Reddit reviews Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
We found 13 Reddit comments about Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Quicksand, by Geoffry Wawro
Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael Oren
The Coming Anarchy by Robert Kaplan
The Revenge of Geography by Robert Kaplan
The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr (although to be honest I found this one a little dull)
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Little America by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Soldiers of God by Robert Kaplan
Sleeping with the Devil by Baer
Dirty Wars by Jeremey Scahill
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll
Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile
The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti
Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan (I actually haven't read this one yet but it's definitely on my to do list and I'm a huge fan of Kaplan's writing, observation, and analysis.)
The Ends of the Earth by Robert Kaplan
This is a partial list of some books I've read in the past couple of years. I put stars next to the ones that I think are the really really excellent ones. Some of them aren't entirely about the Middle East but the concepts in them are really important if you want to understand the region. I hope you look through the list and at the very least look at some of the books that Amazon recommends to go along with these books.
Oh, you should also check out this essay. I like to think it's decent reading if you want to understand what motivated Bin Laden and the context surrounding his life.
If you manage to read just a few of these, and also keep up with the news (I recommend a subscription to the Economist and to the New York Times) you will be a phenomenally well educated person about the Middle East.
Also George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War" and Robert Baer's "Sleeping with the Devil", one of three books that formed the basis for Syriana.
Osama Bin Laden's relationship with the US is the primary reason behind September 11 conspiracy theories. The official record shows that no money ever flowed directly out of US coffers to Osama bin Laden, which might be true.
It'd be pretty fuckin' weird, though.
UBL was best buddies with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who we funded heavily. He's a cousin by marriage to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who held an essentially cabinet-level post in the Reagan White House. He was a favorite son of the Bin Laden group, which is Saudi Arabia's Halliburton. And his primary activities in Afghanistan were recruitment videos and multimedia for Saudi Arabia in order to encourage young Arabs to join the jihad.
Considering who we were giving money to in Afghanistan, not giving money to Osama Bin Laden back in the '80s would have been a colossal oversight.
This is how conspiracy theories happen: hide a little, let public misperceptions fill in the blanks. It's a lot better for the CIA to have you believe in "loose change" than to have our heavy investments in Islamic fundamentalism join the public discourse.
No. The IC doesn't even have a single dominant agency, although all the agencies theoretically all operate under the DHS now. It has even less capacity to dominate all of the USG.
I'm a little rusty on how the DHS has evolved, in part because so many of the recent developments are at least semi-secret. But if you look at US history, different agencies within the IC are often competing with one another for control and influence. Sometimes they cooperate, other times they compete.
The FBI, for example, has almost nothing at all to do with an agency like HUD, which has its own power base and purview. HUD has little coordination with the EPA. The EPA has little to do with the FDA. The CIA and the State Department are very close (even to the point of work environment -- the CIA often operates out of embassies).
The system of foundations and think tanks works closely with the IC in a symbiotic fashion. They share the same labor pool as well, as all of them prefer to recruit leadership from the Ivies.
There are also natural cozy connections between the IC and the finance community. Financial firms are often ideal shell organizations for cover identities, because the way that business works is that you exchange investment money for information and some degree of control.
Individuals within the different agencies often hate each other, because they're competing for the same pile of resources. They have to convince people in different intelligence committees that their agency should get funding and not the others. And in turn the agencies have to compete with private firms for funding (especially since the post-9/11 privatization explosion). Competition between the agencies can even result in the deaths of agents. The Israeli Air Force sunk the NSA spy ship, the USS Liberty, the State Department basically covered for the Israelis instead of treating it like an act of war.
On occasion, when certain elements in the government become too powerful, different elements group together to purge whatever agencies are threatening to tip the balance. The Church Committee put a boot to the neck of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA in particular. The ability of the IC to assassinate foreign leaders was a particular target of the committee. Arguably, this is because this put American elected politicians at greater risk of retaliation. Saying that politicians are valid targets of clandestine aggression naturally puts your own politicians in danger.
The historical context was also that, after Vietnam and Nixon's impeachment, the US was going through severe economic times. Cutting back on the military and the intelligence agencies in particular was much easier than going after other types of government spending. It was a good way for politicians to appear morally upright and fiscally responsible.
During the Bush administration, the different agencies competed for influence and money with the elected administration. The 9/11 attacks resulted in a bonanza of new financing and special powers within the IC. Different agencies competed with each other to provide usable pretexts for war [1] with Iraq and other governments. It may be hard to believe, but GBII authentically thought that he was on a mission from God to go to war with Iraq, and also wanted revenge for Saddam's attempt on GBI's life. The agencies competed with each other to fabricate evidence that Saddam had broken WMD treaties to make it easier to go to war. The agencies didn't even succeed at building a sufficiently credible fabrication to secure the strong support of all NATO countries, but the administration just went to war with the lies it had anyway.
