Saudi Arabia first, Iraq second

Time Magazine, that bastion of conservative reporting, asking the question Do We Still Need the Saudis?

People in Saudi Arabia are sick of talking about Sept. 11. They have little interest in examining why 15 of their countrymen hijacked U.S. commercial planes and killed 3,000 civilians; many prefer to believe that the attacks were the work of the CIA or the Mossad, and that the 15 hijackers were unwitting players in someone else's plot. "They were just bodies," a senior government official says. Spend an evening in Jidda, the hometown of Osama bin Laden, where young Saudis today flock to American chain restaurants and shopping malls to loiter away the stifling summer nights, and you rarely hear bin Laden's name. "They find it silly when people talk about al-Qaeda," says journalist Mohammed al-Kheriji, 28, as he sips a latte at the city's newest Starbucks. "People are worried about their own problems."

The article goes on about how "the country seethes with open loathing for the U.S. and sympathy for bin Laden's cause." The 15 Saudi hijackers who killed themselves on 9/11 are revered as "the Fifteen."

I think Saudi Arabia would make a find 51st state, and a great place from which to launch an attack against Saddam.