Reading over the weekend of the latest contretemps involving the Saudis — whether to sell them $20 billion worth of weapons — we found ourselves retrieving Max Singer’s celebrated op-ed piece calling for independence for the Eastern Province. The piece, one of the most remarked upon we’ve ever run, appeared in the April 26, 2002, number of The New York Sun and advanced a radical proposition. It posited that once President Bush attacked and toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, “a much bigger step will have been taken in the effort to head off militant Islam before it is too late.”

Mr. Singer argued that one essential measure would be to stop the flow of Wahabi money from Saudi Arabia and pointed out that the Wahabis are but a small minority of the population of the oil-rich Eastern Province, where all the Saudi money comes from and where a substantial minority of Saudi Shiites are subjugated to the Al Saud’s rule and treated as inferiors even though they do much of the work in the oil industry. He argued for splitting the Eastern Province from the rest of today’s Saudi Arabia — with our help.

Now that is a policy to sink one’s teeth into, and never more so than at the current moment so riddled with contradictions. One has an administration in Washington that is, on the one hand, complaining about the fact that the Saudis are feeding the war against us in Iraq, permitting terrorists to cross its border into the theater and exporting its Wahabi propaganda. On the other hand, the administration is proposing to sell the Saudi regime a huge cache of new weapons, some of which can — as our Eli Lake stressed to us in a wire Sunday — target individual windows in an office building from hundreds of miles away.

The Democrats, led by Congressman Anthony Weiner, are, on the one hand, making noises about trying to block the sale of weapons to the Saudis even while, on the other hand, also moving to block America’s ability to fight the war in Iraq. And into the mix one can stir in a government in Israel that would, at one time in its history, have agitated to block the sale of weapons to the Saudis, particularly because such weapons could — and no doubt will — be used against the Jewish state. Yet today a weakened government in Israel is acquiescing in such an arms transfer on the grounds that we need to arm the Saudis for a fight with Iran, though neither America nor Israel appears prepared to lead such a fight.

We’re well aware of Churchill’s famous line in the Commons about his willingness to ally with Stalin against Hitler, but even by that standard, our own view is that the Saudis are more a part of the problem than the solution. It would be risky enough to arm the Saudis if one had already made a clear commitment to go to war against Iran. But arming the Saudis with vast amounts of high grade weaponry without a clear commitment from the United States Congress to back a war with Iran strikes us as a doubly dangerous demarche.

It’s hard enough to get the Congress to back even our current mission in Iraq, in which Mr. Weiner himself is a sheep in hawk’s clothing. He may have been tracking the Saudi royals for five years, demanding reforms to their anti-Semitic school books (to no avail). His effort against the latest arms deal is not going to be easy, for the proposal is greased with $30 billion in additional aid for Israel and $13 billion for Egypt over the next ten years. Though we have an Arms Export Control Act, no Congress has ever succeeded in sustaining the veto-proof majority needed to block an arms sale requested by a president.

The better strategic line is to support a sustained effort at defeating our enemies in Iraq, work to support democratic, pro-American elements in Iran, and dismantle the Saudi tyranny. Splitting the Eastern Province from the rest of today’s Saudi Arabia would, as a strategic matter, accomplish several aims. Those living there, the liberal open-minded merchant communities who have worked with Americans for decades as well as the oppressed Shiites would welcome a liberation and support it. Among other things, an independent Eastern province could curtain the corruption of the Al Sauds, and it would defund the Wahabi movement.