Follow the Money -- to the Saudi Princes

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted November 27, 2001.

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

-- Winston Churchill

As our missiles and cluster bombs fill the air in Afghanistan, the lies of our officials fill the air here at home. The loudest of these lies comes from the lips of President Bush himself, who insists that his is the noblest of wars, that he is the young prince who has set forth on a historic crusade to do nothing less than rid the world of terrorism, swinging his mighty sword in a sweeping arc to -- in the words of a recent pronouncement -- "save civilization itself."

Bless his heart, he might even believe it, for this is what he's been told by Prime Minister Cheney and by Rummy, his Machiavelli. The Bush- Cheney-Rumsfeld axis certainly is right that this is a war triggered by terrorists and that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network (in Arabic, "the Base") must be stopped. Nothing can ever justify crashbombing crowded jetliners into buildings full of people, nor can we sit around waiting for them to attack us again.

As in many wars, however, there is the political objective, and then there is the business objective, which tends to be less than noble. This is the truth that Bush & Company seek to hide by their loud and glitzy media campaign to keep us commoners focused on the evil face of bin Laden, and on the relentless pounding that the Bushites are administering to Afghanistan's Taliban and the poor people of that impoverished, inhospitable, practically primitive land.

It's time to ask, "Why?" Why have we singled out a country that is already so devastated by decades of invasions and wars that you can't tell the "before" aerial photos from those taken after our bombs explode? We're bombing donkey stables!

Well, yes, we're told, but we've got to get the insane terrorists who attacked us and continue to foment hatred toward America. Fine, but the Afghans are not now and have not in the past been global terrorists. In the whole bloody series of terrorist attacks on America -- the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the Al Khobar Towers military-housing bombing in 1996, the bombing of two of our embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and most recently the September 11 atrocities -- not a single terrorist was Afghani.

Until very recently, Afghanistan's Taliban rulers were hailed by our government as "freedom fighters," and billions of your and my tax dollars were spent to help repel the decade-long Soviet invasion of their country. And while Bush is now waging a propaganda war against these theocratic thugs for their subjugation of women, it was the U.S. that backed these very extremists when they came to power in 1996, knowing full well their deplorable human-rights record. As recently as last March, George W.'s administration shipped $43 million to the Taliban for being valued partners in the drug war.

Yes, the Taliban has housed Al Qaeda, but the truth is that we are reducing Afghanistan to dust simply because we can. It is a politically weak nation, an easy target. It also has no resources that global corporations drool over -- no oil, no diamonds, no forests, no fields of grain. It does provide the pathway that U.S. oil companies favor to pipe out the oil and gas from Central Asia -- and those oil fields are possibly the biggest in the world. (We'll come back to this in an upcoming Lowdown.) But apart from pipeline passageways, this desolate country's chief crop is caves.

In the economic scheme of things, the Afghani people don't matter.

Bomb them into oblivion, oust our Taliban ex-pals, and install some other nasties (the Northern Alliance) as our preferred government of the moment. Think of Afghanistan as a rundown tenement house in some out-of- the-way part of town. The Taliban are the live-in landlords of the place, allowing a drug ring (Al Qaeda) to operate there, doing dirty deals. You can kill the landlords, but this doesn't stop the dealing. If you really want to stop it, you follow the trail of dollars and go after the money bosses who finance and profit from the ring. But this is the crucial move that Bush-Cheney- Rumsfeld aren't making and don't want you and me even thinking about.

The global family of oil

Bush just recently made a highly publicized fuss about a small-potatoes businessman in Dubai who might (or might not) have funneled some money to bin Laden. This is another feint to keep the public from focusing on the key patrons of Al Qaeda's terrorism: the descendants and wealthy retainers of the royal Saud family, for whom the oil fiefdom of Saudi Arabia is named.

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