House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties Hardcover – March 16, 2004

The Bush administration is in the dock for allegedly ignoring the threat of Islamic radicalism before Sept. 11 and then retaliating in the wrong place, Iraq. That is the complaint of Richard A. Clarke, who resigned in disgust as coordinator of counter-terrorism for the administration in February 2003, and of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

Craig Unger repeats the charge and suggests an explanation. He says that President George W. Bush's circle and the ruling family of Saudi Arabia are way too close. Business deals with Saudis and friendship with the formidable Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, blinded Bush father and son to the deadly threat of Islamic radicalism in Saudi Arabia. Iraq is at best a "dangerous and costly diversion," he says, and at worst a trap. "Never before," Unger concludes, "has an American president been so closely tied to a foreign power that harbors and supports our country's mortal enemies."

Allowing for investigative hyperbole, that's quite an indictment of the Bushes and such political and business associates as former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Vice President Cheney. The U.S.-Saudi alliance has survived against the odds since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud. In return for American protection from Israel and Arab radicals, the Sauds pursued an expansionary oil policy and opened their markets to U.S. business. But with one ally espousing missionary Islam and the other democracy, the relationship had to be discreet. Deep divisions over Israel were swept under the carpet. Desert Shield in 1991 and the attacks of Sept. 11 a decade later applied intolerable stresses: A Western army invaded the sanctuary of Islam, and 15 of the airline hijackers were Saudis. Discreet alliance has given way to mutual suspicion, of which Unger's book is an American symptom.

Unger tells a story well and has a flair for describing the affinities (horses, aviation) between rich Saudis and rich Americans. As he portrays it, the Saudis were drawn to Texas as another oil-rich province. Khalid bin Mahfouz, the leading Saudi banker later implicated in the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), helped finance the Houston skyscraper built for James Baker's family bank in 1982. A Saudi investor bailed out Harken Energy, George W. Bush's less than stellar oil company.

Saudis, led by Prince Bandar, donated millions of dollars to Bush family charities. Mahfouzes and bin Ladens bought into the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm that counted George Bush Sr. and James Baker as paid-up advisers in the 1990s. For Unger, all this is evidence at the least of a "strategy the Saudis had of investing in U.S. companies that were connected to powerful politicians." Unger claims that Saudi interests have paid not less than $1.477 billion to persons and entities in the Bush circle. Yet the largest portion, $819 million, involved contract payments to Vinnell Corp. of Fairfax, Va., which has been training the Saudi National Guard on behalf of the U.S. military since the early 1970s and was owned by Carlyle only for a period in the 1990s. Halliburton companies received contracts to develop oil fields and built process plants in Saudi Arabia long before Dick Cheney was the corporation's chief executive.

Unger's best pages tell how, in the days of panic and recrimination after Sept. 11, Prince Bandar managed to spirit prominent members of the Saud and bin Laden families out of the United States on chartered aircraft. Beginning on Sept. 13, when private aviation was still restricted, some 140 Saudis, including about two dozen of the bin Ladens, were flown to Europe. "Didn't it make sense," asks Unger rhetorically, "to at least interview Osama bin Laden 's relatives?"

Yet Unger's charge that Prince Ahmed bin Salman, who was evacuated from the racehorse sales at Lexington, Ky., was a bin Laden agent in the Saudi royal family is based on double hearsay. By invading Iraq, George W. Bush may have done a great service to Islamic radicalism, but the Sauds opposed the invasion as folly and are not to blame. In reality, the Sauds misread bin Ladenism as comprehensively as the United States. Because bin Laden appealed to the same fierce sectarian impulses that brought the Al Saud themselves to power, senior princes and high-ranking commoners thought they could exploit him for the Arab cause. When that failed, they tried to wish the Islamic radicals out of existence or buy them off.

According to well-informed people in Saudi Arabia, everything changed on May 12, 2003, when near-simultaneous attacks on three residential compounds in Riyadh killed 34 people, including nine Americans. The militants had declared war on the House of Saud. Since that day, Prince Naif, the Saudi interior minister, has stopped denying the existence of an Islamic opposition. The Saudi security forces have been pursuing Islamic militants with a vigor that has impressed some American observers. If this is a change of Saudi heart, it doesn't square with Unger's argument, and he ignores it.

Reviewed by James Buchan

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