Conservatives, Christians, President Bush & The War on Terror

In the aftermath of September 11th , despite Al Qaeda being funded from Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government did little to curb radical fundamentalism  and the Wahabists funded by the House of Saud continue to this day to fund an intolerant religious radicalism that engenders the very culture of terror that bred Al Qaeda. The cosmetic Saudi efforts after the May 12^th Saudi attacks have not stopped it. This kind of funding carried out under the auspices of religion goes on unabated not only in Africa, Asia , Europe and The Middle East but even in the USA. While the Saudis fund construction of mosques and Islamic institutions (some of them virtual apologists  for a militancy sympathetic to terror), they will not allow a single church or synagogue to be built in Saudi Arabia, actively denying the same freedoms to others they demand for Islam in the West. The  Saudi human rights record is a travesty that in some areas is more repressive than Sadam Hussein’s. They protected Idi Amin who was worse than Hussein, and  recognized genocidal Islamic regimes including the Taliban. President Bush and Carl Rove well know this yet they expect the rest of us to ignore it.  George Bush Sr. condemned anti Saudi sentiment after 9/11 calling them “our friends”. A regime that beheads people for becoming Christians may be a friend of Mr. Bush, but is no friend of the United States.

The “Axis of Evil” is not Iraq, Iran, and North Korea – but Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea.  Iraq only remained a threat because the first Bush administration failed to remove Sadam Hussein when international opinion was with us. The Iraq war was a  sideshow diverting attention from the real source of terror – the Saudi Arabian Wahabists. Far from standing up to the nations that support terror as the President promised, the president, his father , Mr. Cheney, Colin Powell, and Candolezza Rice are rather in bed with them. 

Bush involvement with  Enron (a concern that  manipulated energy prices and contributed to California’s woes) lent credence to the charge that the Bush administration is owned and operated by international oil which has vested interests appeasing the Saudis. Indeed, for a solid year after 9/11, with 15 of the 19 suicide bombers being Saudi, President Bush continued the express visa exemption for Saudi Arabians making it easier for them to enter America in the  aftermath of 9/11. Protecting Saudi sensitivities, Mr. Bush allowed members and associates of Bin Laden’s family to quickly exit the USA  in the days after 9-11 instead of detaining them as sources of intelligence. The fact that the wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar (named “Bandar Bush’ by the Bush family in one of his visits to the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine after his contributions to Bush family causes) made handsome donations to those who helped the 9/11 hijackers has made no difference to the Bush policy of refusing to protect America when it comes at the expense of not protecting Saudi interests. 

Steven Emerson, (producer of the award winning documentary “Jihad in America”), Professor Samuel Hunter (author of ”  Clash of Civilizations”), Professor Daniel Pipes, former CIA officer Robert Baer (who exposed the Bush, Cheney, and Candolezza Rice – Saudi private business interests involving Carlyle Group and Chevron/Texaco) and the Israeli government all tried to warn the US government regarding the threat of Saudi funded radical Islamic terror  to the USA prior to 9/11. Ignoring them prior to 9/11 was reckless and irresponsible. To ignore it after 9/11 is suicidal. Yet the Bush government seems to continue to place  personal family financial interests in Saudi Arabia, including those of Carlyle, above American national security, yet in the name of national security censors 28 pages  of the congressional report on 9/11 documenting Saudi government  officials’ complicity in the mass funding of Al Qaeda.

While Americans are expected to arrive earlier and pay more tax for air flights, there is no policy to security profile Moslem passengers. It is reasonable to expect Arab Americans to display the same loyalty that German, Japanese, and Italian Americans displayed during the Second World War. But no one is saying it is fair to judge all  Arab Americans because of a Moslem soldier in the US Army killing his comrades with a hand grenade or a Moslem American in Ohio plotting to blow up national treasures. But we can not  overlook that  60% of Moslems questioned in 18 countries defended 9/11 as justified in one poll in March of last year. Surely,  no one wants to see Arab Americans victimized as Japanese Americans once were. But in a war aliens can not be accorded the same rights as citizens. The failure of the Bush Administration to cancel green cards and student visas of aliens (under emergency war powers that congress after 9/11 was sure to approve as an expansion of the Patriot Act) from counties known to nurture networks of terror places more American lives at needless risk and the administration’s refusal to freeze Saudi assets pending litigation by the families of victims of 9/11 is a slap to the face of  these devastated American families – all for the price of a barrel of oil.

The Republican record of Saudi appeasement at the expense of American interests is astounding. When Shia terrorists blew up the US Embassy in Beirut in 1982 Ronald Reagan and Casper Weinberger had US marines arriving ‘Dead on Arrival’ at hospitals in Germany and England  instead of being evacuated to nearby surgical theaters in Israel so as not to upset the Saudis and endanger  Bechtel construction contracts.  It is of little coincidence that Shultz, Weinberger, and Rumsfeld were all senior Bechtel executives. With Mr. Bush, this pathetic legacy endures. His pandering to the Saudi dynamo of the very fundamentalism that produced the terror of 9/11 while insisting he will target those who support terror, Mr. Bush proves he is not a man who can be trusted or believed.

