(no subject)

[winterbadger]

8/50: Fire Watch by Connie Willis. I used to *love* Connie Willis. I picked up this the other day and discovered I now *loathe* her. It's the sense of someone smirking and chuckling to herself, waiting for the stupid reader to pick up enough of the clever clues she's hidden n the story to "get" her point. And her points seem overblown and tedious, like a dish that's been over cooked and oversauced and then allowed to get cold in the process of serving it on elaborate plates. It's summarised by her comment to one of the stories, that she thinks writing is about creating 'reveals'. Lady, writing is about telling stories, something you have trouble doing with any subtlety at all.

9/50: The Best of L. Sprague de Camp. I picked this up at the same time as Fire Watch and found it much more satisfying. Yes, de Camp employs revelations in his stories too, but they serve a purpose--they're not *the* point of a story. It seems as if the difference between these two writers, to me, is that Willis thinks up or comes across a concept, germ of an idea, like "a cat that can talk" and writes just that--a cat talking. Whereas de Camp thinks "what would be the consequence of this cat talking? what kind of story can I tell that will involve this talking cat? who will this cat talk to, and what will be the result? To me, that's the difference between being a storyteller and being an ego with a pen.

10/50: Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Secret Saudi-U.S. Connection by Gerald Posner. This is another book I listened to on CD. I found it quite interesting, though Posner goes into a *lot* of detail on subjects I didn't feel I needed the detail for, I would assume among other reasons so as to demonstrate the depth of the information available to him as a way of validating it. The book starts off with the interrogation of an al Qaeda terrorist who reveals connections to highly placed members of the Saudi royal family and a senior Pakistani military officer. The terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, not only told interrogators (who he believed to be Saudi intelligence officers) that they should call these people as they would tell the officers to release him, but that several of them knew the details of the 9/11 attack *before* it took place. According to Posner, the Bush Administration deliberated for some time how to handle this information, then decided to reveal it (privately) to senior Saudi and Pakistani leaders and challenge them to investigate it. No one, I imagine will be surprised to hear that the Saudi and Pakistani governments denied any truth to the story, or to learn that the four people named (three Saudi princes and a Pakistani air marshal--roughly equivalent to a three- or four-star general) all died from "accidents" or "natural causes" within the next few months, before they were questioned or interviewed by anyone from the US government.

Posner describes how a large number of Saudi royal family members and their entourages in the US were assembled immediately after 9/11 and flown out of the country, at a time when no other private aircraft were being allowed to fly. He quotes numerous sources within the US government who deny publicly that any such movement took place, and he also quotes people who worked in the airport in question who saw the Saudis arrive and leave. One of the Saudi princes named by the AQ terrorist as knowing about the 9/11 attacks beforehand was one of those quickly flown out of the US after the attacks took place.

Posner then jumps backwards in time to provide a history of the kingdom and the house of Sa'ud, emphasising the close and lasting ties between the Sa'uds and the strict fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. I had some idea of how conservative the Wahhabis are, but I had not realised how totally crackers they are, how thoroughly medieval and anti-intellectual, how racist and hate-filled their version of Islam is. Or how much they destroyed in Arabia (moderate Islamic art, literature, seminaries, etc.) once they got the Sa'uds on their side to give them temporal power.

He then goes through the postwar history of the kingdom and the growing influence of its oil wealth on the world economy and especially on the US. I confess that while I remember the long lines of the 1973 oil crisis, I had entirely forgotten that it was not just a price *rise* brought about by OPEC, but an actual embargo by Arab states in retaliation for the US's support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Surprising what one does and doesn't remember.

He details the spending habits of several members of the royal family, the battles for power, the assassination of King Faisal in 1975, the vast investment by Saudi royals in US industry, the cooperation of the US industry and the US government in Saudi racist and sexist exclusionary practices, the efforts of US government agencies to circumvent laws passed by Congress prohibiting compliance with the Saudi-led boycott of anyone doing business with Israel. He describes in detail a complex self-destruct system that the Saudis have put in place to ensure that if they are deposed or dispossessed, they can make the nation's oil industry not simply nonfunctional (through explosions that will destroy terminals, pumping stations, even power stations that provide electricity to the system) but unusable (through radiological dispersal devices that will spread highly dangerous radioactive material throughout both the infrastructure and the oil deposits themselves).

