Michael Moore and Richard Perle
Combine Forces:Who Really
Wants to Invade Saudi Arabia, and Why?
by Tanya C.
Hsu
- www.globalresearch.ca 9 July 2004
The URL of this
article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HSU407A.html
Hijacking planes, terrorizing innocent
people and shedding blood, constitute a form of
injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam,
which views them as gross crimes and sinful
acts
Any Muslim who is aware of his
teachings of his religion and who adheres to the
directives of the Quran and the
Sunnah will never involve himself in such
acts because they will invoke the anger of God
Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on
earth. Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and
Chairman of the Senior Ulema, Sheikh
Abdul-Aziz Âlush, Sept. 15, 2001
Michael Moores new film Fahrenheit
9/11 has done a tremendous favor for some
proponents of a war upon the Arabian Peninsula.
The film achieves what endless pages of
conservative think-tank studies and panel
discussions, hours of PR time and books can not:
spill gasoline on the anti-Saudi sparks already
ignited within the United States. Moore's film
lambastes the Saudis not only for their business
relationships but also for leaving the US after
the attacks of September 11th 2001 as did other
non-Saudi officials on the same day when specific
flights were permitted. The overwhelming
popularity of this documentary takes the
anti-Saudi message to a whole new market. It is
the latest manifestation of a rationale for war
that could finally execute a long-term plan to
invade and occupy the Kingdom. In spite of its
progressive producer and target audience,
Fahrenheit 9/11 falls lock-step in
line with the stated agenda of neoconservative
hawks: rid Arabia of the House of Saud thereby
granting the US and allies full access to the
Middle East's biggest prize.
The Ghawar structure consists of two
subparallel, north-south trending structural
crests, separated by a saddle. It is about 174
miles long and 12 miles wide. In the northern
part of the field, the saddle dips below the
initial oil-water contact between Uthmaniya and
Ain Dar, but the two crests remain above it. The
Fazran and Ain Dar areas are along the western
crest and the Shedgum area is along the eastern
crest. The three southern areas extend across
both crests. These crests existed at the time of
Arab-D deposition and the reservoir quality is
best in the crestal areas. A map of the Ghawar
structure at Arab-D level appears below.
There is a growing
assumption on the part of members of the US
Congress, US-Saudi diplomats, and the American
public that the Bush administration is making a
turnaround in US policy towards the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of
neo-conservative and domestic interest group
pressure. Those opposed to the current
administration accuse the White House of
maintaining ties to an enemy of America in
exchange for lucrative business deals. In
contrast, those who support ties with Saudi
Arabia maintain that the US has no intention of
severing relations with a regional stabilizing
force and with long term friends in the House of
Saud. Who is correct?
Neither.
The US has not had wholly friendly
intentions towards the Kingdom for the past 30
years. Any appearance of such is only the visible
veneer of real US military policy. Declassified
documents reveal that there has been a constant
drumbeat to invade Saudi Arabia that has sounded
behind the closed doors of our government. The
Pentagon, for three decades, has formulated and
updated secret plans to seize Saudi oil wells and
rid the Kingdom of the ruling House of Saud. This
is not only a neo-conservative cabal. Time and
again plans have been made for an invasion of
Saudi Arabia for a larger purpose: US control of
the global oil supply thereby dominating global
economic markets.
The most recent wave of charges that Saudi Arabia
supports, condones, and aids terrorism signify a
secondary and more public attempt to gain support
to finally execute a thirty year old plan to
occupy Saudi Arabia. Other regional players
objectives, (securing oil supplies; the rationale
of a "war on terror") may add synergy
and an unstoppable impetus for an American
invasion.
This essay discloses and evaluates the motives
and actions of those behind the new drive to
occupy Saudi oil fields.
Classified Plans Brought To Light
In 1973, the Nixon administration described a
plan of attack against Saudi Arabia to seize its
oil fields in a classified Joint Intelligence
Report entitled UK Eyes Alpha.
British MI5 and MI6 were informed, and under
British National Archive rules the document was
declassified in December of 2003. The oil embargo
had been over for only three weeks but Eyes
Alpha suggested that the US could
guarantee sufficient oil supplies for themselves
and their allies by taking the oil fields in
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf State of Abu
Dhabi. It followed that
pre-emptive action would be
considered, and that two brigades could seize the
Saudi oilfields and one brigade each could take
Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.