The Council for Arab Islamic Relations is funded by the same Wahabist Saudi Arabia that funds terror breeding extremist views of fundamentalist Islam, yet cries “intolerance” and “discrimination” when the grossest intolerance and discrimination by Islamic countries is highlighted from the apartheid of Malaysia to the genocide in Sudan, East Timor, and the Southern Philippines. Already, frustration at government inaction and refusal to amend immigration and asylum policies in the face of Islamic militancy in Britain and Europe is resulting in the growth of racist nationalist front parties. Similar inaction in America will only generate support for armed militia groups as desperate people seek to protect themselves because their government will not enact the immigration policies required for domestic security and restrict the misuse of religious freedom by foreign Saudi Arabian interests to bankroll a pro jihad anti American agenda.

Without doubt, if the same standards were applied to the Saudis that were applied to Spain after the sinking of the battleship Maine, war would have been declared on Saudi Arabia September 12th.  Instead of confronting the Saudis who engender the culture of terror responsible for 9/11, the Bush administration stresses dialogue and common economic interests, just as when  the Soviets supplied North Viet Nam to kill Americans, the détente of Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford took the same hopeless route. This is exactly how the Republicans lost Viet Nam (when Mr. Rumsfeld was also Defense Secretary), and it is how they will lose the war on terror.

Just as Nixon reduced Veteran hospital provisions for Viet Nam veterans, now the Bush administration is closing VA hospitals. As the CIA was involved with heroine traffickers in the Air America scandal during Viet Nam, now we are in league with Afghanistan opium lords. Preoccupied with the Viet Nam imbroglio, Nixon did nothing when a still held American naval vessel was impounded by North Korea in open piracy. Now once more preoccupied with an imbroglio, Mr. Bush does nothing to respond to North Korean aggression. And just as in 1973 under Nixon during Viet Nam, oil prices once more are going through the roof. Clearly, one attribute the Republicans do have is consistency.

When George Bush Sr was CIA Director the US secretly supported Manuel Noriega only to have to remove him later, but this pattern of insane policy by Republican governments is seen no more than in Middle Eat policy. From the sequestered Wilson affair in Libya, to arming the Taliban to fight the Soviets, to Mr. Rumsfeld’s brokered deal to assist Iraq to fight Iran, to the Reagan government supplying arms to Iran in Irangate then denying it, each time America armed Islamic fighters, we ended up having to fight them ourselves. Now Mr. Bush is arming the Palestinian Authority. The eventual results will not likely be different.

Instead of standing up to the dynamos of terror, the Bush strategy is to rather twist the arm of our allies in the war against it. While the US builds a fence along the Mexican border to save jobs, the US condemns Israel for building one to save lives. Iraq was invaded in part on the claim of weapons of mass destruction that do not seem to exist, but the presence of Qassam II missals in Gaza pointed at Israel is questioned by no one because one has already been fired at Israel. Yet Mr. Bush is preventing Israel from invading Gaza. The missals were supplied by Syrian fed Hezbollah after the first Bush administration handed control of Lebanon to terror sponsoring Syria on a silver platter . This was the most catastrophic Middle East blunder since  the Republican Eisenhower /Nixon & Dulles administration handed Egypt over to the Soviet sphere of influence in the 1956 Suez crises when the Republicans also coerced our true ally Great Britain. We reap what we sow. As Bush ties Israel’s hands from defending its citizens and demands  they make concessions to the terror of extremist Islamic jihad, and refuses to act against terror’s wahabist sponsors while simultaneously claiming to be fighting terror, Americans daily come in home in body bags in what is starting to resemble a Bush made Viet Nam.

The regime change applied to the Baathists in Iraq should have been applied to the Wahabists in Saudi Arabia. Israel should be left to do to Hamas, Syria, Arafat, and Hezbollah what America did to the Taliban instead of the hypocritical dual standards of the Bush administration designed to pacify the Saudis at the behest of the oil companies .  Israel must be allowed to respond to Arafat’s terror precisely as the Jordanians responded to it in Black September of 1970. Arafat is responsible for the murder of American citizens including a US Ambassador and the utter hypocrisy of Bush/Cheney dual standards where the USA can kill Bin Laden or Sadam Hussein but Israel cannot target the same Arafat who sponsors the same kind of terror is an outrage.

