How's that a 'foreign policy'?

How's that a 'foreign policy'?

"... For more than a quarter century, Saudi Arabia and the United States have had a grand bargain: they sell us overpriced oil in exchange for virtually unlimited access to our advanced weapons. (Of the $66 billion in U.S. arms sales abroad last year, half went to Saudi Arabia.) In addition, Riyadh agreed to fund U.S. covert operations around the world with its surplus petrodollars.......

In 2007, Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department's top expert on terrorist finances, testified that "wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia are still funding violent extremists around the world, from Europe to North Africa, from Iraq to Southeast Asia." As Levey told an interviewer, "If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia."

It should come as no comfort, therefore, that Saudi sources, both official and unofficial, have been pouring military supplies into Syria's rebel movement for months. The New York Times reports that the Obama administration has encouraged such provisions to supplement its own "non-lethal" aid. "Administration officials say that outsourcing the supply of money and arms to the rebels maintains a crucial distinction that keeps American military fingerprints off a conflict that has already turned into a bloody civil war."

Efforts by CIA officers to steer the arms to non-jihadist groups appear to be of little avail. The resistance movement is increasingly turning Islamist, even joining up with fighters from al Qaeda. The consequences for human rights, especially for Syria's minorities, have been terrible.

In the words of one Indian journalist writing for the New York Times, "As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who've been 'cleansed' from their homes... by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home... The seeming indifference of the international community... is breeding a bitter anti-Americanism among many secular Syrians who see the United States aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world's most resolutely secular state."

He is not alone in raising the alarm. Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki warned that by "sending arms instead of working on putting out the fire," Saudi Arabia and Qatar "will leave a greater crisis in the region."

Even some neocons, who for years have championed the downfall of Syria's regime, now sound uneasy about the prospect of Saudi Arabian money dictating the outcome of what increasingly is turning into a regional conflict.

"Washington must stop subcontracting Syria policy to the Turks, Saudis and Qataris," declared Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. "They are clearly part of the anti-Assad effort, but the United States cannot tolerate Syria becoming a proxy state for yet another regional power."

Surely we already have enough dangerous fires to put out, from Islamists attacking a nuclear air base in Pakistan to jihadists rampaging across Northern Africa in the wake of the Libya campaign. The Obama administration is right to resist foolhardy calls for direct military intervention in another sectarian conflict in the Middle East. But outsourcing our intervention to Saudi Arabia is an abdication of responsibility, an evasion of accountability, and a set-up for long-term disaster."

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
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