What is the role of oil and the Bush family's "Saudi Connection"?
Fahrenheit 9/11 documents the close and highly profitable connection between the U.S. government and the Saudi royal family. And, in particular, it shows the direct personal role that George Bush Senior has played (at times) negotiating with the Saudi ruling class for the monopoly capitalist Carlyle Group.
And, on the one hand, this is all true and revealing. It shows how the presidents and officials of the U.S. are entwined with global capitalist investments in many intimate and complex ways. It reminds viewers that the Persian Gulf is, after all, a highly strategic center of global oil production.
But while showing all that, the movie then rushes into a series of speculations that give a series of false impressions--both about how global capitalism actually works, and about why the U.S. government ultimately decided to conquer Iraq.
Essentially Moore speculates that the Saudi ruling family may have been connected to 9/11, and that the Bush White House wanted to shield them (and its own financial dealings) from scrutiny by shifting attention to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
First of all, it has to be said, it is impossible to know for sure who, exactly, did the 9/11 attacks--or who may have known about them and allowed them to happen.
While many of the alleged hijackers were Saudi, it is also true that Osama bin Laden has had deep ties to the American CIA--going back to the CIA's massive covert war in Afganistan during the 1980s when the CIA helped organize, train, fund and arm the extreme reactionary Islamist forces that later emerged as both the Taliban and al- Qaida.
The argument that Saudi money may have bought the most basic loyalties of the Bush family essentially turns reality upside down. The dog wags the tail, the tail doesn't wag the dog. U.S. imperialism controls Saudi Arabia and its decadent princes, not the other way around.
At one point, Michael Moore even accuses the Bush family of betraying U.S. so-called national interests, supposedly by putting their private ties with Saudis above their responsibilities as U.S. representatives. This too is upside down. The Bush family are prominent representatives of the interests of the U.S. ruling class--and they have overall acted in that capacity in their dealing with Saudi princes and other foreign governments. And more important, those interests (which are often called the "U.S. national interests") are fundamentaly the interests of the monopoly capitalist ruling class of the U.S. These interests are against the interests of the people of the world (including most people in the U.S.)--they are nothing to uphold, or unite with.
The U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia have never centered on just the personal business interests of the Bushes--or any other U.S. family (however rich or influential). U.S. government policy in that region (whether Republicans or Democrats are in the White House) is about the functioning and power of their global empire. It is about dominating and exploiting the lives and labor of huge parts of humanity:
As the Revolutionary Worker pointed out:
"Oil is vital to the running of capitalist economies and modern armies and is a source of enormous profit and strategic power. Saudi Arabia sits on the world's largest pool of oil--some 260 billion barrels, or a fourth of the entire world total. Saudi Arabia pumps more oil than any other country, and it can quickly increase or decrease output to drive oil prices up or down. This gives the U.S. great leverage over the world oil market. Adding to its strategic significance is Saudi Arabia's location--at the center of the region's oil fields, along the petroleum transit routes of the Persian Gulf, and next door to Iraq (which has the world's second largest oil reserves).
"
(from "Toxic Relationship")
In fact, the war on Iraq was not a "diversion" from the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia -- but part of a larger strategic plan to consolidate U.S. control over the whole Persian Gulf.
The conquest of Iraq is intended to increase U.S. control over this strategic region (including Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) and make it more permanent. And then to exploit that control to further dominate countries throughout the world who depend on Persian Gulf oil for their most basic economic functioning.
Bob Avakian writes:
"It is important to understand that it is not just a matter of U.S. corporations being `oil-hungry,' or simply that the U.S. economy is `dependent on fossil fuels.' The more fundamental truth is that the monopoly capitalists who rule the U.S. must control huge supplies of oil and other fuels, worldwide, in order to keep production costs for U.S.-based corporations as low as possible (particularly through super-exploitation of labor in many oil-producing countries), to strengthen their competitive position vis-a-vis other imperialist corporations and countries, and overall to control vital lifelines of the global economy. And these monopoly capitalists use the government apparatus--in particular the military--of the U.S. to enforce this control. This is an expression of the essential nature of the imperialist system we are confronting."
(from "The New Situation")
Bob Avakian talks about the post 9/11 U.S. response and motives this way:
"Clearly this [invasion of Afghanistan] is more than retaliating for September 11. Certainly it has nothing to do with bringing justice for the people who were killed on September 11. It has to do with their own needs and interests and designs as an imperialist power, which is seeking to follow up on its political victory in the Cold War to further recast the world under its domination....
"Who is Osama bin Laden? Historically, he was tied with the U.S., and now they say he's turned against the U.S. Maybe that's so but it's not clear what all the different arrangements are and what all the different links and ties are between different intelligence agencies--U.S., Israeli or whatever--but let's assume that there was actually an attack that went down from forces not directly connected to these intelligence sources that killed thousands of civilians in the U.S.
"Well, whatever the U.S. knew about it in advance or whatever different forces linked up with U.S. institutions may or may not have known about it, the fact is they did have to respond. Again, like Mafia monsters on a worldwide scale, they can't let something like that go on and appear vulnerable. They don't give a damn about the people who died there. The only thing they care about is that they can't have it seem as though they can't maintain order in their own country.
"So they don't give a damn about the people that died and they're doing monstrous things in the name of the people that died. But clearly the main thing that's going on is that they had a program that they were already moving to implement on a certain level, and now they've seized on this situation that was created by September 11 to pull out the throttle full scale and try to ram this through, in a big way."
(from "Bob Avakian Speaks
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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