Silly neo conservative notions that pluralistic democracy can work in either Iraq,  Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia should be abandoned in favor of  the reality that a benevolent but strong armed westernized secular autocracy along the lines of the late King Hussein of Jordan or General Musharif in Pakistan is the best model of  polity that can be practically applied in the Islamic world. Iraq needs a mentally balanced and humane version of Sadam Hussein or the imbroglio will grow worse and worse, with the USA, not the UN, left holding the bag. The misplaced Paul Wolfowitz doctrine that Mr. Bush can remake nations with an Islamic worldview into America’s democratic likeness as Mac Arthur remade Japan with its Shinto worldview reveals a fundamental ignorance. Unless this folly is ditched, the otherwise good strategy of decreasing reliance on Saudi oil and its unstable regime by developing Iraq as an alternate source (with second largest proven reserves) and outflanking Iran on its east and west with western troops in   Afghanistan and Iraq is doomed to collapse in abysmal failure. The Al Saud regime is doomed by its own corruption, and democratization will only result in a Sunni version of a Komeini-ist nightmare; in one poll 95% of educated Saudis support Bin Laden. Once Al Saud goes, the price of crude may exceed $85 per barrel.  The West  has had 30 years since the 1973 scare to develop alternatives to oil reliance, but the political influence of the oil companies prevailed over the national interest. The West in effect created Iraq and Saudi Arabia and now unless the West re-creates them with a realistic alternative, the economic consequences will prove catastrophic. The House of  Saud is going down. Why must The House of Bush take us down with it?

 Much is being said of the 11 million unemployed, the horrific trade imbalance, and the record $600 billion Bush deficit (even worse than  Reagan’s)  propping  up the economy with war time expenditures in an election year risking returned inflation. While California unseats a governor for fiscal mismanagement, we are expected to pretend the Bush deficit fiasco does not exist. The most free spending liberal Democrat would not have ran a deficit a fraction of that of Ronald Reagan, let alone that of  George W Bush. Writing as an independent Christian conservative, it is the same old story – ‘once the Republicans get in the economy goes down the drain and we wind up losing a war’.

Now we are asked by Mr. Bush to compound his record deficit spending with a further $87 billion to refurbish the infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan, far more than is federally budgeted for education, Medicaid for the aged, and more than is spent to rehabilitate America’s own dilapidated infrastructure. Under Mr. Bush  power blackouts in Baghdad are more of a fiscal priority than blackouts in the USA.

This is not to suggest that from a conservative, pro life Christian perspective the Democrats deserve to win the next election, but only that Mr. Bush and the Republicans deserve to lose. George Bush deserves to be rejected after one term as his father was.

Those appalled at Mr. Clinton opposing a presidential war in his youth only to launch one in contravention of the NATO charter in his intervention against the Serbs in a conflict instigated by the Al Qaeda aligned Kosovo Liberation Army have a point. But should charges that Mr. Bush as Commander in Chief now committing American troops to a quagmire in Iraq himself effectively went ‘AWOL’ from his duties as a  fighter pilot not get similar attention?  Bill Clinton faced impeachment after lying about personal immorality, but the Reagan government lied about providing arms to a terrorist regime. Like Nixon’s Watergate cronies, from Macfarlane to Poindexter to Meese to Casey one Reagan crony after another was implicated in the sea of indictment and sleaze of a corrupt Republican White House with George Bush Sr. giving Weinberger ,with whom he served in Reagan’s cabinet  when the crime was committed, a pardon just as  Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon without an admission of guilt after testifying at his Senate confirmation hearings that he wouldn’t. In terms of dishonest government the Republicans are no better and the Democrats no worse. With Enron the sleaze continues.   

If Clinton allowed Bin Laden to escape from Sudan when he had a chance to get him before 9/11, after 9/11 Mr. Bush allowed him and Sheik Omar to escape from Afghanistan by refusing to carpet bomb Kandahar for fear of Saudi objection. Today we see what is in reality a weak president with neither the courage or integrity to place the national interest above the demands of his political owners in the oil industry. 

Carl Rove believes the conservative Evangelical Christian vote can be taken for granted because Republicans will be seen by them as a lesser of evils. “A lesser of evils however is an evil no less”. Many Christians and many conservatives are tired of being stabbed in the back. They are tired of a president who remains silent when the Ten Commandments are removed from an Alabama judicial building contrary to the will of 77% of the American people. They are tired of a Republican dominated Supreme Court that will not reconsider Roe v Wade even though Roe herself is now against abortion. They are tired of a government that bullies our friends in the War on Terror but placates our de facto foes and refuses to take the real actions required to protect American lives for fear of offending the Saudis and upsetting the oil lobby. Indeed, no Christian, no authentic conservative, no supporter of Israel, and no veteran should ever vote for George W. Bush.

The notion that the Republican Party represents Christian values is even more of a farce. We had Ronald Reagan getting advice from his wife who was being advised by a fortune teller as the national deficit quadrupled and America was turned into the world’s biggest debtor.  Now we have a president who claims to be a Christian mollycoddling a Saudi barbarianism that finances the nurturing of terror and executes Christians for their faith while his administration denounces Evangelical leaders who dislike it. Such is Mr. Bush.

As political terms, ‘Republican’ and ‘Conservative’ are not synonymous. This pathetic state of affairs underscores the need for independent third party candidates in the Bull Moose tradition of Teddy Roosevelt to emerge as alternatives for conservatives to the futility of voting Republican, even if only a protest vote.  Mr. Rove and the Republican Party must be sent a clear and unmistakable signal. We have had more than enough.