a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, January 08, 2004 Sympathy for the DevilLast month my friend Marc asked this wonkish question: "If the Bush administration intends to pursue a policy of pre-emptive attacks, wasn't Iraq among the worst possible targets it could have chosen?"Here's my long-overdue, and just plain long, answer: Yes because public patience for another war should be at an all-time low, since Bush exaggerated, etc. But in a deeper way, no. Robert Baer's helpful newish book about Washington's relationship with Riyadh (Sleeping With the Devil) lets me see, more clearly than ever, that we went into Iraq because it stood out as the best possible target — meaning easiest, ripest, most strategic. We already had a military lock on the country, and it would look good to go in strong pretending to have some kind of revenge in the Middle East for September 11. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia may have had links to al Qaeda, Mohammed Atta, and (in Pakistan's case) fully-developed nuclear weapons; but the sad and simple fact is that Bush lacks the cojones to challenge either one. Toppling Musharraf would be a bad idea. He's our friend, as far as he's allowed to be. But al-Qaeda and 9/11 are pure Saudi phenomena, encouraged and funded by the Sa'ud family. We keep the royals in place because they not only manage the world's largest oil reserves but also encourage, and fund, so many interests in Washington — "K Street lobbyists, PR firms, and lawyers," recites Baer, "... bluestocking charities, like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Children's National Medical Center, and every presidential library of the last thirty years," not to mention think tanks, the aerospace industry, even American farm subsidies. "Any Washington bureaucrat with a room-temperature IQ knows that if he stays on the right side of the kingdom, some way or another, he'll be able to finagle his way to the feed at the Saudi trough." Bush, as the world's most important bureaucrat, knows this well, and anyway his dad's Carlyle Group has been intimate with the Al-Sa'ud for decades. You don't make war on family friends. A democratic Arabia might also be fundamentalist, so "regime change" would be a disaster, and even I can see how letting fundamentalist madmen seize such massive reserves of oil might be a bad thing. (Baer envisions a worldwide depression.) Invading Saudi Arabia would also encourage Osama and his followers; one unspoken goal of toppling Saddam, after all, was to get U.S. troops out of the Holy Land. So. Facing the devil is daunting. I'm not sure what I would have done in Bush's place. But he's an oil boy, and therefore exactly the wrong guy to deal squarely with the Saudis after September 11. Instead, we got a war in Iraq, which may have trashed our credibility abroad but did place our military on the eastern edge of Saudi Arabia. In case of some bad emergency like the collapse of the house of Sa'ud we'll be in a strong position to grab those oil fields; which means, from a Machiavellian point of view, that Iraq was not a bad target at all. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:09 PM | |
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