Sleeping with the Devil

Robert Baer

While reading the prologue, called “The Doomsday Scenario”, out of the corner of my eye I saw my bejeebers run screaming across the floor for a place to hide. Sleeping with the Devil can be found in the non-fiction/current affairs section, not the horror section - but that makes the fear more real. Baer explores corruption in The House of Sa'ud (and the lavish life style it buys), Washington Politics, oil, legal and illegal arms dealing, and Islamic extremists mixing in a devilish brew. The doomsday scenario is the Muslim Brotherhood (al Qaueda is an offshoot of this lesser known name) or extremist Wahhabis get twenty kilos of plastic explosive and disrupt four key areas of Aramco oil production in their largest facility. Production at that facility could be reduced from nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day to about 1 million barrels. Seven months out, production might recover to 3 million barrels a day. The price spike is estimated at $80-100 a barrel - and some think $150 a barrel might be realistic, at least for a short time; the $65 SUV fill up would be a fond memory. Baer, a multi-lingual ex-CIA officer, explores a number of bad neighborhoods see how plausible this scenario might be. Following the terrorist money trail points to the House of Sa'ud. Through “charitable” organizations, money is funneled to extremists inside Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to export Islam to the world (think Chechnya and Afghanistan), attempting to both expand Islam and hold on to power. The money builds and funds madrasah schools in the Kingdom and elsewhere, which espouse violent, puritanical Islam (Wahhabism), and trains terrorists locally (yep, evidence is that there is training there) and internationally. Saudi Arabia has some of the world's highest birth rates; combined with stagnating oil prices, per capita income has dropped from $26,000 in 1981 to below $10,000 in 2001, resulting in an increasingly dangerous level of internal unrest – mostly from madrasah graduates. The regime is under siege from the graduates. We see limited glimpses of the internal turmoil as there is no free press in Saudi Arabia. Washington considers Saudi Arabia to be “our valued partners” in the Middle East, and has felt this way consistently from the time that Franklin Roosevelt met Ibn Sa'ud immediately after the Yalta conference. Baer considers that the 20th century was more affected by the meeting in the desert than by the Yalta conference - and when Churchill learned (too late) that Rooseelt had the meeting, he also went to meet Ibn Sa'ud - too late, as the deal was aleady set. Some of what has gone on in recent administrations (back to the Nixon era when a corrupt regime is alleged to have first bought a president) is mind boggling. Given the money that flows from the Saudis and the oil industry into political coffers on both sides of the aisle, for presidential, congressional and senate races, and former administration officials jobs (remember Kissinger excused himself from the 9/11 commission rather than identify his clients) I doubt if the Saudi terrorism connection is raised meaningfully in the current election – but it should be. It seems may all be asleep with this devil in one way or another.