Bush's Baffling Policy Toward Saudi Arabia

Sulaiman Al-Rajhi is a reclusive Saudi octogenarian with a personal fortune of $12 billion and his own Islamic bank with 500 branches in Saudi Arabia and a few more around the Muslim world. According to the CIA, Mr. Rajhi's organizations have acted as conduits, financiers, and facilitators for a wide variety of Islamic terror groups — from Al Qaeda to Hamas — for about 20 years now.

On Thursday, their nefarious activities were detailed in a landmark investigation by the Wall Street Journal. The next day, a front page article in the New York Times focused on more of Saudi Arabia's wicked activities, quoting senior American officials expressing "frustration with the Saudi government" and accusing it of both "significant efforts to undermine the Iraqi government" and "obstructing a number of other American foreign policy initiatives."

Then, lo and behold: Over the weekend, the Bush administration announced that it will ask Congress for permission to sell billions of dollars of "advanced satellite-guided bombs, upgrades to its fighters, and new naval vessels" to that very same Saudi Arabia.

Incoherent Middle East policy is an established hallmark of this administration, but continuing to coddle the very same guys who are arming jihadist Islam against the West and around the globe is over the top.

Here is what the world's intelligence agencies have documented:

• In the past 30 years, Saudi charities, government funds, and the Saudi royal family itself have sent thousands of wild-eyed, bearded, sandaled Saudi jihadists as fodder to wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, and now Iraq.

• The CIA and British and Iraqi intelligence agencies estimate that a majority of the suicide bombers in Iraq today, as well as 40% of the foreign fighters sneaking in to kill Shiite Iraqis and American troops, are Saudi citizens. No coincidences or "slip-ups" can explain that number. Moreover, a former American ambassador to Kuwait and Jordan, Edward Gnehm says Saudi emissaries are lobbying the oil-rich Sunni ruling families of Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates for funds and fighters in the struggle against Shiites in Iraq.

• The 1987 founding of Hamas — a Palestinian Arab terrorist group that originally was the Gaza wing of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and whose leaders then resided in Saudi Arabia — was overwhelmingly a Saudi-financed project undertaken by Islamic charities, including those of Mr. Rajhi.

• Half the terrorists killed by the Lebanese army in the ongoing siege at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, which began in May, have turned out to be Saudi jihadist fighters.

The myth of Saudi Arabia as a stabilizing power, a friend of America, or a bulwark against Islamist radicalism is just a fairy tale concocted by well-paid Saudi lobbyists on K Street in Washington, a group that includes some former senior American officials. The Saudi Arabia we have painfully come to know for the last two decades is a two-headed monster ruled by the alliance of its hallucinating jihadist priesthood and its ruling family's dilettante princes. The former are on a fanatical mission to proselytize on behalf of radical Islam. The latter see nothing wrong with dropping a few million at roulette tables in Monaco, picking up a few expensive prostitutes on the way to their yachts, then heading to a mosque for dawn prayers on the French Riviera.

Intelligence reports about nefarious Saudi policies have crossed the desks of every American commander in chief since President Reagan, with each administration deciding to overlook them lest "we further alienate the Saudi royal family." Americans will recall how President Bush personally intervened to allow scores of Osama bin Laden's relatives to be flown out of America barely a day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A great deal of intelligence about what the Saudis might have been up to both then and before the attacks was lost as it was spirited away in the middle of the night.

"Collaborating with the enemy" may be too strong an accusation to place upon the commander in chief, but continuing to view Saudis as friends is part of Mr. Bush's unbridled naïveté. To be sure, if we cease protecting those royals, the next regime in Saudi Arabia will be a basket case, too. But at least we can decide to fight it with everything we have, without any confusion about its true nature.