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Title: Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude by ROBERT BAER ISBN: 1-4000-5021-9 Publisher: Crown Pub. Date: 15 July, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (71 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: OK--the sky really IS falling
Comment: After reading this book and Baer's earlier book, SEE NO EVIL, a number of things became depressingly clear to me:
*In a country who runs its foreign policy based on "interests, not friends" (or principles, for that matter) we are doomed to make stupid, arrogant and avoidable mistakes--over and over again.
*Money will be the death of us.
*Ignorance is not an excuse -- not for me and not for my country.
*It might not be a BAD thing to get the oil bidness out of the White House--and Congress and.....oh, pretty much anywhere people have control over armies or taxes.
I won't go into the specifics (see wizardofuz's review), but given Baer's years of experience on the inside, it's hard not to treat this stuff as credible, ergo apalling. (Baer's periodic table thumping and cynicism can be excused (like Richard Clarke's alleged Bush-bashing) as the result of years of banging his head against the wall of bureaucratic inertia.) The book is highly readable, full of recognizeable incidents, names and places. Instead of basing the problems in Islam, Baer puts the focus squarely on the politcs-as-usual/business-as-usual environment of the rich, powerful and incestuously interconnected. It won't leave you feeling particularly pleased with your elected government, but at least you'll have something concrete to write them about. I recommend this book as a good, first-person primer on the Byzantine relationship(s) between the US and the Saudis.
AND WHAT IF......since the Bushes have been in the bidness with the Saudis for a long while, and Wolfowitz and Perle, et al, had that nice big axe to grind, and things were going from bad to worse anyway over there, just WHAT IF all those boys in the west wing decided to secure another, contollable source of black gold while the gettin' was good, before the House of Saud just falls over and the whole area just goes to hell in a handbasket?.......I mean, I'm just sayin' -- what if......
Rating: 5
Summary: Compelling Condemnation of Crude Corruption
Comment:
Former spy Robert Baer, author of SEE NO EVIL: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, makes the leap from intelligence reformist to national mentor with his new book, "SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude." Indeed, his last sentence has the White House laying in the moonlight with its legs spread, lustfully eyeing the Saudi wallet on the bureau.
This is an extraordinary compelling work, not least because it provides detailed and documented discovery not previously available, of how the U.S. government has over the course of several administrations made a deliberate decision to a) not spy on the Arab countries, b) not collect and read open sources in Arabic, c) not attempt to understand the sub-state actors such as the Muslim brotherhood, despite a long history in which these groups commit suicide to achieve their objectives, including the murder of several heads of state.
Baer's most brutal points should make every American shudder: it is America itself that is subsidizing terrorism, as well as the corruption of the Saudi royal family. Baer's documented estimate is that $1 dollar from every barrel of petroleum is spent on Saudi royal family sexual misbehavior, and $1.50 of every barrel of petroleum bought by America ultimately ends up funding extremist schools, foundations, and terrorist groups.
Baer has "gone back in time" to document how all of this terrorism began in the 1970's, but despite its terrible local consequences (including the assassination of heads of state), was ignored by Washington as "a local problem."
In one lovely real-life account, Baer, then duty officer at CIA while Iraq poised to invade Kuwait, found that the $35 billion per year system was useless, impotent. It came down to his calling the chief of station in Kuwait, who called a border guard, who lifted his binoculars and described the Iraqi tanks stopped for lunch. Baer says: "As I waited, I wondered: Is this what all that money for intelligence is buying us? A pair of binoculars?"
Baer joins with Robert Kaplan in concluding that democracy in Arabia would be an out and out disaster. The decades of Islamic extremism and anti-Americanism run amok cannot be resolved by democratic elections because the very people who most hate America will be elected. Baer observes that "strongman tactics" such as used by Saddam Hussein and by the Syrian leadership--including a "scorched earth" campaign against the internal terrorist groups--are a more stable "rule of law". One can conclude that the US has made a mistake in destabilizing Iraq, and that the imposition of a democratic solution in Iraq will turn out to be vastly more difficult, and vastly more expensive, than the naive neo-conservatives understood when they set forth without bothering to establish who was in the majority within the population being "liberated."
Saudi Arabia has bought and paid for all the White House and Congressional influence it needs. This is why the recently released 9-11 report contains no mention of the secret documentation of Saudi Arabian complicity in the terrorism that took 3,000 American lives. As Senator Shelby noted on PBS NewsHour recently (he has read the secret report), 93% of the blanked out pages, and specifically those on Saudi sponsorship of terrorism against America and other nations, is a "con man's" effort to avoid "embarrassment." As the families of the 9-11 victims have said, "we need to know."
Baer is extraordinary. He was a success as a case officer (a clandestine representive of America dealing with traitors and terrorists under conditions of extreme risk), and he has now become a sort of "Patrick Henry" of the modern era, warning us in clear and compelling terms that White House corruption (a non-partisan recurring corruption) and Saudi Arabia are the twin swords upon which this great Nation may yet impale itself.
Rating: 5
Summary: Money talks, morals walk . . .
Comment: A profoundly disturbing and timely book. May it elicit better strategic thinking about America's best interests than has obviously occurred so far. Many thanks to Baer for having the courage to write it.
Baer presents a convincing portrait of the greed of US ruling and corporate circles as well as the spineless behavior of State Dept. bureaucrats, who exhibit their usual unquestioning implementation of any self-defeating US foreign policy as long as it leads to their next promotion. Baer lays out step by step the way that the ruling circles of the US sold out the long-term interests of the US to continue sucking at the Saudi t*t in what is essentially a modernized version of "What's good for GM [Big Oil] is good for the country." Baer outlines how the greed of these Washington in-folks (all the lawyers, the lobbyists, the admin officials, the former Ambassadors) made them ignore the threat of the militant, ignorant Wahhabists to America. Three thousand US citizens died, because the US ruling circles preferred to ignore the Saudi hatred as long as they could share in the Saudi spoils. Now the lower and middle class soldiers are paying in blood to maintain the links between the US's upper classes, the Saudi ruling family, and oil money.
However, all excesses carry the seeds of their own punishment. US business's greed backfired when the Saudi-bred jihadists took down a big, expensive building in Wall Street; and now Big Business's assets, and the security of the whole country, are threatened to their core.
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Title: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer ISBN: 140004684X Publisher: Three Rivers Press Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer ISBN: 0471265179 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 18 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Why America Slept : The Failure to Prevent 9/11 by GERALD L. POSNER ISBN: 0375508791 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 02 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke ISBN: 0743260244 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 22 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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Title: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll ISBN: 1594200076 Publisher: The Penguin Press Pub. Date: 23 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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