Personally, I don’t think we need the “advice and guidance” of the Saudis right now. Last time I checked, 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were still Saudis, and Saudi Arabia was still funding hate-filled Islamic schools known as madrassas all over the world. The Saudi government claims that it does not directly fund these jihad factories, but the Saudi religious foundations that do fund them have close ties to the royal family.

Since September 11, the Saudi government has rounded up some extremists and undertaken a lot of clever public relations (so far, Crown Prince Abdullah’s Mideast peace plan is still in that category), but it has done little or nothing to prove that it is out of the business of exporting hate in the guise of religious instruction.

ROOTING OUT HATRED

Where is the directive from the folks who hold the purse strings of the madrassas to change the curriculum? And where was this on Cheney’s agenda? (If it was raised in private, why can’t we know?). The vice president was apparently so busy trying to drum up support for action against Saddam Hussein and laying the groundwork for a meeting between President Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah on the Middle East that he neglected some of the true “root causes” of September 11. Many lie in Saudi society.

This is a hard thing for the U.S. government to confront. Every American president since Franklin Roosevelt has kissed the fanny of the Saudi royal family to help assure a constant supply of oil. The Bush administration has particularly close ties to the Saudis through the oil business. Cheney himself oversaw more than half a dozen Saudi subsidiaries when he ran Halliburton, Inc.

I’m not suggesting that Cheney has an easy task. The whole point of his mission initially was to get the Arabs, particularly the Saudis, to sign off on a U.S. attack on Saddam Hussein. Crown Prince Abdullah’s comments that the Mideast conflict would have to be addressed first (“The people who are dying on the street are not a result of any Iraqi action. The people are dying as a result of an Israeli action”) greatly complicates the administration’s timetable. It increases pressure to achieve peace in the Mideast not just for its own sake, but to clear the decks for ousting Saddam.

OFF THE BALL?

But having said that, it sometimes feels as if the United States is taking its eye off the ball in the war on terrorism. Yes, removing Saddam is important and more justified all the time (A new piece in The New Yorker shows closer links between Saddam and al Qaida than previously known). So is achieving Mideast peace. If the Saudi plan–however flawed–can get the process going, it’s worth pursuing.

But let’s not pursue these aims to the exclusion of fundamental change in the Arab education system and hate-filled media that condition and encourage terrorism. That must be on every agenda for all high level talks–stressed publicly and privately–no matter what else we want to accomplish.

The Saudis hope to use Crown Prince Abdullah’s plan and their role in confronting Saddam to give themselves the upper hand again–and to relieve the pressure to reform. If we allow that, we’ll pay for it down the road. Big time.