BUSH TO BANDAR: YOU’RE NOT MY BROTHER! A FALLING OUT IN THE BUSH FAMILY.

f i c t i o n a l i z e d to have some fun.

4th rough draft.

THE NEWS

Recently, Sir Niguel Rudd, a director of the UK’s BAE Systems, and Mike Turner, its chief executive, were detained by the FBI when they arrived in Houston. The FBI detained them for around 30 minutes and issued them subpoenas to return for formal interviews.


ANALYSIS

President Bush in Saudi Arabia was heard screaming at Prince Bandar bin Sultan, “You’re not my brother and I deny ever having known you.” (This is the fiction part.)

The financial and oil markets have a mind of their own, especially when the people at the White House take the easy and cowardly way out. As in invading a country to grab its oil instead of addressing urgent public policy issues and enacting needed regulations.

Mr. Bush, in his two visits to Saudi Arabia, was reported to have asked King Abdallah to increase Saudi production of oil to alleviate (the hope: to break) the hold OPEC and the speculators have over the prices of oil. In effect, to devalue the dollar without paying an oil tax on the devaluation. The concern for Bush/Cheney is that a continued rise in the price of oil not only would confirm the recession. But, too, it would give a boost to Barrack Obama’s candidacy. After much begging, King Abdallah agreed to increase production by a paltry 300,000 bpd (barrel per day.)

(In the meanwhile, Iran is sitting on 30 million barrels of heavy crude -- not sought after by modern refineries, but accepted by older ones -- which it has stored in docked oil tankers.)

The pressure on the Bush administration from the McCain-Lieberman camp must be tremendous -- to do something about oil prices.

In response, it seems, President Bush has unleashed the Justice Department on the Saudi government. (This newsletter had assessed that a Democratic administration might do this; not a Republican oil administration. But this is not the first time that the Bush Administration unleashes a force to subdue Saudi Arabia's government; it had unleashed the Jewish Right and its Defense Policy Board, threatening to break up the Kingdom, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.)

FROM THE SERIOUS FRAUD OFFICE (UK) TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT (US).

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had once begun to investigate BAE Systems for an alleged $2 billion bribe to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, known as “Bandar Bush” for his closeness to the Bush family. The SFO later aborted its investigation on the intervention of then Prime Minister Tony Blair. (Go to the guardian.co.uk; use its search engine for details.) There were reports in the UK press that prince Bandar all but threatened Mr. Blair with cutting off coordination in intelligence-sharing about terrorism between Saudi Arabia and the UK. Some in the UK press interpreted these alleged threats quite ominously. A legal battle ensued to force the SFO to re-open the investigation.

Since BAE Systems is, for all practical purposes, a bi-national corporation (UK and US), and is a major supplier of weapons to the Pentagon, the U.S. Justice Department had the obligation to pick up the corruption investigation. (I'm currently examining the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act -- FCPA) But under a Bush regime one would've expected that Justice would not move too hastily on this matter, lest it disturbs relations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Especially that the main target of the investigation in the end (especially if the FCPA penalties for the offending corporation are merely financial) would be Prince Bandar, directly, so close to Bush, and his father Crown Prince Sultan, indirectly. (The last I read was that CP Sultan is undergoing treatment in Switzerland and that the process of picking a replacement is under way; that Prince Nayef at Interior, his full brother, is the foremost candidate.)

But hastily Justice is moving on this matter. The brief detention of the BAE Systems' directors shows it. The timing, however, of the detention is suspect: that it would happen so soon after the Saudi government had shot down President Bush's request to increase substantially the production of oil. Though I’m confident (logically) that Justice has had a roadmap for the investigation, the detention still smacks of a political maneuver. The idea likely is to pressure Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to the limit to break the hold by OPEC and the speculators on oil prices.

(Justice might retort by claiming that they had a jurisdictional opportunity, so to speak, and had jumped at it -- the opportunity that two men were on American soil. Instead, Justice likely would've had to coordiniate with the British government and these men's British lawyers to speak to them, if ever. That argument in the end is unpersuasive. Viewing the closeness of the relationship between the UK and the US, and the fact that UK troops had helped in Basra in the suppression of the Mahdi Army, the US will have to defer to the UK, in the end; and may already have angered that government. Why complicate that relationship at this time but for the White House needing to send a signal to the Saudis, a threat of dire things to come?)

Not to complicate matters, but Saudi Arabia’s unresponsiveness to President Bush’s pleas has quite a lot to do with the fact that the harmful idiots will likely leave the region in a shape that’s eminently disadvantageous to the Kingdom. It’s not so much that the US had been dealt a defeat -- which it had, and this newsletter was first to announce it and define it -- after the invasion and breakup of Arab Iraq. It’s that Saudi Arabia which had been dealt the bigger defeat. (See “The defeat of Saudi Arabia...) The kingdom watches as the Maliki Badr/Dawa Shia government, beholden to Iran, digs its heels deeper in Iraq -- while the Arab Sunni have been made marginal and live on the harmful idiots' dole. Even if the Arab Sunni were unleashed, how is Saudi Arabia to supply them with weapons? Through Israel/Jordan? That’s political suicide. Through Syria? It’s allied to Iran. The Turks: too complicated, with Europe and the Kurds. Saudi Arabia and the other Arabs have no Trojan horse but Muqtadha al-Sadr. (Not that they know it.) But the harmful idiots have fused Muqtadha's fate to that of Hizbollah and Iran, especially with the last assault on his men in Basra and Sadr City.

Rhetoric aside, the harmful idiots are rushing down the highway of near-full partnership with Iran, de facto or de jure -- what does it matter. And the Saudi government likely is increasingly suspicious. Partnership by the harmful idiots with Iran or not, the Saudi government's options since the invasion have diminished markedly. That government is now feeling, and should later feel even more, the full weight of the harmful idiots' bureaucracy, on a regualr basis. (The Saudi government buckled under that weight, heaviest, when the Pentagon had been taken over by Israel's right wing boys -- the Kissinger Brigade.) This weight should become heavier as the harmful idiots continue to lose influence the world over. And as they continue to lack flexibility, being tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unable to tend to their own garden (ours), in raising rates, enacting regulations and preparing to raise taxes on oil once the price of that staple goes down, the harmful idiots should weigh heaviest on those countries which are beholden to them. Case in point: Saudi Arabia.

(This analysis shoud in no way be seen as a defense of Prince Bandar bin Sultan or of BAE Systems. As they say in Arabic, beteeen these entities and myself there exists what "the blacksmith has manufactured." -- solid steel. "Bayni wa- baynahum ma sana3uhu al-7addad.")

There’s a dim chance(very dim) that Justice has moved on its own, without White House approval, in a coup against the President. The idea would be to blunt the rapprochement between Mr. Bush (as a person not as the President) and the Saudi government -- to stem the transfer of the Bush team from the federal government payroll to that of the Saudi. But I wouldn’t bet the electric car on this interpretation.