Arab News Staff Writer

RIYADH, 13 January 2004 — Saudi Arabia yesterday reacted angrily to a tendentious campaign led by US hawks after Richard Perle, an adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, lumped the Kingdom in the “axis of evil”.

Perle told CNN on Sunday, “The Saudis qualify for their own membership in the axis of evil,” which President George Bush had named as Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea.

“I hope that those who believe we are now getting full cooperation are right,” he added, referring to Saudi Arabia’s role in the US-led war on terror.

“I have yet to see the evidence,” Perle charged in the latest assault on the Kingdom by influential US neo-conservatives.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Saudi ambassador in London, branded Perle a “Zionist extremist”.

The envoy told the Al-Hayat newspaper that Perle “has predicted the disintegration of Saudi Arabia and expressed his own point of view much more than that of Washington.”

Saudi Arabia owed its existence to “God, followed by its faithful people,” he added.

The Okaz newspaper set the tone of the riposte in the media. “The hawks stubbornly follow the same political line they laid out for this administration to impose their hegemony over the world,” it said.

“While the whole world refuses war as a means of settling conflict ... Washington is alone against the tide, losing friends and making enemies,” the daily said.

Okaz warned that tolerating campaigns directed against one of its strategic interests, the (Bush) administration was acting against American interests.

Al-Watan hit out at such “irresponsible statements” which the daily accused were part of a “tendentious campaign”.

“Richard Perle, one of the main planners of the war in Iraq, only knows the language of force, murder and destruction,” the paper said. “From his statements and those of his ilk, we do not believe that the United States wants to improve its image in the world.”

The Al-Yaum branded Perle a “rotten fruit ... dishing out accusations left and right.”

“Through its flagrant interference in the affairs of other states,” Washington was becoming “a tool destroying world peace,” added Al-Jazirah daily.