DTJ
You are aware, I hope, that the United States told Saudi Arabia (in 1991) that SH was mbutting troops on the Iraq-SA border when in fact he wasn't. SA was told that so they would feel sufficiently threatened by SH to compel them to "invite" US forces into SA (operation Desert Shield) to protect them from the seemingly read-to-invade SH forces.
The longterm result was the continued presence of at least 20k US troops in SA, which seems to have been the prime reason for the attacks on US embasies in Africa in the 1990's, the attack on the USS Cole, and finally 9-11.
The last I read (and this didn't exactly make any headlines in the US) was that the US was pulling it's military out of SA once the invasion of Iraq was underway. One of the reasons for the invasion and installation of a puppet gov't in Iraq was to secure a new location for US airbases in the region once it became clear that the continued presence in SA was causing so much turmoil within the kingdom (perhaps an admission of the link between US presence in SA and 911). That, plus the fact that SA is probably running out of oil (and most of Iraq's oil is still in the ground) meant that it makes more sense to station US forces in the country with the most potential for future oil production.
For the neo-cons and baptist christian fundamentalists in the Bush administration, they wanted to buttbuttinate SH since he actually attacked Israel during operation Desert Storm (christian fundamentalists interpret biblical scriptures in a dire way and SH could have been the anti-christ to them and saw it as their duty to destroy him).
