Add Ralph Peters to the growing list of people who are fed up with Dubya for groveling to the Saudis.

The trigger for the latest orgy of kissing Saudi feet was an article in The Washington Post by one of our nation’s finest reporters, Thomas E. Ricks, revealing that a Pentagon briefing to top insiders dared to question Saudi virtue and perfection.

President Bush & Co. immediately got on the phone to Prince Bunkum bin Bigot to insist we didn’t really mean it, like a spineless husband caught cheating on camera. In this grotesque case, our president clearly forgot who he works for. Bush family friends or not, the Saudis are murderers. And their preferred victims are Americans.

The royal family doesn’t do its own dirty work, of course - no more than they fight their own wars. Like mafia dons, they put out contracts. Some of those contracts are for oil deals or public-relations blitzes, or to buy influence-packing lobbyists inside the Beltway. Others involve money handed to terrorists to spread the cruelest imaginable perversion of a great world religion - in the end, the Saudis are even greater enemies to the future of the Islamic world than they are to the United States.

In fact, the comparison to the mafia is unfair to organized crime, since the mafia did have a code of honor, a sense of obligation and respect for women.