On 24 Nov 2005, Dan Minette wrote
Look at Brin's arguments here. He claims that two generations of
Bush's are traitors ... Both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. were tools of
Saudi Arabia, and governed the US's foreign policy according to
the orders they were given ...
This is not what I remember. It may be that we have seen different
stories, since Brin said that he was trying to provoke thinking more
than anything else.
As I remember, the older Bush was not an issue. The younger Bush was
not being bribed but blackmailed: the thesis was that a Saudi prince
got something on him before Bush was `born again', probably a
photograph during a party -- something that even now would damage him
in the eyes of a major constituency. (The ideas are that the
constituency does not realize the degree to which photographs can be
faked and the Bush people do not think they could lie well about
something that actually happened. They certainly would deny a
genuinely faked photograph well.)
In Middle Eastern dictatorships, the only way to change government has
been through conspiracy, so the expectation of a conspiracy makes
sense. In an open democracy, it is better to presume that a ruler you
dislike has an incompetent admistration or a different policy.
The question is whether the US govenment has changed enough so that a
conspiracy involving no more than a few people is enough to affect US
policy?
A second question is whether the Saudi's belief system would lead to
the kinds of actions the US has undertaken? On the one hand is the
evidence of an increase in petroleum prices. This is especially
important if Saudi oil depletion is high -- if they must drill many
new wells to keep production rates level or rising. On the other
hand, the Saudis would be against a war `fought by the US and won by
Iran', which is how some describe the current situation.
But perhaps the Saudi government did not expect the situation in which
the US finds itself? You could presume that the Saudis expected that
the US would fight and continue to fight a colonial war without doing
anything to upset them. That would not contradict the notion that
Bush did what the Saudis sought originally, but not support it either.
However, (to use US military concepts) it is easier to presume that
Bush and the rest of the US administration focused ahead of time on
stage III of the conflict, which ended in the middle of April 2003,
not on stage IV, the follow up.
Rather than see order, law, electricity, and the like, as critical
military issues requiring more US troops, and rather than note that no
contemporary country fights a symmetrical war against the US (since
its generals know it will lose), but fights a longer, asymmetrical war
instead, they foresaw crowds like those in France and Holland
welcoming US soldiers in 1944. They did not consider the
practicalities of the occupation.
One argument is that the time horizon of critical people in the US
administration was short, so in January and February of 2003, when
major decisions were made, none thought about May, June, and July of
2003.
Another argument is that before March 2003, the responsible people in
the US administration modeled their sense of reality on US war movies
or Tom Clancy novels -- not necessarily consciously, but in practice --
and made decisions accordingly.
--
Robert J. Chassell
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http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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