Random Michael Moore Deceits [#31]

Bush and the Saudis [from Fahrenheit 9/11]

Where is all this going? Moore soon tells us, by unfurling one of his most absurd and insulting slurs. He asks:

"Okay, so let’s say one group of people, like the American people, pay you $400,000 a year to be President of the United States. But then another group of people invest in you, your friends, and their related businesses $1.4 billion dollars over a number of years. [Footage of former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, and Vice President Dick Cheney.] Who you gonna like? Who’s your daddy? Because that’s how much the Saudi royals and their associates have given the Bush family, their friends, and their related businesses in the past three decades. [Footage of President Bush and Saudi Prince.] Is it rude to suggest that when the Bush family wakes up in the morning they might be thinking about what’s best for the Saudis instead of what’s best for you? Or me? ’Cuz $1.4 billion just doesn’t buy a lot of flights out of the country, it buys a lot of love."

This is accompanied by pictures of both Bushes—as well as James Baker, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld—shaking hands with various individuals in Arab dress. Here again Moore makes no specific allegation, but he suggests that both the current and former presidents and their Secretaries of State and Defense are simply for sale to the highest bidder. He conveniently ignores all the ways in which the Bush foreign policy is opposed by the Saudis (they objected, for instance, to the American invasion of Afghanistan, and to the newly assertive American role in the region more generally). And as ever, Moore’s facts, let alone his implications, are completely wrong. As Newsweek put it:

"Moore derives the $1.4 billion figure from journalist Craig Unger’s book, House of Bush, House of Saud. Nearly 90 percent of that amount, $1.18 billion, comes from just one source: contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s military and National Guard. What’s the significance of BDM? The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, the powerhouse private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board has included the president’s father, George H.W. Bush. Leave aside the tenuous six-degrees-of-separation nature of this “connection.” The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn’t join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998—five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm. True enough, the former president was paid for one speech to Carlyle and then made an overseas trip on the firm’s behalf the previous fall, right around the time BDM was sold. But Ullman insists any link between the former president’s relations with Carlyle and the Saudi contracts to BDM that were awarded years earlier is entirely bogus. “The figure is inaccurate and misleading,” said Ullman. “The movie clearly implies that the Saudis gave $1.4 billion to the Bushes and their friends. But most of it went to a Carlyle Group company before Bush even joined the firm. Bush had nothing to do with BDM.” (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/)"

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Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory."

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