’t buy into the nonsense that it’s the only source of instability in this region. 

If American conservatives were the patriots they like to see themselves as, they'd be selling their gas guzzling SUV's and huge pickup trucks and buying fuel efficient cars to accelerate America's energy independence from Saudi oil.  They'd also be supportive of alternate fuel programs  and energy conservation efforts.  The fact that they are not doing this shows that as is the case in so many areas, the conservatives are false patriots and hypocrites.