In February of 1975 the London Sunday Times revealed information from a leaked and
classified US Department of Defense plan. The
plan, drawn up by the Pentagon, was code named
Dhahran Option Four and provided for
an invasion of the worlds largest oil
reserves, namely Saudi Arabia. See exhibit #1
Exhibit 1 The Take-Over Plan
(Source: London Sunday Times,
February 1975, retouched by IRmep)
Also in 1975, Robert Tucker, US intelligence and
military analyst, wrote an article for
Commentary magazine, owned by the
Jewish American Committee, entitled Oil:
The Issue of American Intervention. Tucker
stated that, Without intervention there is
a distinct possibility of an economic and
political disaster bearing
resemblance to
the disaster of 1930s
The Arab shoreline of
the Gulf is a new El Dorado waiting for its
conquistadors. And this was followed in
February of the same year by an article in
Harpers Magazine by a Pentagon analyst
using a pseudonym, Miles Ignotus, emphasizing the
need for the US to seize Saudi oilfields,
installations and airports entitled Seizing Arab
Oil .
According to James Akins, former US diplomat, the
author was probably Henry Kissinger, Secretary of
State at the time. Kissinger has neither
confirmed nor ever denied the charge.
Further, in August of 1975, a report entitled,
Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A
Feasibility Study, was produced for the
Committee on Foreign Relations. In this report,
the CRS stated that potential targets for the US
included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Libya,
and Nigeria. Analysis indicates
[that military forces of OPEC countries were]
quantitatively and qualitatively inferior [and]
could be swiftly crushed.
The real premise of an attack against the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia has been around since the Cold
War. The idea was, however, revived under the
aegis of a new war against terrorism
on the charge of that the Saudi state supported
such against the west. One nexus of this drive is
Richard Perle.
Neo-conservative Designs on Saudi Arabia
Richard Perle is an outspoken critic of
any Americans doing business with the Kingdom,
despite his own attempt to secure $100 million in
Saudi investment for his private venture capital
firm. His ill-fated attempt to become a
power-broker with one foot on in the door of the
US Defense Policy board of the Department of
Defense and another foot in the door of Trimeme
capital investments is well documented . He has since become more
hard-line, telling the National Review, I
think its a disgrace. The Saudis are a
major source of the problem we face with
terrorism. (Perle had to resign from the
Defense Policy Board when his secret and
extortive fundraising meetings with Saudi Arabian
businessmen became public.)
Perle's efforts to rearrange the dynamics of the
region, including Saudi Arabia, have gone on for
many years. Incoming Israeli Likud Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu asked Perle to draft a
regional strategy paper for Israel. The Institute
for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, a
think tank based in Washington DC and Jerusalem
published the completed paper, A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm , emphasized the need to
overturn the Oslo Accords and Middle East peace
process. It demanded Chairman Yasser Arafat be
blamed for every act of Palestinian terror;
required the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the
Baathist regime in Iraq and Syria; and the
force of democracy foisted upon the entire Arab
world plus Iran. One senior Israeli intelligence
officer stated the goal was to make Israel the
dominant power in the region and expel the
Palestinians. Perle's efforts to neutralize
international funding for the Palestinian
resistance and support of Palestinians have
driven his policy recommendations ever since.
Another author of A Clean Break was
David Wurmser. In September of 2003 Wurmser was
moved to the US State Department to work directly
under Vice President Dick Cheney and his Chief of
Staff Lewis Libby. David Wurmsers wife,
Meyrav, ran MEMRI (Middle East Media Research
Institute) alongside Colonel Yigal Carmon, of
Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI specializes
in selective retrieval , searching and translating
especially plucked Arab language documents that
confirm MEMRI's bias that the Arab world despises
the West. Meyrav Wurmser received her doctorate
at George Washington University on the life of
Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist
Zionism and declared fascist, and hero of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party.
Saudi Arabia was again declared an enemy of the
United States on July 10th, 2002, when RAND
Corporations Laurent Murawiec gave a
PowerPoint presentation to the Defense Policy
Board at the invitation of Perle Like Meyrav
Wurmser, Murawiec is also from George Washington
University and listed as a past faculty member.
He was also a follower of the Lyndon LaRouche
cultist organization. This group indoctrinates
its members to abandon their homes because
family values are really immoral,
according to those who left the group. (Lyndon
LaRouche is a convicted felon, conspiracy
theorist and UFO believer.)
