The mayor of New York has been outstanding and very much appreciated in NY after the 9/11 tragedy (more than the President, according to polls).
Then came the Saudi Prince Al-Walid Ben Tahal, offering a 10 million $ cheque for the families of the NY firemen.
The cheque was attached to a press communiqué in which the Prince declares it's time to think about what lead to such criminal acts and I believe the US should be more neutral concerning the Palestinian issue (ok, ok, probably not the exact words, coming from a translation).
Then mr Giuliani refused to accept such words and refused the cheque. "Those who committed such act lost any right to justification, any right to ask to understand why it was committed".
This seems to accuse the Saudis (OBL is from Saudi Arabia) for being responsible for the attacks,as I've read in "Le Figaro" .
Al-Walid (whose investments in the US reach 14 Billion $)uses the same arguments on CNN (moneyline) he used in the press report: "the US support to Israel doesn't help us".
First, I'm wondering why it is intolerable to try to understand why it happened, instead of just qualifying them as evil and us as good. The scientific method requires us to try to understand and, anyway, that's what historians will do in the future. To call them "evil"and us "good" is leading us straight to a religious-like conflict, a the causes and effects are simply being obliterated.
I fear before winter, Saudi Arabia might turn its back towards the west, espouse all pro-Palestinan movement and suddenly increase the oil barrel price by so many fold.
Does the US want to alienate itself Saudi Arabia?Is it in its interest? And then, by a snowball effect, all the other Muslim countries.

And I was quite amused by the posts answering to mine about the UN and the Nobel Peace Prize. Phil turning it immediately into a sport thing.
However, the Bush administration did pay all that had been due. It turns out, the US does need the rest of the world, therefore the UN, for this war. There was a problem in the 90's concerning Somalia: the US was quite unhappy by the turn of events and dropped its support to Butros-Ghali and instead voted in favor of Kofi Annan to head the UN: now, he's receiving the Nobel Peace Price and is still being ignored by americans (well, at least the Herald Tribune puts him in front page).
The UN can only apply decisions from the nations that are part of it. Some decisions are taken by the 15 members of the Security Council: each one of those 15 members has the veto right.
After the withdrawal of the US and Israel from the Durban conference, I posted something about not being a good idea to leave before the end; I remember Mary Anne giving a similar example in an event earlier in the US history.
This was shortly before 9/11.

Raoul