John LeBoutillier
Wednesday, June 16, 2004

My last column - SO HELP US GOD - was based on an anonymous email circulating on the Internet about a WWII-age couple visiting the newly-opened World War II Memorial in DC.

The email was a fraud - and I fell for it!

Newsmax correctly checked it out and pulled the column.

It was - and is - my fault. I should have gone to the Memorial and looked at the inscriptions with my own eyes before writing the column.

My deepest apologies.

Speaking of “getting snookered,” the Saudi Government sure has snookered our government for generations. We now see what a hotbed of radical Islam Saudi Arabia really is.

The kidnapping of Paul Johnson Jr. and the video of his threatened execution is yet another attempt to drive the United States away from the Saudis. And let’s face it: if they didn’t have the world's largest oil reserves, we would already have left the region.

The failure of Ryadh to protect Americans will undoubtedly lead to a pullback of American support for the Saudi Government - exactly what Osama bin Laden wants!

This has been his aim since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Desert Shield build-up of 500,000 American and Coalition troops.

Osama then approached his pals and family connections in the Saudi Royal Family and presented a plan to protect the Kingdom from Iraqi invasion - without American ‘infidel’ troops encamped on ‘Holy land’.

The Saudi Royals rejected the plan.

Osama then left Saudi Arabia for the last time and launched a long-range plan to overthrow the Royal Family and turn Saudia Arabia into the capital of Radical Islam. Thus his use of 15 Saudi suicide hijackers for the 9/11 attacks.

So far Washington has not taken the bait and cooled relations with Saudi Arabia.

Obviously, oil is a big part of the reason.

The mistake we are making, though, is to be unprepared in the case of a Royal Family collapse and a Saudi reversal, away from us, including a cutoff of oil sales to the West.

We are clearly not ready for the devastating impact this could have on us and on the industrialized, oil-dependent West.

Just today al Qaida has attacked more oil pipelines in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and killed an Iraqi oil executive in northern Iraq. It is a day-by-day, drip-drip-drip destabilization of the region.

Clearly the instability has just begun.

We must move to fuel cell technology with the urgency and speed of the Manhattan Project and the space-race, beat-the-Soviets-to-the-moon mentality.

Not a 20-year plan that assuages a few environmentalists; this Project Independence needs to be implemented today - with the goal of having every new car, bus and truck using hydrogen fuel cells within two years.

We will be lucky if things in the volatile Middle East remain even remotely stable for two more years; we should have done this years ago, right after the 9/11 attacks when the American people were ready and willing to do anything to preserve our freedom.

Things are beginning to spin out of control in the Middle East. The wise move for our country - and for the West - is to be prepared to disengage completely if and when things spiral into total and complete mayhem.

It is the height of political and moral malpractice to not be ready for all possibilities.