interview
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/12_baer.htmlBUZZFLASH: The book’s full title is Sleeping With the Devil – How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and you cover several administrations. The claims you make here seem to apply, for the most part, whether they’re Democrat or Republican. And you, of course, focus on Saudi Arabia. What compelled you to write the book?
BAER: I’d always been fascinated by Saudi Arabia. And I’d always noticed that on general intelligence reports that are sent around in the field, and in Washington, there’s virtually nothing said about Saudi Arabia. Every Arab that I talked to – and I know a lot of them – kept on talking about the disputes in the royal family, huge contracts, the Wahhabi's funding Lebanese politics. It became clear to me, even though I wasn’t seeing much in the CIA traffic, or State Department, or anywhere else, that this was a key country.
So when I got back to Washington in ’95 – and I stayed there until I resigned from the CIA – I said, all right, I don’t know a whole lot about Saudi Arabia. What about Saudi Arabia? And I got onto the computer and I took a look around, and there just wasn’t anything useful. I mean, you, as a journalist, would have looked at this and said: It’s junk. There’s nothing here. And especially nothing that goes deep into the problems in Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, I started running into these assessments of the oil industry, and just how much damage you could do to the processing facilities, not the pipelines, if you were a terrorist and wanted to bring the Saudis down. And then 9/11 came along, and the 15 Saudis that caused it. So I took notes about everything that I’d ever learned about Saudi Arabia and the government. And I said, this would make a book. I asked myself: Why don’t we know more about a country that’s so vital to the United States? And this is my effort at explaining that. You’d get a different perspective if you asked James Baker about it or an academic. But this is the continuation of my memoir, my gut reaction.
BUZZFLASH: We were told, after the Afghanistan war, that indulging in drugs is supporting terrorism. But you also make the claim: Every time we buy a gallon of gasoline, if the petrol came from Saudi Arabia, the oil was used for the gasoline. So we’re also supporting terrorism.
BAER: Well, it is. In the first Gulf war, if Saudi Arabia hadn’t been there to pump the extra gasoline, and if we had let oil hit $80 or $90 a barrel for a long period of time, people wouldn’t have been buying all these SUVs in the ‘90s. I mean, Saudi Arabia really does balance the market out. I’m in California right now, and we use a lot of gasoline. As you drive around this town, it’s amazing all the SUVs and four-wheel drives that you see.
In any case, we just use a lot of gasoline, and we depend upon it, just as we depend upon cheap imports from East Asia, from China. All these cheap imports and cheap gasoline, and wood from Brazil, it becomes a dependency. These aren’t my ideas. I talk to a lot of people about the drug problem, and they say, well, with dependency, your perceptions change. And I think the best I can tell is that’s what has happened. It's as if Saudi Arabia is our boss and is paying us a good salary. It would be difficult to find another job, so we're not going to really worry about focusing on what our boss is really doing. We're too dependent.
BUZZFLASH: So that’s the basis of your claim that through our dependence on Saudi oil, we’re, in essence, financing terrorism – because you do say in your book that, over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has transferred half a billion dollars to Al-Qaeda, and at least a hundred million dollars to the Taliban.
BAER: Exactly. And it’s obviously not intentional on the part of consumers; there’s no conspiracy in this on this side of the ocean. People in Washington didn’t sit around and say, let's finance terrorism. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s this process of what I call slow accrual.
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