IRVINE, CA--Saudi Arabia is our enemy, and we should treat it as such, said Robert Tracinski, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

"The Saudi rulers," Tracinski observed, "are vigorous promoters of Wahhabism, a fanatical Islamic sect that preaches--among other barbaric doctrines--that Muslims have a duty to hate non-Muslims. They have exported this hatred to the rest of the region, inspiring and sponsoring the Taliban, paying blood money to Palestinian terrorists, broadcasting anti-Jewish incitement and anti-American propaganda in their state-controlled press, and tolerating the free flow of money to organizations like al-Qaeda.

"The events of the past year have demonstrated that we cannot allow the world's largest deposits of oil to be controlled by medieval religious fanatics."

"Those who oppose strong action against the Saudis," Tracinski remarked, "will no doubt take up their Gulf War protest cry: 'No blood for oil.' But if they really meant those words, they would be the ones agitating for an invasion of Saudi Arabia, because blood for oil is the gruesome equation that has ruled the Middle East for the past five decades--our oil, stolen by the Saudis and used to spill our blood.

"The rightful owners of the oil," Tracinski explained, "are the American, British, and French companies that discovered and drilled for the oil--only to have the oil fields nationalized for the benefit of the Saudi royal family in the 1950s."

"It is time to say 'no blood for oil'--which means taking back the wealth created by the West from those who are using it to attack the West."

### ### ###

Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004.

 
 
The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its principal tenets: reason, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism.