Author: Mark Steyn
Publication: The Spectator
Date: November 30, 2002
Mark Steyn says that the President's
cosying up to the Saudis is making a mockery of the war on terrorism
New Hampshire
I always like the bit in the Bond
movie where 007 and the supervillain meet face to face - usually at the
supervillain's marine research facility or golf course or, in this latest
picture, his Icelandic diamond mine. Bond knows the alleged marine biologist
is, in fact, an evil mastermind bent on world domination. The evil mastermind
knows Bond is a British agent. But both men go along with the pretence
that the other fellow is what he's claiming to be, and the exquisitely
polite encounter invariably ends with the mastermind purring his regrets
about being unable to be more helpful. 'But perhaps we shall meet again,
Mr Bond,' he says, as the Oriental manservant shows 007 to the door.
It must have been a bit like that
when Prince Bandar and his family dropped by the Bush ranch at Crawford
a couple of months ago. Bush must have known for the best part of a year
that in the run-up to 11 September Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa, had been
making regular transfers from her Washington bank account to a couple of
known associates of the terrorists. Bandar must have known Bush knew. Each
party knows the other party knows they're engaged in a charade, but they
observe the niceties, with Laura showing Princess Haifa the ranch, Bush
hailing the 'eternal friendship' between the Saudi and American people,
and Bandar regretting, as the Saudis always do, that they're unable to
be more helpful.
It would be nice if George W. Bond
would kick over the cocktails and lob a grenade into Oilfingers refinery,
but instead he and the sheikhs are still teasing each other. In this latest
curious episode, the official explanation, if I can type it without giggling,
goes something like this: Princess Haifa, the wife of the Saudi ambassador
to Washington, gets a letter from a woman in Virginia she's never heard
of complaining about steep medical bills. Being a friendly sort of princess,
she immediately authorises the Riggs Bank in Washington to make payment
by cashier's cheque of several thousand dollars per month to this woman,
no questions asked. How come I can never get hold of a princess like that
when I need one?
Of the $130,000 she receives from
the benevolent ambassadress, Majeda Ibrahin signs at least some of the
cheques over to a friend of hers, who's married to a guy in San Diego who's
helping two of the 11 September plotters. Pure coincidence, say the smooth-talking
Saud princelings put up on the talk-show circuit since Newsweek broke the
story at the weekend. Could happen to any good-hearted princess.
How did Omar al Bayoumi, the penultimate
recipient of the royal largesse, get to hook up with the two terrorists
anyway? Well, there's another amazing coincidence. Omar happened to be
at the airport in Los Angeles, heard a couple of fellows speaking Arabic,
struck up a conversation with them and waddayaknow, one thing led to another,
they seemed like decent coves and so, even though he'd never met 'em before,
before you know it he's throwing 'em a big welcome party in San Diego and
paying up the first couple of months' rent for them on the apartment next
door to his. How was he to know Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhamzi had just
jetted in from an al-Qa'eda training camp and would go on to hijack Flight
77 and plough it into the Pentagon? Just one of those things, coulda happened
to any guy who wanders round airport concourses looking for perfect strangers
to cover the accommodation expenses of.
Meanwhile, Majeda Ibrahin, the woman
the princess was sending all that money to, turns out to be married to
Osama Basnan, another buddy of the al-Qa'eda duo, and one who subsequently
celebrated 11 September as a 'wonderful, glorious day'. But here's an odd
little thing: Mr Basnan is known to have been in Texas in April when Crown
Prince Abdullah and his entourage flew in to the state to see Bush at the
ranch. Just another coincidence? Well, sorta: he's supposed to have had
a meeting in Houston with some big-time Saudi prince who deals with 'intelligence
matters'. This seems an unusual degree of access for some schlub from San
Diego who's in the US illegally, as it transpires. He is variously described
as a Saudi government agent and al-Qa'eda sympathiser, as if these positions
are mutually exclusive.
