The other day Guss wrote this post with the comment:

You have got to be kidding me. When most of the terrorists are from Saudi Arabia, you don’t sell them arms.
These people are not our friends.

I can’t say I disagree with his statement. The following is from The Omega Letter, a subscription only Christian end-times publication. It discusses the ramifications of this military hardware sale from a Christian perspective.

Arming the Jihad

For reasons that few understand and even fewer can articulate, the United States government is considering a $20 billion arms sale to the wellspring and root of Islamic jihadist theology, Saudi Arabia.

According to a senior US defense department official quoted in the Jerusalem Post, “We’ve been working very hard on a Saudi arms package, which we believe is critical to the overarching architecture… to deal with the changing strategic threat from Iran and other forces.”

Speaking before the UN in September, President Bush told the world, “Extremists in your midst spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in a war against Islam. This propaganda is false, and its purpose is to confuse you and justify acts of terror.”

But it is the House of Saud itself that is “perverting Islam” and threatening, as the White House correctly puts it, a world in which “our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.”

Weapons the Bush administration is evidently planning to sell them. Arming the Saudis to deal with Iran is an unthinkably dangerous gamble on more levels than one is comfortable contemplating.

First, the House of Saud is a regime whose future should be calculated in months or years, rather than decades. King Abdullah is 83 years old. Over the course of his lifetime, he’s had thirty wives and has produced at least fifteen sons and twenty daughters. Overall, the Saudi royal family has some 6000 princes at last count.

The line of succession in the Saudi royal family is complicated; the crown doesn’t necessarily pass to Abdullah’s eldest son, but rather, to the most suitable, as chosen by the royal family in a much-despised secretive selection process.

In the second place, they are being slowly consumed by their own creation, jihadist Islam. The House of Saud is founded on Wahabbism, and Wahabbi Islam is the Saudi state religion. Osama bin Laden is a Wahabbist.

Wahhabi Islam was founded by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in the 1700’s in an effort to purify Islam by returning Muslims to what he believed were the original principles of Islam. Wahhabi Islam teaches jihad against the West, conversion by the sword, the destruction of the Jews, martyrdom in the cause of Allah, and a world view shaped by 6th century values.

The Saudi royals have enormous internal problems to contend with. By giving Wahhabis a free hand over Saudi Arabia’s religious and educational sectors, the royal family guaranteed themselves an eventual showdown.

Instead of fostering a liberal and intellectual class that despises the Wahhabis and could have been an important ally against them, the Saudi government imprisons anyone daring to call for liberal reform.

The House of Saud created an oil-based welfare state and rules by virtue of its lavish entitlements programs. But with all that free time on their hands, the Saudi population has doubled in the past two decades — half of the population of the country today is under 18.

That’s a lot of raging hormones to control. Especially after a lifetime of Wahabbist indoctrination calling for jihad against the Saudi royal family’s most important ally, the United States.

Saudi youth has been raised to despise the West — and to despise the decadence of the Saudi Royal family — in Saudi madrassas, in sermons delivered in the mosques of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, from whistle to well, Saudi society lives and breathes jihadist Wahabbi Islam.

Saudi Arabia is primarily a kingdom of teenagers ruled by men in their eighties. The next likely king will be in his late seventies or early eighties. While the Saudi royals are seen as friendly to the West, the majority of the Saudi population are in sympathy with Osama bin Laden.

Pouring $20 billion worth of arms into Saudi Arabia under these conditions would be a fool’s gamble even if the Saudi royals really WERE our friends. Which they are not.

The Saudis embody everything the Bush administration claims to have been wrong with America’s pre-9/11 policy: turning a blind eye to dictatorship and advancing the spread of radical Islamist ideologies.

They continue to support and fund Hamas, supply more than 40% of the foreign jihadists combating the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, funnel money to al-Qaeda, and lead the Arab world’s opposition to normalized relations with Israel.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Assessment:

The Bush administration’s relationship with the Saudis is almost inexplicable, given what is popularly known about the Saudi government’s relationship to the jihadists.

In 1997, the House of Saud was the first government in the world to extend formal recognition to the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The Saudis produced Osama bin-Laden, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, funded and supplied al-Qaeda, and continue to shower billions of dollars worldwide on madrassas where Muslims learn they must wage jihad against America and Israel.

As I said, the Bush administration’s relationship with the House of Saud is almost inexplicable, until one considers the oil factor.

This is one of the many charges that’s been hurled at Bush by the Bush-bashers over the course of his administration, but it has the unique quality of being among the few that are actually true.

It has to be true because the economy hasn’t collapsed. My electricity is still on, the internet still works, the supermarkets are still open and there is no rioting in the streets.

Because if Bush had heeded the cries of “no blood for oil” in the Middle East, that would be the case right now.

No utilities, empty supermarkets, roving armed gangs — think immediate post-Katrina New Orleans. THAT is what is behind the administration’s support of the House of Saud.

The US economy is based on the global oil market. The value of the US dollar is propped up by the fact that it is the world’s principle currency. Some things, like Saudi oil, can only be purchased in US dollars. So that means that oil-importing countries have to keep enormous supplies of US dollars on reserve.

The fewer US dollars are held internationally, the lower the value of the dollar becomes on the international market. Since Iran and Venezuela began demanding euros instead of dollars for their oil exports the value of the euro has skyrocketed while the dollar continues to plummet.

If the Saudis abrogated their “dollars only” agreement with Washington, it could conceivably tank the economy, making the Great Depression look like a minor recession by comparison.

It is this delicate balance of oil and dollars that keeps the US from moving full steam ahead toward independence on foreign oil. The technology exists today to turn turkey guts, or any other carbon-based garbage, into #6 sweet crude oil for about eleven bucks a barrel.

But Appel Technologies only has two small factories in operation, one in Carthage, Mo., and the other outside Philadelphia.

We can’t afford cheap, unlimited, renewable oil supplies. What Appel Technologies has accomplished is the equivalent of the alchemist’s quest to turn lead into gold. If lead were as valuable as gold, then gold would be no more valuable than lead. A gold-based economy would collapse overnight.

The same applies to an oil-based economy. So the United States has no choice but to suppress the alchemists and continue to appease the House of Saud.

One of the themes of the last days is that of widespread economic disaster. Jesus warned of famines and pestilences. The Apostle James warned of the calamities to befall the rich man in the last days. The Apostle John wrote of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Conquest, War, Famine and Death.

And one of the persistent questions surrounding the outline of Bible prophecy deals with the absence of any nation resembling the United States during the Tribulation Period.

As the weeks turn into months, and months turn into years, I am continually amazed at how the puzzle pieces for the Big Picture continue to fall into place.

The Omega Letter has published, as of today’s report, one thousand, nine hundred and fifty-three consecutive reports outlining, in detail, the events that point to the soon return of Christ.

Our archives are a daily eyewitness journal of these events, as they happen, creating a chronological overview of the Big Picture as it continues to fall into place.

What is astonishing to me is the sheer volume of evidence supporting the literal fulfillment of Bible prophecy in this generation. There are literally thousands of pages of evidence in our archives, and no shortage of new evidences to examine each morning.

The King is coming! He promised us that He is “long-suffering towards us” and, “not willing that any should perish,” (2nd Peter 3:9) He is waiting until the last possible moment to give that last, willing the chance to repent and complete the called-out company of believers. But He is coming!

And all the evidence suggests that He is coming soon.