Entitled Taking Saudi Out Of Arabia
the PowerPoint presentation states Saudi
Arabia the strategic pivot and declared
that the Kingdom is an enemy of the USA. It
advocated the US seize the Kingdom and its oil
fields, invade Mecca and Medina, confiscate Saudi
Arabian financial assets unless
the Kingdom stop supporting
anti-Western terrorist activities.
Saudi Arabia was declared as the
kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most
dangerous opponent in the Middle East.
Murawiec claimed, Since independence, wars
have been the principal output of the Arab
world and that plot, riot, murder,
coup are the only available means to bring about
change
Violence is politics, politics is
violence. This culture of violence is the prime
enabler of terrorism. Terror as an accepted,
legitimate means of carrying out politics has
been incubated for 30 years
James
Akins explained the overall plans thusly:
Itll be easier once we have Iraq.
Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and Bahrain too.
So its only Saudi Arabia were talking
about, and the United Arab Emirates falls into
place.
The connections between individuals pressing for
a US invasion of Saudi Arabia run deep. Richard
Perles lifelong mentor was the RAND
corporations late Albert Wohlstetter, the
grandfather of neo-conservative analysts.
Wohlstetter also was a Ahmed Chalabi's classmate
at the University of Chicago. Chalabi, the leader
of the Iraqi National Congress and the
protagonist of the information provided to the US
government regarding the thus far non-existent
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, is an indicted
criminal in Jordan where he has been sentenced to
more than 20 years hard labor for currency
manipulation and embezzlement through Jordanian
Petra Bank.
The analytical and populist groundswell of
denunciation against Saudi Arabia as a state
sponsor of terrorism from progressive and
conservative circles alike may culminate in an
invasion sooner rather than later. Supporters
within the current US administration can use this
unity to execute another blueprint"
for US policy. It can follow as easily as Saddam
Husseins imminent threat towards
America and Iraqs Wads served as the
principle rationale for the US invasion of Iraq.
Target Saudi Arabia: Taking the Case from
Think Tank to Theater
In reality there has been no hard evidence
linking Saudi Arabian leaders and officials to
terrorism, little evidence of Saudi subjects
playing a mindful role, and far less financial
ties to terrorism than could be found in most
nations with a banking system. In fact, the US
State Department lists the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Australia and indeed
the United States itself as having Al Queda
financial ties and connections. However, facts
may not be enough to stem rising anti-Saudi
sentiment among policy makers and average
Americans.
Wahhabism: The debate
persists as to whether the state religion of
Saudi Arabia breeds intolerance or is just
misunderstood
By David
Van BiemaTIME ON-LINE
Posted Sunday, September 7, 2003
Religious movements often originate in a dream.
It was said in Arabia in the 1800s that a man in
Najd province dreamed that his body produced
flames that spread far and wide, consuming desert
camps and towns alike. He told his dream to a
sheik, who said the man's son would found a new
faith that the desert Arabs would adopt. And so
it transpiredalthough the founder was
ultimately the man's grandson: Mohammed ibn Abd
Wahhab.
The version of Islam that Wahhab
conceived in the 1740s is now the state religion
of Saudi Arabia. These days, many would interpret
that premonitory dream in a darker light. Is
Wahhabism somehow synonymous with terrorism,
dictating war on the West as part of its
doctrinal underpinnings? Or have terrorists
distorted Wahhabism to give a false legitimacy to
their militancy?
Wahhab was born in a small
central Arabian town in 1703 as the Ottoman
Empire, which had dominated Islam's majority
Sunni branch for centuries, was in its long,
final decline. His seminal text, The Book of
Unity, attempted to recover what he saw as
the original, pristine state of Islam by pruning
out "innovations" that had polluted its
essential monotheism. Wahhab's list of
corruptions was sweeping; it included Shi'ism,
the faith's minority strain, and Sufism, its
mystical tradition. He discarded most of the
interpretations of Islam's four great legal
schools in favor of an exceedingly literal
reading of punctilious ritual and enforcement by
draconian punishment.
The new creed had no place for
free will or human rights, let alone separation
of mosque and state. Wahhab partook of a
historically typical hostility toward Christians
and Jews. But he was less focused on infidels
than he was inward-looking and obsessed with
orthodoxy: he wrote that jihad should be
postponed until the Islamic house was in order.
He was more combative regarding his brethren.
