Bandar: Boffo!

[marmar]

From OurFuture.org:


Bandar: Boffo!
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on July 26, 2007 - 10:55pm.

Got my new issue of the London Review of Books today, and found a review essay by Tariq Ali on new books about Saudi Arabia. He leads with a bit of an astonishing story:

The day after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 a Saudi woman resident in London, a member of a wealth family, rang her sister in Riyadh to discuss the crisis affecting the kingdom. Her niece answered the phone.


"Where's your mother?"


"She's here, dearest aunt, and I'll get her in a minute, but is that all you have to say to me? No congratulations for yesterday?"


The dearest aunt, out of the country for too long, was taken aback. She should not have been. The fervour that didn't dare show itself in public was strong even at the upper levels of Saudi society. U.S. intelligence agencies engaged in routine surveillance were, to their immense surprise, picking up unguarded cellphone talk in which excited Saudi princelings were hearing reveling in bin Laden's latest caper.


Okay. If any of this is anything close to accurate—Saudi elites thrilled at the cold-blooded al Qaeda murder of 3,000 Americans—does the cynicism of our foreign policy elites, the people supposedly in the know, framing "the enemy" as, first, Iraq, and then, seamlessly, Iran, know any bounds?

There's this too: "Many Arab Studies departments on Anglo-American campuses receive generous endowments from the Saudis and other Gulf states. Conferences on the region are often funded from the same source." And anyone remember those "forums" that The New Republic used to publish as "advertising inserts," in the same font as the rest of the magazine, sponsored by the Saudi Arabian government? The same government that—this Tariq Ali reports, too—handed out copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to visiting American politicians as late as 1973?

These "morally serious" foreign policy "experts" of ours: why should we respect any of them at all?

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/bandar_boffo?tx=3