President Bush: Stop pandering to supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad

President George W. Bush has led civilization victoriously through two huge battles in a world war against terrorism.

His top political aides are unintentionally handing him over to his worst political enemies.

The Center for Security Policy has warned for more than two years now – since well before 9/11 – that certain top presidential political strategists are as ignorant and reckless in the national security field as they are brilliant and ruthless in winning elections.

In ways reminiscent of Clinton and Carville, these strategists, in and out of the White House, thrust national security aside and compromise the president’s leadership to pander to an ethnic group here and there for a few more votes in the next electoral cycle. First it was shutting down the vital Navy range in Vieques, Puerto Rico in a misguided and fruitless kowtow to Hispanics.

More dangerously, it has been the endless pandering to militant supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad and other terrorists in the name of courting the “Arab-American vote” and the “Muslim vote.”

Few of those groups would exist without cash injections from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The Saudi regime, which has made Wahhabism its official state religion, has spent billions supporting terrorism and spreading hateful Wahhabi militantcy around the world. It has been leaning on American politicians compromised by petrodollars and, with the neighboring Wahhabi emirate of Qatar, has been financing political influence operations in Washington.

Recipients of that money, some very close to the White House, have been maneuvering endlessly to legitimize the Wahhabi lobby and defeat the president’s own national security legislation. For the sake of the president and of the country, this has to stop.

Senator Jon Kyl courageously held a ground-breaking hearing in June about the growing Wahhabi influence in the United States. Senators Arlen Specter and Susan Collins followed with a hearing on Saudi terror funding. Senator Richard Shelby says he will have additional hearings, and Senator Kyl is preparing to hold at least one more. These are all members of the president’s own party. Yet the administration keeps brushing them off.

Now comes the White House’s ham-handed censorship of the congressional report on 9/11 intelligence failures. The president’s most influential allies in the press are now raising the alarm. “The White House is simply not going to be able to get away with the same old secrecy,” Wall Street Journal editors wrote in a stunning August 8 editorial. The furor over the administration’s recent insistence on redacting 28 pages of a 9/11 report related to the Saudis has made that clear enough.”

The Wall Street Journal then made a chilling point: “The Saudi question has finally given opportunistic Democrats a chance to get to the President’s political right on fighting terror.”

Time for some serious White House damage control, while there’s still time.