The Real Manchurian Candidate

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 2 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

As we reach the final days of the Bush Junta's misrule, it appears (more and more often) that he and his family have never worked for America but for its enemies.

In The Manchurian Candidate, this was done through a complex  plot involving the brainwashing of a young Army officer (Laurence Harvey), a ruthless double agent (Angela Lansbury) and her fool of a husband (James Gregory). Spoiler alert. It was Gregory (the one on the left here) who was the candidate, a drunk and incurious fool whose rise was driven by attacking the very people he would work for.

The movie's most vivid image is of a playing card, the Queen of Hearts, which Lansbury would show Harvey in order to hypnotize him and give him his orders.

In real life we had no Harvey, and no Frank Sinatra to save us. The plot succeeded. The evidence is all around you.

Those tempted to show a Queen of Hearts to George W. Bush at one of his last press conferences are missing the point. He's Gregory, not Harvey. He never required a lot of handling. Just point him where you want and he goes.

In the real version of this horror show Dick Cheney is Lansbury (or is it possible his father, George H.W. Bush, is Lansbury), and there is no real underground plot, no playing card at all. Everyone is doing what they are doing with their eyes wide open. Because they are not working for North Korea. They're not Communists.

They're Arabists.

Every single policy pursued by the Bush Administration, domestically or in foreign affairs, has been aimed at protecting, nurturing, and supporting the interests of one nation.

Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is not the country's real name. The Saudis are merely its owners. (It's a big'n too — as you can see in this BBC picture, taken at the funeral of the last King.) It's the only nation on Earth whose very name is property — the Arabia owned by the House of Saud.

Bin Laden was a Saudi. His is an offshoot of Wahhabism, the state religion, of which the King is the head. Bin Laden's idelogy developed as an attempt to "cleanse" Wahhabism of decadent influences, including any humanity for women, and all forms of modern sin. I think of it as being like the dispute between Mormons and their FLDS sect.

What Bush has managed to accomplish has all been to the good of Saudi Arabia, and all to the detriment of the United States. Yet even today neither he nor Cheney will acknowledge this fact, nor offer any apologies for it.

The answer to that mystery lies in the Depression, when Texas became wedded to the interests of the oil kingdom through the creation of Aramco. Arab oil is far more plentiful and easy to tap than any field ever found in the U.S. It was also more lucrative, for decades.

I was in Houston during the first oil crisis, in the mid-1970s, and what you may not realize is these were great days, for Houston. While the rest of the nation suffered under oil prices rising through the roof, Houston prospered as never before. Much of this was because of Aramco, whose offices were then on the West Loop in Houston. The Saudi takeover of Aramco in 1980 was the end of the Houston oil boom.

The best way to return to those good days, it turned out, was through policies that would enrich the Saudis even more. And these are the policies the Bush-Cheney Administration pursued, from the start of their misrule. Cheney, after all, had been head of Halliburton, which through its Brown & Root subsidiary was a long-time player in the Saudi Kingdom, and he made that company richer than its wildest schemes. How wealthy and dependent it became under his viceroyship is seen in the fact that the company moved its operational headquarters to Dubai in 2007.

This was the real "trickle-down economics." It wasn't a bug, it was a feature. Make the Saudis trillions and companies like Halliburton could get billions. The way to do that was to use the U.S. military as the offensive arm of Saudi power, taking out the threat of Iraq, and to use companies like Halliburton for the dirtiest work.

This is precisely what has happened. The U.S. economy was broken on the wheel of Saudi oil. America's foreign policy became completely beholden to Riyadh and its interests. The hardest task of the coming Obama Administration, the most vital task, will be to break this link.

It won't be easy. In the near term the only thing making Obama's economic program workable is the willingness of Saudis and their allies in the Emirates to continue taking our paper. Never mind what China's disinvestment could do — remove the dollar peg, watch the Saudis sell instead of buy treasury bills, and you'll be at triple-digit interest rates on our debt faster than you can say Ben Bernanke.

This relates directly to the War Against Oil. It's why Obama must proceed cautiously, carefully, in the War Against Oil. I think it's why his people seem so weak on that issue, endorsing offshore drilling (which retains our dependence on oil), looking kindly to scams like ethanol (which just starves Africans, a favorite Saudi pastime of centuries' standing), and generally concentrating on the economic situation, not energy.

This is, in fact, necessary. You take the Saudi pins out from under our economy today, with a confrontational attitude toward the oil kingdom, and you can kiss any hope of economic recovery goodbye. They have to finance it. It's only after we start generating cash again, start producing again, and start taking away the punch bowl through tax hikes and interest rate rises that we can gain any measure of autonomy.

The sad truth of our time is that, thanks to Bush and Cheney, the United States is today a dependency of Saudi Arabia. The plot that was only imagined in The Manchurian Candidate has become utter, horrifying reality in our time.

It will be years before we can afford to wake up.