Despite huge US imports of Saudi oil, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee said it was high time Saudi Arabia was told to stop financing hate-filled religious schools around the world.
"I do not doubt the pressure that the Saudis are under, like other Arab states in the region, having to essentially buy off their extreme groups in order to maintain themselves," Senator Joseph Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday.
But the Delaware Democrat said the Saudis had "gone above and beyond the call" to destabilize the region "by essentially funding a significant portion of what we are now dealing with -- Islam gone awry."
Biden, in answer to a question, said it was one thing to export Wahhabism, the Saudi Arabian proselytizing version of Islam, in religious schools. But he said many of the schools were "hate-filled anti-American breeding grounds."
He said he was very aware that the US imported about 1.6 million barrels of oil each day from Saudi Arabia.
But he said Washington had to take a risk by having a "simple straightforward discussion" and say: "Don't push it. Cease and desist from this activity or there will be consequences."
Saudi Arabia's form of Wahhabism denies equal rights to women. Its teachings are also known to have inspired Osama bin Laden, suspected of the being behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the US, as well as the Taliban militia that harbors him in Afghanistan.
Biden also said the arrival of US ground forces in Afghanistan, where the US is waging a war against the Taliban regime, could be a positive development in the propaganda war. The Muslim world would see American soldiers taking risks rather than "a high-tech bully" relying solely on bombs.
"It demonstrates to the entire world that we're willing to risk American lives, that we have the capability to risk them and succeed," Biden said.
"The longer the bombing goes on, the more susceptible we are to criticism, justified and unjustified, in the Islamic world," he said.
The crisis of Sept. 11, Biden said, had also forced President George W. Bush to make some hard decisions on foreign policy that meant rejecting right-wing positions he had previously embraced.
It was now time to build on multilateralism if the US hoped to maintain the coalition against terrorism over the long run, he said.
This meant not scrapping the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia or continuing to jettison outright the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and environmental treaties, he said. And it meant helping Russia financially to scrap its weapons of mass destruction, Biden added.
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