So, the agencies are powerful, but they're still ultimately subordinate to other powerful elements within the state, and they still have to compete with each other. Other books that I would suggest would be Bob Baer's 'Sleeping With the Devil,' which talks about State/CIA subordination to the Saudi kingdom. You have a lot of different elements within the government that work at cross-purposes with each other. One working group might be funneling money to some Saudi shithead who is in turn funneling money to train terrorists to attack American cities while another agency is attempting to interdict their money flows. Meanwhile, another working group is collaborating with the Mossad to undermine the same arms network that another American agency is funding. Meanwhile, the FBI, the NSA, and the NYPD are all monitoring the same group of terrorists in NYC, but fail to actually act in time to stop a terrorist attack, because they don't want to disrupt their intelligence network. Also, due to lack of internal foreign language expertise, the agencies hire foreign-born graduates willy-nilly, resulting in total penetration by more foreign governments than you even want to think about, each with great access to classified material.
The result is less of that of a hyper-organized Illuminati, and more of that of a bunch of guys who hate each other spending 50% of their time covering their asses, 25% of the time being paranoid about other people in their own government, 15% of the time doing awful things, and the remaining 10% writing up nonsensical reports based on 8-year-old information.
The big problem is that America's foreign policy goals are insane when viewed at a 50,000 foot elevation level. But then when you get closer, it turns out that it's actually several different ways of crazy with no rational narrative to explain it. Then you get closer and closer, and see entire buildings full of people transcribing fights between American military husbands and wives. There are some funny passages in [1] about NSA people spending huge amounts of time just spying on the American military and people in the State department because those were the only people that they had the language capabilities to actually understand out of the intercepts that they had from target countries.
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Pretext-War-Americas-Intelligence-Agencies/dp/140003034X
[2]http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1400052688
This relationship is a hell of a lot more complex and deep-rooted than most people realize. If you are interested, check out the book: Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.
There’s an excellent book you should read that fully answers this question. It’ll blow your mind. Sleeping With the Devil - Robert Baer.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400052688/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_Q46dAbW02S42N
The tl;dr is massive systemic corruption and greed for oil money
His link(s) to the JFK assassination as well as all the "theories" around his connection(s) to the attempt on Ronald Reagan, during his time as head of CIA he was deeply involved in their beginnings of trafficking narcotics to pay for off the books programs, he also takes advantage of his daily CIA briefs to pass along information to all the folks he consults for.
Please don't take my word for any of this. I HIGHLY encourage you to look around on your own and read up. A great book which also touches quite frequently on GHW Bush and all his Saudi connections:
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1400052688
Nobody else ever seems to smile when they talk about this subject but he tends to:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TloGm6kS66I
If you really want to know more read Robert Baer's book Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.
https://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/dp/1400052688
Sorry, nope. The problem is this: US and British think-tanks like the one where that 'paper' was published are all 'advising' Saudis already since decades.
Some of think-tanks (most are controlled by what is called the 'Carlyle Group', which has several ex-US presidents and National Security Advisers - or various of their aides - on its paylist) are cashing hundreds of millions for their 'advice', and are also 'steering' Saudi investments worth billions - and that every single year, already since mid-1980s. Such like the Carlyle Group are then 'outsourcing' military/security related 'analysis' to think-tanks like IISS, Jamestown and whatever/whoever else is around.
(To make sure: no, this is no 'conspiracy theory'; read Robert Baer's 'Sleeping with the Devil' and see for yourself.)
Only a few of think-tanks in question - take WINEP as example - are at least serious enough to send their people to the ME and let them talk with decisionmakers and participants, and then report correspondingly. However, while their reporting is thus more serious, even their publications are never going to contain a clear analysis of what went wrong, i.e. a serious critique and 'finger pointing'.
Bottom line: expecting they would ever be as frank and/or as sincere as to publicly admit the Saudis are plain dumb to follow their advice (which is a well-supported matter of fact at least since the British convinced the Saudis to get involved in Yemen, back in October 1962), is like expecting the Sun would go up in the West tomorrow in the morning. Nobody is as crazy as to slaughter his milk-cow. At most, they publish such 'critique' like mentioned above, blaming Saudis for this or that - while actually it was them who pushed Saudis to bring such decisions.
Little surprise then, if reports like this one are full of nonsense and factually incorrect.
The Saudi Arabia situation is a bipartisan fiasco which goes back to 1944-45; I'd recommend Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold our Soul for Saudi Crude for details. The book is a lot less preachy, more interesting, and frankly more funny than it sounds...
I'm sorry I'm a bit busy with work right now to research this properly, but one of the most interesting dynamics to follow right now in global politics is the ~reform MBS is attempting to implement in SA. It's been many years since I dug into any of this stuff deeply, but from what I understand, the export from SA of Wahabi ideology, beginning with Egypt and the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the '50s, was a consequence of the arrangement made between Ibn Saud and the conservative militant tribes that provided him with the strength of arms he needed to dominate the Arabian Peninsula. It's really a fascinating subject, and if you're interested in learning more, I wholeheartedly recommend [Sleeping With The Devil, by Robert Baer] (https://smile.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/dp/1400052688).
2 entertaining and informative reads by a former CIA Officer, Robert Baer:
I am surprised no one has mentioned Adnan Khashoggi. Read Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude to learn how this guy runs Washington.
A great book on the US-Saudi unholy alliance. https://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/dp/1400052688