Somewhere in the USA there is a group of intelligence analysts who are much more interested in Saudi state policies, both overt and covert, than they were on, say, September 10th. They are probably just as interested in the policies of the Wahhabi clergy, which they probably ignored before September 11th. They are piecing together conversations, reports of meetings, statements in the Saudi press, conversations with travellers, and - most important - records of financial transactions to build a picture. Somewhere else are a few people with higher pay grades who are reading daily reports on what that picture looks like. Somewhere not too far from there, there are men in green suits who are putting together and regularly revising big stacks of dry-reading plans in 3-ring binders - arcanae like movement timetables, requisitions for ammunition - and maps. There are lots of maps, each of them laying out a geographic sector and assigning it to a military unit. Somewhere further away there are other guys in green suits, down at the motor pool, painting their tanks in desert camo.

If the Saudis are very smart they will drop the bellicosity. They don't have the gunnies to make it stick, at least not before there are cigar-smoking Methodists having a few beers and some Carolina-style barbeque with scantily-clad babes in the ruins of Riyadh.

When they've dropped the bellicosity, they can start unobtrusively cleaning up their mess - we aren't a vindictive lot. We'll know they've made a start toward mending fences when the Grand Mufti in Makkah meets with a terrible accident. We know by now all about the madrassahs and the steady diet of anti-American propaganda, raising kids from elementary school age into the desire to pop off a few infidels on the way to Paradise. We know about the "charitable donations" that buy the arms and ammunition to be used to achieve those ends. We've noticed that everywhere the Wahhabi brand of Islam is exported, there are bloody clashes between its adherents and whatever brand of infidel it is they're living next to. We've looked a little further into Dagestan, Chechnya, Kashmir and Afghanistan, talked to a few Filipinos and Indonesians. They're onto the idea in Singapore and even in Malaysia, too, by the way.

While they're cleaning up, how can the Saudis dig themselves out of their public opinion hole? Be polite. Be very polite. Do a thorough and public house-cleaning at home. (No doubt they'll be "Shocked!" at what they find.) Dump the arms and ammunition and dump the hard boys. Exporting snuffies to terrorize a good part of the world is a good way to be thoroughly disliked, once people notice. If the Saudis want to fund schools, that's fine. They would even gain merit (to use an unbeliever's term) if rather than running schools for subversion they opened technical and business schools run along the same lines as the madrassahs - i.e., free to poor kids. They would do a Hell of a lot more good for the countries in which they're located, and they'd be the one way to restore the Saudis' good name.

They won't do that, though. It would mean dumping the Wahhabi tub-thumpers and running the risk of having them turn against the government. And it's a lot easier to turn a kid into a gunman than into a scientist.