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The Bush Doctrine's Next Test

(Commentary) Victor Davis Hanson - The U.S. has given a free pass to three regimes that have long been regarded not as enemies but as key allies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Egypt, the guardian of the Suez Canal and the cultural and ideological center of the Arab world, is also the incubator of many of its worst pathologies. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism grew out of the mosques, universities, and salons of Cairo, and today Egypt is among the world's premier exporters of anti-Semitic propaganda. Pakistan possesses and helps spread nuclear weapons and their supporting technology. It has engaged in periodic atomic stand-offs with its neighbor, democratic India, and thousands of square miles on its western flanks remain de-facto terrorist badlands. Saudi Arabia, sitting atop a quarter of the world's known oil reserves, is the benefactor of most of the virulent Wahhabism that proliferates in madrassas throughout the Middle East and has crept insidiously into the West. It is hard to find a terrorist arrested in Europe or in the U.S. who has not been indoctrinated by Saudi-sponsored teachings of hate or is not in thrall to the country's religious operatives. Fifteen of the nineteen suicide hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. Mohammed Atta, the tactical mastermind, was an Egyptian, an epitome of the anti-Americanism that, along with anti-Semitism, has made his country a spiritual locus of hatred for the West. If it seems natural that bin Laden should be a Saudi, it is no less natural that his sinister sidekick, Dr. Zawahiri, is an Egyptian. Another Saudi, Ahmad Sayyid Ahmad al-Ghamdi, a medical student and son of a diplomat, blew up 22 Americans in Mosul, Iraq, on December 21, 2004. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a Saudi American with strong ties to his spiritual motherland, has been charged with planning to kill President Bush. On November 5, 2004, 26 influential Saudi clerics subsidized by the royal family issued a fatwa demanding long-term jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq; the Muslim Scholars Association, composed of Sunni clerics strongly sympathetic to Saudi Wahhabism, has worked strenuously to undermine American reconstruction efforts. All this is no accident.
2005-05-06 00:00:00
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