THE SAUDI PR OFFENSIVE isn’t working very well. Craig Schamp isn’t impressed, and an MSNBC story by Andrea Mitchell on the PR campaign stressed that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, that the Saudis were still funding terror, and that the Saudi government was involved. The included denials by Prince Faisal al-Saud were particularly oily and unpersuasive, even for the unimpressive Saudi diplomatic corps.

Perhaps the “rope-a-dope” strategy is really aimed at building U.S. support for an invasion of Saudi-controlled Arabia — and at demonstrating to the world that Bush was serious about being for us or against us, by giving the Saudis enough rope to publicly hang themselves (metaphorically) before the United States does so literally.