That notion proved attractive in
1744 to Mohammed ibn Saud, an ambitious local
chieftain of puritan leanings who wanted
ideological approval to treat the Ottomans as a
foreign occupying power. Wahhabism gave him
religious credibility for an armed campaign to
gain stewardship of the holy cities of Mecca and
Medina. The resulting full partnershipSaud
granted Wahhab religious and judicial control in
his lands and married his daughterwas
wildly successful and memorably brutal.
Slaughtering thousands of Shi'ites and Sufis (and
Sunnis), the House of Saud began a journey that
would turn most of the Arabian peninsula into a
Wahhabi theocracy. In 1926 they introduced the
muttawa, religious police who enforce prayer five
times a day; who today monitor citizens'
cell-phone text messages, and arrest women for
failing to cover themselves completely with the
black abaya robe.
Over the years the profligate
ruling family has drawn the ire of its most
fervent subjects. To them, the increasing
opulence of the princes' lifestyle and the
kingdom's openness to dealing with the West are
corruptions of the faith's rigid strictures. That
dissent increased when the Sauds let Westerners
develop their oil.
With reporting by Bruce
Crumley/Paris
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- The Murawiec PowerPoint indictment
continued, stating that Saudi Arabia is
[a]n instable group:
Wahhabism
loathes modernity, capitalism, human rights,
religious freedom, democracy, republics, an open
society and that Wahhabism is
spreading world-wide [sic] based upon
Irans Revolution led by Shiite
Ayatollah Khomeini; that Wahhabism moves
from Islams lunatic fringe, and that
there was a [s]hift from pragmatic oil
policy to promotion of radical Islam
.
[Saudi Arabians are] treasurers of radical,
fundamentalist, terrorist groups.
Saudi Arabia is then charged with being the
chief vector of the Arab crisis
active at
every level of the terror chain
[it]
supports [US] enemies [and has] virulent hatred
against US
. There is an Arabia
but it need not be Saudi
[US
must] stop any funding and support for any
fundamentalist madrasa, mosque, ulama, predicator
anywhere in the world
Dismantle, ban all the
kingdoms Islamic charities,
confiscate their assets... [and] What the House
of Saud holds dear can be targeted
Oil...the Holy Places
Saudi Arabia [is] the
strategic pivot.
Were these presentations not heard by top-level
Bush administration officials they would be
dismissed as simplistic absurdity. However, the
sparks of a mass movement to demonize Saudi
Arabia had already begun to ignite, and on June
6th 2002 the right wing Hudson Institute held a
seminar called Discourses on Democracy:
Saudi Arabia, Friend or Foe?, Laurent
Murewiec and Richard Perle in attendance.
Of even further interest is the ironic and direct
link between Richard Perle and terrorism. A
recent fundraiser in support of the victims of
the Iranian earthquake in Bam, sponsored by the
Mujahedin-e-Khalq, asked Richard Perle to be
their keynote speaker. Despite rejections by
other groups to speak at the event, based upon
the US state departments official
designation that the MEK is an officially
designated foreign terrorist
organization, Richard Perle knew of the
designation, ignored it, and was happy to oblige
and raise monies - monies which were immediately
seized after the event by U.S. Treasury agents.
The MEK is the same terrorist organization that
attempted to assassinate Richard Nixon in 1972.
Two weeks after the PowerPoint presentation to
the Pentagons Defense Policy Board, the
American Enterprise Institute held yet another
seminar by Dore Gold, former UN Ambassador from
Israel to promote his new book,
Hatreds Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia
Supports the New Global Terrorism. Having
never visited the country, Gold has been promoted
on broadcast television networks as an
expert on Saudi Arabia when not
introduced as "an advisor of Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon".
Gold claims that the al-Haramain group has
channeled massive funding to Al-Qaeda whilst
omitting that Saudi Arabia shut down the
organization and froze its assets. Golds
strongest claim is an Israeli document claiming
funds to Hamas come from Saudi Arabia. Hamas has
strongly denied the charge of any Saudi
government involvement and Saudi Arabia also
dismissed the charges as false. Gold uses the
book to promote the Netanyahu/Perle/Bush agenda
to pursue Saudi Arabia far more
aggressively if Middle Eastern security is to be
protected and argues that Israel has only a
minor role in Al-Qaeda related acts
of terrorism because Saudi Arabia is to blame for
funding the global jihad of Al Qaeda.
Gold then testified before the United
States Congress about the inherent evil of
Saudi Arabia. Yet throughout the book Gold only
confirms that terrorism connections come from
foreigners who infiltrate the country, and
non-Saudi governments. The book provides no proof
of official or unofficial support.
