[Reader-list] (fwd) Book Review

[sanjay ghosh]

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House of Bush, House of Saud: The Hidden Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
by Craig Unger 
355pp, Gibson Square, £17.99

Since 9/11, the world has taken a very different turn. The reason is the United States, the key player the Bush administration. This book seeks to throw light on the nature of that administration and, above all, its relationship with Saudi Arabia, the largest oil exporter in the world, possessing an estimated 25% of all known oil reserves. House of Bush, House of Saud is a title that suggests a conspiracy, but this book does not belong to the conspiracy genre. Rather, it meticulously seeks to plot the relationship between Bushes senior and junior - together with their associates - and the elite Saudi families. Sometimes the link seems a little tenuous, resting on a narrative connection, but for the most part this is a very powerful, well-researched and sober book that leaves the reader both enlightened and more than a little disturbed. You will certainly view the Bush administration - and, indeed, American policy-making - through a rather different prism in future. 

The close relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia goes back 60 years, but what engendered its special intimacy was the oil crisis of 1973. From 1970, American oil production began to fall and the country was increasingly dependent on foreign supplies: Saudi Arabia became critical to the maintenance of the American way of life. A large proportion of the petrodollars that flowed into the coffers of the Saudi royal family as a result of the oil price hike were invested in the US. Unger estimates that, since the mid-70s, 85,000 super-rich Saudis have invested the staggering sum of $860bn in American companies. Houston, the oil capital of the United States, has benefited more than any other city and now has a significant Saudi presence. 

The Bush family has enjoyed a long connection with oil: George Bush bought an oil company in the 1950s and sold it, at a handsome profit, a decade later. His confidante and lifetime collaborator, James Baker, was similarly connected with oil, being a partner in Baker Botts, a big Houston law firm that represented oil-industry interests. When Bush began to put together his presidential team in 1978, it was based on a new political network in Houston, that of Big Oil (his son's administration has taken this much further, nakedly representing the oil industry like never before). Not surprisingly, this slowly became enmeshed with Saudi interests, which, especially in the figure of Prince Bandar, a member of the royal family and for many years the Saudi ambassador to the US, slowly and painstakingly sought access to the American political elite - most successfully of all with the House of Bush. Prince Bandar, for long the central Saudi figure in the US, hugely rich on his own account, has been a close confidante of George Sr for two decades. 

George Jr trod a not dissimilar path, establishing his own - albeit not too successful - oil company in the late 70s, until bought out by Harken Oil, of which he became a director; when Harken, too, was saved from extinction by a very wealthy Saudi investor, George Jr was one of the beneficiaries. The same wheels within wheels were turning. Unger is interesting on the differences between father and son. George Sr was a product of the East Coast establishment and later adopted Texas as his home. In contrast, George Jr was unashamedly, brazenly even, a Texan, born and brought up in American's oil state. The misperception of what he would be like as a president had much to do with his father's reputation and experience, which was largely to prove a false lead. 

The US-Saudi relationship blossomed in the context of two crucial wars, both of which the US fought by proxy: the Iran-Iraq war and the Afghan war. The American administration was deeply concerned about the impact of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran - previously the US's most powerful ally, Israel apart, in the Middle East. It used Saddam, in strategy well detailed by Unger, as a means by which to counter the Iranian regime, secretly supplying him, for a decade or more, with weapons and cash. The Saudis - who effectively replaced Iran as America's regional ally - were intimately involved in the intricacies of American policy, even coming to the aid of the Americans by secretly funding - at the Reagan administration's request - the Contras in Nicaragua after Congress had blocked presidential support. 

Unlikely as the American-Saudi alliance might seem, during the cold war there was a mutual sympathy. Of course, the central component was, and remains, one of raw, elemental interest. The US depended on a reliable supply of cheap oil - for which the Saudis were utterly crucial - while the Saudi regime needed a military guarantor for what was a deeply insecure regime in a profoundly unstable region. Both regarded the Soviet Union as the infidel: albeit for the Americans a secular one, and for the Saudis religious. These interests coincided most closely in Afghanistan. 

The Saudis became enthusiastically involved in the American-inspired covert funding of, and support for, the mujahideen war against the newly installed Soviet-backed government. Strangely, 10 years before the end of the cold war, the conflict was to prefigure the future course of events, on the one hand the collapse of the Soviet Union and on the other hand the emergence of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. The Afghan war was to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam while for Bin Laden, a member of one of Saudi Arabia's elite families, who were intimately connected with the House of Saud, Afghanistan became the Islamic equivalent of the Spanish civil war, a mobilising cause across the Muslim world, especially the fundamentalist part, and above all in Saudi Arabia: indeed, the House of Saud found the mujahideen crusade a useful way of asserting its own militant Islamic credentials and appeasing domestic opinion. So al-Qaida was forged in the crucible of the Afghan war. 

Bin Laden was an authentic product of Saudi Arabia, not simply a rogue child. His family was one of the most powerful in the country. The House of Saud owed its very existence, and perpetuation, to Wahhabism, a fundamentalist school of Islam. He was not an aberration. But now, propelled by his experiences in the Afghan war, he became increasingly disenchanted with the corruption and westernisation of the House of Saud. The breach came in 1990 when, in the first Gulf war, the Saudi regime agreed to allow American troops to be stationed on its soil. Having defeated one infidel, the Soviet Union, Bin Laden now turned on another, the United States. He resolved on the removal of American troops - in which he eventually succeeded - and the overthrow of the House of Saud, now weaker and more vulnerable than ever before. 

The Saudis never enjoyed the same kind of intimacy and ease with the Clinton administration as they did with the Bush administrations. The connections, cultivated over a quarter of a century, are complex and multifarious, emanating outwards from Houston, centred on oil, embracing both the public and private sector activities of the House of Bush, lubricated and driven by money and power. Unger estimates that $1.476bn has made its way over time from the Saudis to the House of Bush, and its allied companies and institutions. He writes: "It could safely be said that never before in history had a presidential candidate - much less a presidential candidate and his father, a former president - been so closely tied financially and personally to the ruling family of another foreign power. Never before had a president's fortunes and public policies been so deeply entwined with another nation." 

September 11 placed the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US under extreme pressure. Unger catalogues the tensions in intimate detail. He describes how the Bush administration has sought to soothe and safeguard the intimacy, failing to ask or pursue crucial questions about the involvement of leading Saudi figures in 9/11. But the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia - one of the cornerstones of American policy since 1973, and earlier - is now closer to breaking point than ever before. Can the Bush administration continue to turn a blind eye? Will the House of Saud survive? What will the Americans do in response to its likely successor, an aggressively anti-American, fundamentalist regime? What price an American occupation of the world's most important oilfields? The future is, indeed, uncertain.

· Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. 
Saturday July 31, 2004
The Guardian