The reaction of the government-controlled
Saudi press is that this is all a lot of hooey put about by 'circles linked
to the Zionist lobby'. According to Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef,
'these are nothing but lies'; not the facts of the case - the Saudis don't
dispute those - only their meaning. The official line is that it's just
one of those cultural differences between the West and Islam: it's very
common, we're told, for House of Saud bigshots to help out their financially
strapped subjects. As it happens, Majeda Ibrahin is Jordanian. But it would
be interesting to know how many others, Saudi or Jordanian, were getting
$130,000 from Princess Haifa in this period. Couple of dozen? Two or three?
The US has no banking confidentiality worth speaking of: I'll bet the feds
had traced the money trail back to the princess's Riggs Bank account within
a few days of 11 September, and I'll bet they know where any other monthly
payments were going. As things stand, whether intentionally or not, there's
a reasonable probability that funds from the ambassador's wife helped pay
for the scheme that murdered thousands of Americans. And that the President
knew this when he lunched with her at Crawford a few weeks ago.
The Saudi embassy say they've only
received queries about this matter from the media, not from the FBI. Odd
that. The federal government claims it needs vast new powers to track every
single credit-card transaction and every single email of every single American,
yet a prima facie link between the terrorists and Prince Bandar's wife
isn't worth going over to the embassy to have a little chat about. I doubt
very much whether Princess Haifa is deliberately bankrolling al-Qa'eda,
but I'm not so sure one could make the same confident claims of those embassy
staffers running the begging letters past her. And, even if their hands
are clean, the widespread support for Osama among Saudis at home and abroad
means it's only a degree or two of separation from hardcore terrorists
via their supporters to the Saudi royal family. The fawning legions of
ex-ambassadors to Riyadh have been all over the TV assuring us that, oh,
no, al-Qa'eda hate the House of Saud and want to overthrow it. But, interestingly,
though Osama's boys are happy to topple New York landmarks, slaughter Balinese
nightclubbers, blow up French oil tankers, kill Philippine missionaries,
take out Tunisian synagogues and hijack Moscow musicals, you can't help
noticing they do absolutely zip against the regime they allegedly loathe.
There are 6,000 Saudi princes, but none of 'em ever gets assassinated.
And, if anything mildly explosive goes off in the Kingdom, it somehow manages
to get blamed on Western bootleggers. Statistically speaking, if you're
looking for the spot on the planet where you're least likely to be blown
to shreds by an al-Qa'eda nutcake, it's hard to beat Riyadh. If al-Qa'eda
hated the rest of us the way they supposedly hate King Fahd and co., the
world would be as harmonious as a Seventies Coke commercial.
Clearly, the House of Saud has come
to an arrangement with al-Qa'eda, and this arrangement involves, among
other things, money. More interesting is why the administration insists
on pretending otherwise. On 20 September, George W. Bush said, 'You're
either with us or you're with the terrorists.' A couple of weeks later,
a small number of us began pointing out the obvious: the Saudis are with
the terrorists. But the US-Saudi relationship is now so unmoored from reality
that it's all but impossible to foresee how it could be tethered to anything
as humdrum as the facts. Seven of the nine biggest backers of al-Qa'eda
are Saudi, and Riyadh has no intention of doing a thing about it; but the
White House insists, as it did on Monday, that the Kingdom remains - all
together now - 'a good partner in the war on terrorism'. Fifteen out of
the 19 terrorists were Saudi, but the state department's 'visa express'
programme for young Saudi males remained in place for almost a year after
11 September and, if it weren't for public outrage, Colin Powell would
reintroduce it tomorrow. The overwhelming majority - by some accounts,
80 per cent - of the detainees at Guantanamo are Saudi, but the new rules
requiring fingerprinting of Arab male visitors to the US apply to Iraqis,
Libyans, Syrians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Algerians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Bahrainis,
Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, but not Saudis. You can pretty much bet they'll
be fingerprinting British and Australians before the Saudis. In his interview
with The Spectator, my old friend Ghazi Algosaibi, the much-missed ambassador
to the Court of St James's, was doing so many gags it was easy to overlook
the most telling nugget. Asked by Boris Johnson why so many Saudis were
among the 9/11 killers, Ghazi replied with disarming candour. 'The answer
is easy,' he said. 'It was much easier to get a visa for a Saudi.' In other
words, the murderers took advantage of the privileged access Saudis have
to the United States. Given that Muslims from Eritrea to Afghanistan now
have even more onerous entry requirements, come the next atrocity the Saudis
are likely to score a perfect 19 out of 19.
