Members of Congress caught using Saudi Arabian Oil as Vaginal Lubricant

I saw Syriana last night. There's a wake up call. Sure it was a confused, 2 hour long, pretty much unintelligible wake-up call, but a wake up call nonetheless. Some message board smeg heads (are there any other kind?) are describing the film as "liberal, far-left propaganda" or "the truth about the right wing conspiracy", but the film deals with something that goes beyond party affiliations, something that runs deeper then our petty ideological divide.

Our policies are a depressingly unchangeable Catch-22. At least seemingly unchangeable.

Here are some excerpts from an interview with Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who wrote the novel from which the film was based:

BUZZFLASH: Why do the Saudis finance terrorism? From reading your book and elsewhere, we deduce that there are probably two reasons. One is that they’re paying protection money. You set up the scenario, as you discussed earlier, that if they didn’t buy off al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, they might be the target of a plane that’s hijacked into their oil processing plants, and that would ruin them for years. The second reason is that the Saudis practice what we would view in America as a fundamentalist branch of the Islamic faith that actually becomes a breeding ground for terrorism.

BAER: There's a lot that we really don’t know. There are a lot of people in the royal family that sympathize with bin Laden. There are people in the royal family that feel humiliated by colonialism -- call it what you want -- by the United States, by Israel. And they’re humiliated that they are citizens or subjects of a country that has never fought a war, and yet spends so much money on defense. They’re humiliated that they don’t take the Israelis on, because their army is worthless. And maybe they’re not humiliated but rather disenfranchised because they can never advance up the ranks of the family, and it’s a very tough culture. They sit around and they read the Koran. And they get on these Islamic websites, and they watch Al-Jazeera. And they go to the mosque, and I think they’re believers.

....

That brings me to the State Department. You’ve got ’95, ’96, and ’98 bombings that had a bunch of Saudis. The bombings in Africa [U.S. Embassy in Kenya] and the Cole [U.S.S. Cole] had a bunch of Saudis involved. And we were hit September 2001, and we still don’t have visa interviews for these people. How can you explain that? If you’re a Syrian, you have to wait 30 days. If you’re an Iranian, you have to wait 30 days before you get your visa. In Saudi Arabia, you just send your passport to the travel agent. It comes back, without an interview, without any sort of check, and you get a visa. And that’s what disturbs me.

....

BUZZFLASH: You also mentioned how intertwined business relationships are with Saudi Arabia. Another point you bring out is that the Saudi Arabians keep possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks. So how does that factor in?

BAER: Well, Kissinger set this up in the first oil embargo. He said, listen, fine, you can raise the price of oil. You’re going to get more money for your oil. But let’s be reasonable about this. Take this money and all this profit you’re making, and invest it in the United States, which is a perfectly good policy, by the way. Buy our arms. Keep your money here. It’ll keep our economy floating. We won’t go into a recession or a depression because of high oil prices. And we’re all going to win by this. And that worked fine.

But then that goes back to the dependency. We depend so much on Saudi investments in the stock market, in Citibank and other funds. This is not just Saudi money; it’s other Arab money too. If we go into a confrontation with the Middle East, especially with oil prices so high right now, and that money is not recirculated back in the United States, it’s going to do some real damage. Or if one day, they just completely pull their money out. I mean, that’s the perfect storm: an oil embargo, the Saudis and others' pulling their money out, and having the price of oil go up to $70 - $80 a barrel. We would be hurt, badly hurt.

So it's the snake eating it's tail. We finance them, they finance us, they finance terrorists, the terrorists bomb us and we bomb them. The film suggests that any attempt to change this, bring in a reformer that pushes true democracy and self sufficiency to the Saudis, is actually against our best financial interests. The oil prices might rise and they might take some of their money out of our economy. So we'll continue to support backwards anti-reform idiots who support terrorists because it keeps oil prices down and the rich white guys pockets full.

Would having a Democrat in office make things any difference? Probably not. Maybe some regulation and more funding for alternative fuels, but no fundamental difference in our policies.

Remember when the commercials used terrorism as a way to fight the drug war ("Harmless?"). Well, it ain't pot that's funding terrorism, it's your SVU. So drive that gas guzzler with the "Freedom Isn't Free" bumper sticker. You're a driving oxi-moron and you should be ashamed of yourself. OK, not you, but someone else. I like you!