Activities in the toxic kingdom are always worth careful attention.

It is tempting to take over the oil fields and then just bomb the rest, but there is a shorter more effective way to beat these vermin:

Insist on allowing the equality of women in religion and before the law.

Even now one can hear those minds go snap.

Posted by: dgene at December 17, 2007 11:37 AM

"My own hunch is that the next al-Qaeda strike will not be a symbolic blow to a great building or city, but rather a carefully-timed economic blow: either by cutting – or trying to cut - the oil jugular, or by trying to precipitate a run on the dollar."
-- from the article above

The implication of the remark quoted is that the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was merely a "symbolic blow." It was not. It cost the American economy tens of billions of dollars: the destruction itself, the disruption of commerce and travel, the huge expenses for the new bureaucracy of Homeland Security. Nor is this unrecognized. Bin Laden has repeatedly talked about the economic damage he inflicted on America.

And the confused caught-in-the-headlights response to that attack, undertaken by the Bush Administration without any of its officials first acquiring a useful knowledge of Islam, and of the fissures within the Camp of Islam that could usefully be exploited, has led to even greater economic self-destruction: between one and two trillion dollars have been squandered in a policy in pursuit of goals that are both unattainable and are, in any case, the wrong goals.

Posted by: Hugh at December 17, 2007 11:43 AM

The Gulf has roughly $3.5trn under management in wealth funds and central banks, so a dollar shift makes waves.

from the article

So they want to destroy their own holdings? Let them. Sort of gives a new meaning to the idea of suicide terrorism.

What goes up must come down, anyway. The American century is over. Those who longed for the end will soon get their wish. Here's hoping they're happy with the result.

Posted by: PMK at December 17, 2007 11:45 AM

The Gulf states also have illiquid assets in the West that can, and should, be seized, when their actions are correctly seen as amounting to acts of war, just as enemy-owned assets, including those deemed enemy nationals, were seized during World War II.

Using vast sums to pay for the spread and dominance of Islam is an act of war, If rightly understood, these mosques, madrasas, armies of western hirelings, the buying up or corrupting of academic centers and departments and individual professors, the propaganda efforts (those free magazines, from ARAMCO World on, that present a view of Islam, and of Saudi Arabia, designed to lull unwary Infidels). are all part of an effort to spread Islam in the United States as in other Infidel lands, and to ensure its dominance. The removal of all obstacles to that spread, and to that dominance, of Islam, naturally mean that the legal and political institutions of the Western lands must be undone, changed beyond recognition. That is an attack -- a clear attack, an act of war -- using not military but other means. And if the Saudis do not stop using their vast sums to undermine our polity, our legal and political institutions, we have a perfect right, in answer to this now-recognized act of war, to seize Saudi assets in this country -- and possibly those in Saudi Arabia as well. And there is absolutely nothing Saudi Arabia can do, for it cannot stop selling oil, and if it were to pretend to deny it to us, this would make no difference. Oil is fungible. If the Saudis sell their oil to others and we, in turn, buy the oil that those other buyers have replaced with Saudi oil. They have to sell their oil. They have no other sources of wealth, and they have grown accustomed to luxury, and to millions of wage-slaves. They rely entirley on us for their technology, their medical care, their access to advanced education. We keep misunderstanding what we can do to Saudi Arabia, and they are happy to keep encouraging that misunderstanding.

The Money Weapon can be dealt with. And the definition of "illiquid assets" does not mean real estate alone. Cash, stocks and bond holdings, can be quickly seized, and held -- held against a new attitude, and better behavior, by the most malevolent and dangerous of all the Sunni regimes -- that of Saudi Arabia.

Posted by: Hugh at December 17, 2007 12:06 PM

Hugh,

Your post above is dead on the money, and a very good road map for dealing with this problem. I wish 'the people in charge' were paying attention.

I've been expecting this sort of crap from the Gulf States and other oil producing contries for some time. I suspect some of our other trading partners (like the Red Chinese) are encouraging this.
This is a deliberate, premeditated, attack by the enemy and it's every bit as serious as a military strike, if not more so.

Posted by: livefreeordie! at December 17, 2007 12:35 PM

Nice going traitorous politicians from both parties-tying the US firmly to Jihad Central in Riyadh. Hopefully you're enjoying all the money the Saudi lobby has bestowed upon you because when we have a jihadist induced Depression you will all deserve to swing from trees.

Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS at December 17, 2007 1:11 PM

Whatever the reasons of Saudi Arabia, I would like to point out that the collapse of the dollar was not invented by them and is not recent news. It has been going on for a couple of years now, to the point where the NYSE has ceased being the largest exchange in the world. This is actually bad news for everyone, not just for Saudi Arabia, because all the world's leading economies hold large stocks of dollars and dollar-denominated goods and stocks. Until either the dollar recovers or the euro replaces it as worldwide reserve currency, we are going to live in interesting times.

Posted by: Paolo at December 17, 2007 2:45 PM

The collapse of the dollar is good for the world economy but especially for the US. The American workers benefit by having their produce competively priced, their jobs are secured. The globalisation plague which seems to be driven largely by a search for cheap labour to produce ever more gizmos and useless content will be checked. How many Americans are feeling deprived because they can't play the latest PS stations or watch some fluff on widesceen plasma TVs or run Excel on 4GB of RAM? The US is self-sufficient where it matters, food, jobs and can be so in energy production if they put their minds to it.
A no less important outcome is that the Chicoms would have to offload a lot of their pointless production at bargain prices. They'll be walking a lot more humbly from now on.

Posted by: ivan at December 17, 2007 9:23 PM

Hugh,

Kudos on your great post on the Saudis (it being your second most useful post this year).

There likely will be a time when the whores of the beltway, and presidential libraries and institutional centers of learning will cringe to be named receptors of Saudi largesse.

The toxic Saudis.

Posted by: dgene at December 18, 2007 11:54 AM

Ousamah bin Laden (bin Looney Tunes) already did this in his infamous 1998 fatwa against the American people. I'll wager nobody in the US government, not even Greenspan, paid any attention to this aspect of this fatwa(which could have been a mistake on America's part as we can observe in retrospect).

All this may involve the REAL reason why the dollar has fallen so low recently and why the Russian govenrment is so anxious to see the dollar dethroned from its current status as the pre-eminent international monetary exchange unit.

One thing's for sure: the Bush Administration boatload of Islamo-flunkies isn't about to do anything about it.

Posted by: pythagoras at December 18, 2007 7:21 PM