Hudson Institute co-founder and neoconservative
Max Singer wrote a paper sent to the
Pentagons Office of Net Assessment in May
2002 urging the outside break up of Saudi Arabia.
On Oct 7th 2003 fellow arch conservative William
Kristol, editor of Weekly Standard, stated that
he was upset that the US had not gone beyond the
war on Iraq to the next regime change
of the next horrible Middle East
dictator Bashar Assad of Syria.
Before publication of his book Sleeping
With The Devil , Robert Baer, ex-CIA
officer, was ordered by the CIA to remove
multiple passages claiming special CIA knowledge
of Saudi royals having funneled money to Al Qaeda
for terrorist funding, assassination plots, and
even Chechen rebels. He asserts that Saudi Arabia
is a powder keg waiting to explode,
"the royal family is corrupt
, hanging on by a thread and
as violent and vengeful as any Mafia
family. Baer, filled with loathing towards
the Saudis, relies upon a tacit, yet rejected CIA
stamp of approval, but also shows little hard
evidence. Baer refused to comply with the
CIAs request just [to] defy
them. The CIA is considering filing a
lawsuit against Baer, who, like Gold, has also
never personally visited Saudi Arabia.
Another author who has made the best-seller list
is Gerald Posner, who wrote Why America
Slept which implicates Osama bin Laden and
the Saudi government. In Posners opinion
the rulers have been paying hush money to bin
Laden for years in order to prevent terrorist
attacks upon the Kingdom. One might consider it
strange that there have been multiple fatal
attacks upon civilians in Saudi Arabia if bin
Laden receives such bribes. And how was Posner
able to create a book with such a detailed
indictment within a few months when US
intelligence has taken years? Posner presents no
clarifications.
The US government itself not only unknowingly
harbored and sponsored terrorists (9/11 Al-Qaeda
members, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation,
Mujahedin-e-Khalq [MEK], IRA, etc.) it
consciously negotiated with Iranian terrorist
groups to secure US troop safety from attack in
Iraq from Iranians in exchange for Iraqi weapons.
Up until 2001 and since the mid-nineties the US
dealt directly with the Taliban for oil pipeline
rights, agreeing to pay the Taliban tax on every
one of the million cubic feet of fuel that would
have passed through Afghanistan daily. Vice
President Dick Cheney, Halliburton CEO at the
time, stated, Occasionally we have to
operate in places where, all things considered,
one would not normally choose to go. But we go
where the business is." During this
timeframe Hamid Karzai was the Talibans
deputy foreign minister and a former UNOCAL
consultant (UNOCAL leading these negotiations
along with Paul Wolfowitz aide Zalmay Khalilzad).
On November 9th 2003 Israel confirmed that it had
failed in secret negotiations with Hezbollah,
sleeping with their own devil. (In January 2004
the Israeli negotiations with their designated
terrorist group Hezbollah bore fruit, when a
prisoner swap became actuality.) Gerald Posner
writes in his book that terrorists had been set
up by the US posing as Saudi interrogators,
releasing a flood of information under excess
cruelty. This charge would mean that the US was
in violation of international law by using
torture on terror suspects.
Whatever inconsistencies exist between US public
relations and the "war on terror", the
efforts to tie the Saudi government or
"Saudis" in general to terrorism is
taking effect. Merit or evidence is not the
issue. Passion and mobilization is. The movie
Fahrenheit 9/11, true to its title,
turns up the heat through an entirely new
American audience: Democrats and Progressives.
The Approaching Decision
On June 25, 2004, Michael Moore's
film, "Fahrenheit 9/11" opened to 500
screens and insatiable crowds. The film's message
to audiences is clear and simple: the US-Saudi
relationship must end. However, Americans should
take time to go beyond the film, books, and
talk-show pundits to re-examine the complicated
history between the US and Saudi Arabia and real
motives of parties pushing for war. By
understanding the motives and histories of the
driving personalities new and old, we can uncover
and more fully comprehend an growing case for war
in Arabia.
Americans will soon be asked to make a decision
about whether invasion is the proper course for
American policy. But unlike the build up to a war
in Iraq, an informed decision will serve America
in a way that hidden plans, rationales and
one-sided messages on sale at the box-office
cannot.contact:
editor@globalresearch.ca
For media inquiries: editor@globalresearch.ca
by Tanya C. Hsu© 2004. For fair use only/ pour usage
équitable seulement.
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