The whole world is dependent on their oil - do you REALLY think anyone is going to support sanctions? What if the saud tribe gets knocked off - then what follows? An islamofascist regime like Iran? The US could bump them off in one afternoon. But that's where the islamic holy sites are - then a billion moslems go on the warpath. They do a balancing act where they keep everyone off their back by selling oil to the "great satan", but then "make up" for it by financing the wahabbis, etc.
See above, and Saddam was a loose cannon who attacked three neighboring countries and certainly would have gotten nukes if he didn't already have them. Then what would he have done? He had to go.
The intellectual roots of islamofascism preceded by decades the US arming of the Taliban, but yes - Osama was radicalized. The US armed them starting at the end of Jimmy Carter's disastrous four year administration, characterized by Carter's foreign policy of concede, withdraw, give away, abandon, betray - when he FINALLY grasped that he had single-handedly created a whole new era of expansionism by the soviet union and its proxies in south america, africa, and the middle east. I'm eternally impressed by how europeans almost never grasp the cold war, how they look at all the side effects but not the titanic struggle itself - perhaps because they were so minimally involved. Wars, especially 40 year wars, have all kinds of unpredictable consequences, but the US, excepting for 95% of the Jimmy Carter era, never lost sight of the ultimate enemy - the soviet union.
