Saudi America

By Alan Bisbort
Created Dec 10 2006 - 8:54am

The other day I pulled in to my local Cheap-O Gas Mart to fill my Echo and
noticed gas prices had begun inching up from when I'd last filled up. I
drove around afterwards and noticed prices were up at Exxon, Mobil, Texaco
and Shell stations, as well. If I'm not crazy, they seem to have been
inching up for, oh, about a month now.

Hmmm. Lemme see...what happened about a month ago? Could these bipolar gas
prices have anything to do with the election? Gosh, do you think the oil
companies would manipulate prices--knocking them down, down, down before the
election to keep their Republican cronies in power, then jimmying them up,
up and away now that Democrats are taking over the national train wreck?
Nah, couldn't be...

On the eve of the election that swept the old Republican Congress into the
dustbin, my mind turned to such conspiracy theories. But here was the thing.
One needn't be a card-carrying member of the Tinfoil Hat Society to believe
in Republican conspiracies. They do their dirty deeds in the open, nothing
secret or subtle about it. As for gas prices, they were down because the
Saudis increased production as a favor to Bush, and all other oil producers
(Venezuela, Nigeria) followed suit, to stay competitive.

Now that Bush is a Sir Lame Duckhead and the Republican Congress leaves
office with (yes, you read it correctly!) a 13%% approval rating, gas prices
are inching up again. Oil company profits can be maximized and the stain of
rising, even runaway gas prices will now accrue to the Democrats. It's what
they call a win-win situation in corporate board rooms--screw the consumer
and let someone else take the blame.

But is there a conspiracy?

You make the call. Joshua Holland has reported that in September, after the
primaries were through, gas prices dropped fifty cents per gallon. Two weeks
before the election, gas prices were at an annual low. One week after the
election, prices rose five cents a gallon. Each week since has seen a
similar rise. So that now, a month out from the election, prices seem on
pace to reclaim that magic $3 per gallon figure by the new year.

It's no secret that the Saudi royal family loves the Bush family. All one
need do is look at the photographs of them together, documentation that
stretches back into George H.W. Bush's presidency. Grown men, swaddled in
jewels and ornate headdresses holding hands with a Bush man, any Bush will
do. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the U.S. is so close
to the family he's nicknamed "Bandar Bush." Bob Woodward, in a brief burp of
truthfulness in mid-2004, told 60 Minutes (later, in his book, Plan of
Attack) that Bandar pledged, "as we get closer to the election, they could
increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop
significantly." (They did; Bush allegedly won the election, give or take
voting purges in Ohio).

After the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden's extended Saudi family were
accorded special treatment. While Americans were grounded for three days,
the bin Laden family was allowed to fly unfettered out of the country, to
avoid answering unpleasant questions and possible legal consequences for the
terrorist act. It pays to be a Saudi friend of Bush.

Former CIA officer Robert Baer in his book, Sleeping With the Devil: How
Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, details how this came to be. "From
the mid-1930s until well into the 1960s, Saudi Arabia was a branch office of
America's oil giants--a Republican internationalist's fantasy. The U.S.
remained secure in the knowledge that Saudi oil would always be there for
us, under the sand, cheap, and as safe as if it were locked up in Fort Knox.
We built Saudi Arabia's oil business and, for our efforts, got full and easy
access to its crude." After the OPEC embargo in the mid-1970s crippled the
US economy, however, the Saudis saw the power they have over us, enough
power now to think they can sway our elections and dictate our national
energy policy.

But this discussion predates oil. It starts with the fact that Saudi Arabia
is not a country, per se. It's an autocratic "kingdom" created by King Ibn
Saud in 1932, and it has not known a moment of democracy since. Women are
repressed and crazed fundamentalists preach jihad against the West, a fact
borne out by 15 of the 18 attackers on 9/11 being Saudi Arabian. My point is
that our country policies, under Bush, are driven by unelected kings who
live in palaces and really, deep down, hate us.

And, apparently, it's not deep down any longer. Rather, it's as out in the
open as the Republicans' collective crimes of the past six years. That is,
"private" Saudi citizens (read: jewelry-encrusted oil barons and their 35
cousins as well as, in all likelihood, members of the bin Laden family,
relocated from the U.S. after 9/11) are giving millions of dollars to Sunni
insurgents in Iraq. Most of that cash is being used to buy weapons that will
kill American soldiers. Though the Saudi government denies this is
happening, even the Bush Family Official Whitewash Committee--aka, the Iraq
Study Group--discovered that "Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab
insurgents." If the ISG says "a source of," you know that means, "is THE
major source of." Indeed, the AP reported that truck drivers are carrying
boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq. That money is headed to the
insurgents.

Saudi Arabia, according to the Bush Family, is America's staunchest ally in
the Middle East. They are the people for whom America's energy and foreign
affairs policies are being crafted. If this is a conspiracy, it's the most
one-sided deal in world history.

When I was a wee lad, the Republicans ran a "Swift Boat" campaign against
war hero John F. Kennedy when he was running for president against
not-war-hero Dick Nixon. The attacks implied that, because JFK was Roman
Catholic, he'd take orders from a foreign power--the Vatican. Theodore H.
White wrote, "Much to his dismay, [Kennedy] discovered that many southern
Protestant groups still believed in old canards about every Catholic having
to obey the Pope's commands unquestioningly. He finally decided to try to
defeat the issue by meeting it head-on." On Sept. 13, 1960, Kennedy went
into the lion's den of Southern Baptist leaders and laid a lecture on them
that essentially froze them in place. It's a beautiful polemic, worth your
seeking out to read in its entirety.

Among the points he made was to call for "an America where the separation of
church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the
president (should he be Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister
would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." He asked voters to judge him
on his political record, not on the basis of carefully selected "quotations
out of context from the statements of church leaders, usually in other
countries, frequently in other centuries and always omitting, of course, the
statement of the American bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed
church-state separation." He said he was not "the Catholic candidate for
president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens
also to be Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters -- and
the church does not speak for me."

Now, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, we really are
being run by a foreign power. The two most powerful men in our government
are essentially unofficial agents of Saudi Arabia. The United States is, in
a sense, merely an annex of Saudi Arabia. Our real flag is the gas pump.

Call us Saudi America.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson