A brilliant column from David Warren on our Saudi “allies,” and the US government’s continuing deal-making and hand-holding with a religious supremacist ideology dedicated to the destruction of the American way of life.

We could summarize the less obtuse journalistic comments on President Bush’s meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah at his (Bush’s) Crawford, Texas ranch in this way: The United States wants cheap oil and democracy; the Sauds want dear oil and despotism; the Arabians (as opposed to their rulers) want dear oil and, maybe, democracy. On the oil, the problem is not one the Sauds can solve for us, until we (the consumers, in U.S. and elsewhere) succeed in breaking the OPEC cartel through which prices are manipulated within extreme limits of market reality. Destroying OPEC would force them, the extended Saud family and Arabians alike, to “get an economy”, or starve. Unfortunately, our side has not formulated tactics to the proper practical end. Instead we accept the cartel, and ask that the price be manipulated for our benefit. A non-starter if any argument ever was.

But our key goal in Saudi Arabia should instead be, the propagation of religious freedom. It is at the heart of a problem which, ultimately, oil merely exacerbates. And it requires a direct confrontation with the Saudi state and its fanatic, Wahabi ideologists.

As Freedom House in Washington pointed out, 40 Pakistani Christians were being arrested in Riyadh, at the moment Crown Prince Abdullah was flying out. They had been caught praying in a private house, and will now be enjoying the ministrations of the country’s psychopathic religious police. But this was only a headline case. Millions of Shia, and non-Wahabi Sunni Muslims, suffer daily oppression just like the Christians, under the constant watch of these state-employed Wahabi thugs.

When he flew out, the Crown Prince was fresh from a meeting with his Sharia-law chief justice, Saleh bin Muhammad Al-Luhaidan, who had recently ruled that any Muslim able to enter Iraq, required no permission to kill “American infidels”. Al-Luhaidan’s books are incidentally distributed throughout the U.S. by the Saudi embassy in Washington.