If you believe that the Bush Administration is engaged in a grand strategy to overthrow hostile and dangerous tyrannies, particularly in the Middle East, you have to assume that an important component of that strategy is the building of public support, at home and abroad, for targeting specific enemies. Certainly, in Iraq, that part worked, as the war was backed by Congress, a large percentage of the public, and several key allies (and parts of the case for war, such as Saddam’s violation of UN resolutions, were validated by the UN and even many of the war’s critics).
A tougher nut to crack will be Saudi Arabia, which (1) casts itself as an ally, (2) never engages in openly hostile acts towards its neighbors, (3) has no weapons of mass destruction, (4) has no identifiable dictator so much as a diffuse class of feudal lords, (5) is seen as a symbolic leader of the Muslim world, and (6) has all sorts of people on its payroll, from bipartisan former government officials at home to Islamic movements all over the world.
But the Administration, if it set out to build public support for a confrontation with the Saudis, has one thing on its side: even the nuttiest of the nutty Left has now started calling on Bush to take a tougher line with Riyadh. When you can get Michael Moore demanding that you be thrown in the briar patch . . .