THE GUARDIAN: One message, often buried, comes out loud and clear from the embassy cables: the US should choose its allies more carefully
Among the most arresting lines in the trove of diplomatic cables made public this week was one from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. "Cut off the head of the snake," he advised his American friends. Any herpetologist would agree that this is good advice in dealing with a threatening viper. But who is this snake? King Abdullah was referring to Iran, obliquely arguing for a military attack.
Yet, there was another tantalising detail in the trove of cables that suggests the larger threat comes from inside King Abdullah's own country. "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaida," the New York Times reported in its first article on the leaked documents.
That is a huge, though not unsurprising, revelation. It reflects how complex and sometimes self-defeating America's foreign alliances have become. Saudi Arabia is an intimate ally of the United States, yet Saudi money supports the world's most violently anti-American terror network.
This deeply troubling contradiction has its roots in Saudi history and tradition. The regime's survival is based on a deal with the Wahhabi clerics who dominate religious practice in Saudi Arabia – and whose austere brand of Islam is among the world's most reactionary. Clerics agree to support the regime, ignoring both its alliance with infidel America and the notoriously unIslamic lifestyles of its thousands of princes. In exchange, the regime gives these clerics billions of dollars, much of which they use to run mosques and religious schools across the Islamic world. More than a few of these mosques and schools, often run by Saudi clerics or others they have trained, are incubators of terror, where generations of lost boys learn to chant the Qur'an and hate America.
The deal is, as former CIA director James Woolsey once described it, "for the Wahhabis to be given all of the money in the world they could ever remotely dream of needing or wanting to spread their sect's beliefs, and for them to leave the House of Saud alone." Read on and comment >>> Stephen Kinzer | Wednesday, December 01, 2010
