Redeye to Riyadh

President Barack "Yes I Can" Obama began his tour of the Middle East today, launched on "a mission to write a new chapter on Islam and the West" according to the Associated Press. After flying all night on Air Force One he landed in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, the peninsula "where Islam began" and the light, sweet crude is pumped out by the tankerful, and was greeted by that nation's monarch, King Abdullah.

"We are lugubriously and most unctuously honored to welcome the illustrious media-star president of the venerable American republic," said Abdullah, handing his guest several pounds of 24K bling.

"We offer our humblest, most comprehensively lubricated, and thoroughly homogenized felicitations to your majesty," the prez replied, which leads me to wonder if he knows that the Ghawar Field, the biggest ever discovered, is depleting faster than a June snowmelt.

The AP story goes on to inform us that as the "Birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia is still considered guardian of the faith as home to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. The Sunni Arab powerhouse also sits on the world's largest oil reserves, buys billions in U.S. military equipment and has cooperated extensively with the U.S. on anti-terrorist operations."

The AP reporter did not mention, however, that the close cooperation between the world's largest oil producer and the world's largest oil consumer have caused some serious trouble for us in the recent past. Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against the U.S. cites American occupation of "the land of the two holy places" as one of the most important, perhaps the most important reason for al-Qaida's desire to attack this country.

But why bring up such stuff on this happy occasion? The president and the king outdid each other with shows of respect, affection, and long volleys of effusive compliments, stopping just short of swapping wives, possibly because Abdullah would bring more units to the table than Obama could.

And this is just a warm-up! The big crescendo of Obama's Mideast trip comes tomorrow when he will deliver The Major Speech in Cairo, which he has characterized as a "truth-telling" address intended to launch that "new chapter" in our relations with the Muslim world.

However, Obama has made clear that he does not intend to make new policy in this speech, but to "frame it differently." I'm glad he clarified that.

I hope he gets the results he's looking for, but I think he'd get better ones if he did make a new policy, one whose centerpiece would be that from now on our number one objective in trying to root out al-Qaida and provide an ideological alternative to the Taliban will be to avoid the slaughter of Muslim civilians, bystanders, and the marginally involved.