This privileged access to America
begins with Prince Bandar. The humdrum rank of 'ambassador' hardly begins
to cover the special status the prince enjoys in Washington. For one thing,
the title implies a posting, and Bandar isn't going anywhere: he's the
longest-serving ambassador in town; he's held the job for two decades and
he's still only in his early fifties; he has more homes in America than
most Americans do; he's seen Reagan, Bush Sr and Clinton come and go, and
he's figuring on seeing the back of George W. too. By comparison, American
ambassadors in Riyadh are passing fancies. At the specific request of the
Saudi government, no Arabic speakers are appointed to the post, a unique
self-handicap by the US. Their chaps in the Kingdom spend a couple of years
out there getting everything explained to them by the royal inner circle,
and then they come home and serve out their day's shilling for the House
of Saud on Middle Eastern think-tanks lavishly subsidised by Riyadh. That's
the way Bandar likes it. 'If the reputation then builds that the Saudis
take care of friends when they leave office,' he once said, 'you'd be surprised
how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.' Just
so. The columnist Matt Welch observed a while back that, if you close your
eyes, America's ex-ambassadors sound like they're Saudis. Effectively,
there's no US ambassador to Saudi Arabia but a whole platoon of Saudi ambassadors
to the US - Prince Bandar and full supporting chorus.
And what was he doing with Bush
at the ranch in September? Most heads of government don't get invited to
Crawford. As I've said before, Australia's John Howard, unlike Crown Prince
Abdullah, is a real ally in the war on terror, but he's still waiting for
ranch privileges; Alberta, not Saudi Arabia, is America's principal foreign
source of energy, but premier Ralph Klein can't get past the assistant
deputy under-secretary. Meanwhile, Bandar, a humble ambassador from an
economically moribund theocratic dictatorship, gets received like a head
of state. Nothing quite explains the administration's willingness to assist
the Saudis in making a mockery of America's war on terror. Even murkier
rumours that the royal house has the goods on Bush and Cheney for some
dark oil-biz shenanigans can't account for the scale of the administration's
denial. We have a huge Saudi-financed pile of American corpses, the Saudis
are openly unco-operative, and meanwhile back at the ranch it's ribs with
Princess Haifa.
As for Bandar, he seems far more
likely than most Washington diplomats casually ensnared in some embarrassment
to have had a reasonable idea of just who exactly his wife was mailing
cheques to. For two decades, he's swanked around the capital as a deal-maker
with a long reach extending way beyond the accepted role of a diplomat;
as Bandar's publicity has it, it was he who negotiated a Sino-Soviet missile
deal that caught the US on the hop, he who hand-picked Robert McFarlane
as Reagan's national security adviser, he who helped Chad ward off a potential
invasion by Libya (really), he who determined the post-Soviet character
of Afghanistan. That last one he doesn't talk about so much these days.
But that's the kinda guy he is: the Taleban's Talleyrand, the cosmopolitan
front man for the exporters of feudalism. Even without his wife's bank
statements, it's simply not credible that the global fixer isn't completely
aware of his family's and his country's complicity in Islamist terror.
Instead of pondering a '90-day ultimatum' to the Saudis, the administration
should remove the symbol of the diseased relationship. If the Pakistani
ambassador's wife had been funnelling money to al-Qa'eda supporters, they'd
both be on the plane home. The day Bandar is, we'll know Bush is serious.
One day the Democrats will stop
sleepwalking over the cliff and realise that this is Bush's weak spot,
and they've got incriminating pictures and all that sycophantic audio.
And, if the Dems don't realise it, then John McCain will, shortly before
he runs for president.