I NEVER WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED – AT 10:37 P.M. ET:  You know, when most of us add two and two, we come up with four.  This formula does not seem to apply to much of mainstream journalism, which has, apparently, great difficulty figuring out simple things...unless informed by a leak.

The New York Times reports the "news" today, gleaned from Wikileaks, that Washington is having problems with Arab states that allow the funding of terrorists.  I am so shocked:

WASHINGTON — Nine years after the United States vowed to shut down the money pipeline that finances terrorism, senior Obama administration officials say they believe that many millions of dollars are flowing largely unimpeded to extremist groups worldwide, and they have grown frustrated by frequent resistance from allies in the Middle East, according to secret diplomatic dispatches.

Allies?

While American officials have publicly been relatively upbeat about their progress in disrupting terrorist financing, the internal State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, offer a more pessimistic account, with blunt assessments of the threats to the United States from money flowing to militants affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups.

Those bad boys.  And we thought they were so decent.  After all, isn't that what Middle East Studies departments in our colleges teach to our kids?

A classified memo sent by Mrs. Clinton last December made it clear that residents of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, all allies of the United States, are the chief financial supporters of many extremist activities. “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” the cable said, concluding that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Maybe the fashion plates of the liberal press, long obsesssed with the "Israel lobby," will now spend a bit of their yoga time probing the vast Saudi lobby in the United States, which has tens of millions of dollars to spend each year polishing the Saudi image and rewarding friends with lavish gifts. 

The dispatch and others offered similarly grim views about the United Arab Emirates (“a strategic gap” that terrorists can exploit), Qatar (“the worst in the region” on counterterrorism) and Kuwait (“a key transit point”). The cable stressed the need to “generate the political will necessary” to block money to terrorist networks — groups that she said were “threatening stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan and targeting coalition soldiers.”

COMMENT:  All those warm friends.  How can anyone think ill of them?  And how much did it cost us to "liberate" Kuwait in the first Gulf War? 

Our country has done a great deal for the Muslim world, and some of it has involved bloodshed.  An occasional thank you would be nice.  It would be even nicer if some of those countries helped us end the money flow to the suicide bombers and other scholars.

But why did it take an illegal leak to inform us of what common sense tells us has been happening all along?

December 5, 2010