Never forget it was 19 Saudi citizens, motivated and financed by the fundamentalist Wahhabi who in turn are protected and funded by the Saudi government, killed over 3,000 Americans ans caused over a trillion dollars in economic harm. Bush hit the wrong country. The Saudis owe the US reparations. You can just guess if those Saudi terrorists had struck China or Russia.
And make no mistake, we didn’t go to war in 1991 for Kuwait, they were chump change, it really was for the sake of Saudi Arabia, and that’s how they paid us back?
The rulers are the moderates. The Wahhabis who form the vast majority of Saudi Arabia's population aren't protected by the Saudi government - they tolerate the government as long as it adheres to Wahhabism. The moment that changes, the Saudi royal family will need to find permanent new digs abroad. Iran's Shah flouted the religious norms of his people, and paid the price by spending the rest of his life in exile. The Saudi government paid us $36b for Operation Desert Storm, which we would have had to fight anyway, to keep Saddam (or any given Arab leader) from unifying all of the Gulf region's oil fields under a single leader.
The amusing thing is that the neocon interpretation of Middle Eastern affairs is not all that different from the liberal one - the view is that the people are the salt of the earth and the rulers are scum who should be toppled. The traditional conservative view is that the people of the Middle East are scum and the only thing holding these evil troglodytes back is their rulers, who try to curb the worst excesses in order to avoid having to engage in continuous war until the end of time.
I'm going on record that Saudis use blood money that buys off our leaders to look the other way. I believe Republicans and Democrats are corrupted by them. The Bushes appear to have catered to the Saudis. We pulled their asses out of the oven by stopping Saddam from taking the kingdoms of Saud and Kuwait. They give us 911. Clinton is well on his way of collecting a billion in payoffs. Before we can contain Islam, we will have to bring corruption under control at home. The direction we are headed seems to point that our leaders are increasingly abandoning the common man.