Vileness, Saudi subversion, and the complicity of America's political class.

. . . Saudi money (oil money) has so suffused American foreign policy and diplomatic circles that confronting Saudi perfidy confounds even the most energetic and honorable of efforts.

. . . At the specific request of the Saudi government, no Arabic speakers are appointed to the post, a unique self-handicap by the US. . . . The columnist Matt Welch observed a while back that, if you close your eyes, America’s ex-ambassadors sound like they’re Saudis. Effectively, there’s no US ambassador to Saudi Arabia but a whole platoon of Saudi ambassadors to the US —- Prince Bandar and full supporting chorus.

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To confront bodily the House of Saud is to emphatically take sides in the internal struggle of a great [sic] religion; it is to say emphatically that the Wahhabi sect is unacceptable as a human enterprise; it is, therefore, to our modern sensibilities, to be intolerably intolerant. Wahhabism, it seems clear, would be nothing but a fringe lunacy, a rump fanaticism, were it not for the Saudi oil wealth. . . .

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Returning to the cluttered world of human affairs, I repeat my piercing disappointment at the pusillanimity and corruption of our leaders in the face of source of the ideology that threatens us. If the Democrats had any principled shrewdness, they would make the Bush administration’s tolerance of Saudi mendacity a central component of their criticism. They would point out that while Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard, as stalwart an ally as we have, has never been invited to the President’s redoubt in Crawford, Texas, Saudi schemers have reclined there numerous times.

"The Challenge of the Saudis." By Paul J. Cella, Cella's Review, 12/2/02 (emphasis added).