Five years before masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Osama bin Laden laid out his strategy in a declaration of jihad “against the Americans occupying the land of the two holiest sites.” The aim: “Expel the infidels from the Arabian peninsula.” Bin Laden argued that the Saudi regime, whose rule derived from its safeguarding of Islam’s holiest sites, had forfeited its legitimacy by ceding so much of its security to the “infidel” Americans.

Two and a half decades later, Bin Laden is dead, the U.S. still has troops patrolling his former safe haven in Afghanistan, and President Donald Trump, once billed as “the dove” in the 2016 election, is as closely tied to the Saudi leadership as perhaps any American chief executive in recent history, which is quite a remarkable statement in itself. He defended ruthless Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman after the de facto ruler’s orchestrated murder of a U.S.-based Washington Post journalist; he sidestepped Congress to push through $8 billion in new “emergency” arms deals with the Saudi royals; he ritually and publicly touched the orb of global influence with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz. Now, Trump is mulling military action against Iran in retaliation for a devastating drone attack on one of the Saudi regime’s key oil-processing facilities on Saturday.

“Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked,” Trump tweeted out of the blue Sunday evening. “There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!”

Call it the curse of Osama bin Laden: The harder an American administration fights against the terrorist’s enduring challenge, the harder it becomes to quit Saudi Arabia. Here is an administration not merely ready to defend Saudi soil as if it were a NATO member, but asking the Saudis how to proceed. Allies of the Saudi royals want the U.S. to proceed with bombs, lots of bombs. “What is required is nothing more than the destruction of Iran’s oil installations, and if there is a capacity, nuclear facilities and military bases as well,” prominent Saudi pundit (and enjoyer of royal protection) Turki al-Hamad intoned this weekend.

In the Beltway, fealty to Saudi Arabia’s whims is just business as usual. The White House has offered no concrete evidence that Iran is to blame for the attacks. (Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels, who are fighting a Saudi coalition for survival in Yemen, claimed responsibility for the attack, though all indications are that the strike goes beyond their known capabilities.) But Trump’s gauntlet was taken up almost reflexively by “grownups” in Congress. “This may well be the thing that calls for military action against Iran, if that’s what the intelligence supports,” Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Fox & Friends viewers Monday morning.