Michael Moore's Underwriter

...But since George H.W...

...Saudis are allowed by their religion to have more than one wife, but they are not the South Sea Island polygamists that Unger evidently believes them to be...

...These weaknesses lead to howlers...

...To answer that question it is necessary to put Unger's facts and sources under more discerning scrutiny than that of a cheering Fahrenheit 9/11 movie audience at the Democratic Convention in Boston...

...Bush ever got physically...

...As Richard Clarke, now a Bush opponent but then the administration's point man on terrorism, has said, "I authorized those flights but only after air travel had been restored and all the Saudis questioned by the FBI...

...Once Bush knew who these Saudis were, he and his advisers accepted that they were no danger to the United States...

...This speculation is the rock on which many of the sinister theories in this book are built...

...It was started in 1945 when OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 BOOKS IN REVIEW President Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz aboard a U.S...

...The oil deal was in Bahrain, not Saudi Arabia...

...This, however, is hardly a Republican plot since the chairman and founder of Carlyle is David Rubenstein, a prominent Democrat who served in the Carter administration...

...But at least let me offer an alternative and unsinister speculation based on two words—knowledge and compassion...

...In 2000 "The Arabian Candidate"(sic), so we are solemnly told, "owed both his personal and political fortunes to the Saudis...

...This may have been a bad decision in terms of subsequent media reaction...

...And most important they were fighting for the same cause...

...We do not know exactly where bin Laden was at that moment but during this period he was in nearby Afghanistan and had begun working to build up the [Al Qaeda] Services Office...

...Unger writes with the disadvantage of never having visited Saudi Arabia, of not speaking Arabic, and of having interviewed an extremely limited number of Saudis, only two of whom Jonathan Aitken, our "High Spirits" columnist, is author of seven books, including Nixon: A Life...

...So a combination of common sense and compassion led to the decision to let them go home...

...Chances are that this is the closest that Osama bin Laden and George H.W...

...Since he himself tells us elsewhere in the book that bin Laden's first visit to Afghanistan was two years after the visit by Bush pere, the answer seems to be, well, er, nothing...

...That does not make the decision wrong any more than it makes Unger's conspiracy theories right...

...So he writes: In May 1984 Vice President George H.W...

...Emetic in style and slipshod in facts, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud purports to have produced the collateral that underwrites Michael Moore's wilder conspiracies about President George W. Bush's secret and unsavory connections with the Saudi royal family...

...The knowledge comes from the fact that Osama bin Laden has long been ostracized from, and as often as not hated by, the principal members of his own family and by the princes of the Al Saud...

...Another factor in Bush's decision was his recognition that anyone with the name of bin Laden or Al Saud could be at personal risk for his own safety in America in the aftermath of 9/11...

...corporations have been beating a path to Riyadh and Jeddah in search of business...

...Bush is an adviser to Carlyle (giving speeches but not engaging in business conversations, according to the company), this Bush connection takes the book into the higher realms of fantasy...

...Take the early sentence: "King Fand married one hundred women...

...In the absence of Bush and Bandar it can neither be proved nor disproved...

...This is Unger's method of fingering a suspect and fudging the facts without actually proving anything at all...

...1 r HE LAUNCHING PAD for many of Unger's wild theories is the permission given to about 140 members of the bin Laden and Al Saud families to fly home from the United States immediately after 9/11 when most other aircraft were grounded...

...A murky Middle East oil deal in the 1980s by Dubya's company, Harken Energy, is highlighted as the reason for its high stock price...

...Unger thinks they should have been detained for questioning by the FBI...

...But is it true...

...For example, Unger wants us to believe that George H.W...

...Bush was somehow or other connected with Osama bin Laden...

...Bush visited the Khyber Pass border of Pakistan and Afghanistan with a $14 million check for humanitarian refugees...

...are mentioned in the end notes...

...They were in the same region at roughly the same time...

...There's nothing much in the allegations against the 43rd President either...

...Wow, that's quite some conspiracy theory...

...Only one little problem here...

...His book presents so much interesting material that I'm a fellow traveler with it for some of the journey, but I think it is wiser to get off several stops before the train crashes into the buffers of the terminus...

...The author's heavy dependence on dubious sources brings to mind Evelyn Waugh's jibe at "that compendium of other journalists' mistakes which newspapers have the audacity to call a library" In the Bush half of the book the author resorts to a novel journalistic technique that deserves to be called "fungering...

...Contrary to Unger's assertions, the Saudi-American "special relationship" was not created by "the House of Bush...

...Not even the National Enquirer on a bad daywould let such palpable nonsense see print...

...Unger calls this "access capitalism" and devotes many pages to "fungering" the Carlyle Group for making so much money out of the Saudis...

...Sounds pretty far-fetched to me...

...The Saudi half is half-baked...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Michael Moore's Underwriter House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties Craig Unger (Scribner, 368 pages, $26) Reviewed by Jonathan Aitken SANS OF FAHRENHEIT 9/11, if there are any among the readers of The American Spectator, will just love this jewel of 2004 campaign literature...

...This sort of "fungering" reminds me of Mayor La Guardia's famous gripe about an article in the New York Times: "However thin ya slice it, it's still baloney" What the heck is Unger getting at here...

...This book is divided into two unequal halves...

...warship in the Suez Canal and offered American protection for the Saudi Kingdom in return for huge supplies of cheap oil...

...In the wake of FDR's deal, it is not surprising that for the last 60 years enterprising U.S...

...I myself know this to be true from many past conversations I have had with the bin Laden family and the Al Sauds...

...He speculates that Bush personally authorized their departures as a favor to the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, because of the allegedly questionable business relationships between the Al Saud and Bush dynasties over many years...

...I know Arabs adore conspiracy theories, but do Americans really believe that Carlyle's leading lights, who in addition to the 41st President and Mr...

...In a nutshell the UngerMoore thesis is that the Al Sauds and the Al Bushes have been entwined together for decades in a spider's web of political favors and financial deals with this end result: "Horrifying as it sounds," writes Unger, "the secret relationship between these two great families helped to trigger the Age of Terror and give rise to the tragedy of 9/11...

...Rubenstein include James A. Baker, John Major, Frank Carlucci, and Richard Darman, have all been working for a corporation that has helped to "trigger the age of terror...

...So like most experienced observers of Saudi Arabia I regard it as inconceivable that the leading Saudi 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004 nationals allowed to fly home (socially and plutocratically they were roughly their country's equivalent of the younger Mellons, Gettys, and Rockefellers) were supporters of Osama or complicit in his terrorism...