And then, in the closing portion of the book, Posner returns to the Saudi royal family's connection to terrorism. First he describes at some length the way that "charities" have been used to provide financial support to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Then he describes the tight control that the Saudi royal family has on all charitable giving in the kingdom, and the uses they have put that to. He also describes in detail funding provided by members of the Saudi royal family directly (not through charities) to people linked to the 9/11 hijackers, including payments made by the then-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, and his wife to the man who lodged two of the 9/11 hijackers in southern California [the man worked for am aviation services company connected to Prince Bandar's father, Prince Sultan, head of the Saudi armed forces and now heir apparent to the throne].

At the end of the book, Posner points out that King Abdullah has been a somewhat moderating influence in the kingdom, rolling back, at least in part, some of the conservatism of his brothers King Fahd and Khalid. Posner suggests that the reader ponder whether Saudi Arabia is really going to move forward and pull the Arab world toward closer relations with the modern world, or eventually sink back into the isolation and hostility preached by its religious leaders.

Comments

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I'm SO glad to find someone else who doesn't worship Connie Willis. I loathed Doomsday Book with the power of a thousand suns (except for one very poignant scene), and have never been impressed with any of her other work I've read, which admittedly hasn't been much because I have too much else to read.

Currently enthralled by Sheri S. Tepper's Grass.

[winterbadger]

Didn't use to understand why people didn't like CW. Now baffled by how I could have stomached her archness and twee self-satisfaction.

Very fond of Sheri Tepper, though sometimes her apparently unrelieved landscape of women downtrodden and crushed by male autocracy can be a bit wearing.

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I feel dirty and cynical and world-weary just reading about the Posner book. Wow. Quite something. What an awful regime. So the idea is that Osama bin Laden isn't so much the "lone squillionaire gone bad" that he's characterised as, but more like the chosen leader or scapegoat of (at least) a sizeable faction of the royal family? Hmm. I very much look forward to the day oil is replaced by other fuels. What a geopolitical earthquake *that*'ll be.

Currently dipping into "Dorothy L. Sayers, Her Life and Soul" by Barbara Reynolds, which is pretty interesting in parts. For instance, I hadn't known that "Murder Must Advertise" was dashed off as a quick light money-maker while she was stuck in the quagmire half way through "The Nine Tailors". Didn't hurt either book really. And the vicar, who Barbara points out was really the central character of the Nine Tailors, more so than Peter Wimsey even, was largely her father, who had died suddenly some years before and was very much missed.

[winterbadger]

What's really disturbing about UBL and his ilk is that they're people who think the *current* Saudis are *too lax*, that the regime that will not allow the US armed forces to bring blacks or Jews in uniform into Saudi Arabia to protect it, who insist that when their personal aircraft fly in US airspace they not be handled by female air controllers, who offered a $10M check to the 9/11 widows and orphans fund but insisted on coupling it with a homily on how basically the US was to blame for 9/11 because it had been too pro-Israal--that the Wahhabi fundamentalists say those people are not hardline *enough*.

Interesting stuff about DLS. She's one of my favourite writers, but I still haven't read the bio of her that I snagged from my parents' library.

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Again - wow. Loathesome.

[winterbadger]

Yep. Listening to it really made me wonder whether there isn't some good way to use nuclear power after all.

Of course, it's not just the Saudis that are loathsome. After the first time the Sauds ran into AIPAC, they realised that what they needed to do was develop lobbying talent. And people in both our countries, and our governments, proved quite happy to do just what they wanted. :-(

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Until now the main factor behind the big resurgence of the nuclear power industry here in Europe - well, apart from presumed megabuck lobbying efforts - has been Vladimir Putin. But the Saudis are being a pretty persuasive factor too.

It all reminds me of something I read a month or two ago about the Chinese investment in Africa - propping up the Zimbabwe kleptocracy for instance. Can't remember the people involved, but Influential American, chatting informally to Influential Chinese Person, was questioning the Chinese propping up of vile regimes. And the Chinese response was, "Oh come on. We need raw materials just like you do. And it's not like we're behaving worse than you. I mean - Saudi Arabia?"

[winterbadger]

Yeah, the Chinese support for the Sudanese government (among, as you say, others) is pretty vile, but at least Sudan hasn't turned around and financed terrorist attacks by its citizens on China. Our continued rapport with SA is, from my personal POV, not only reprehensible but stupid as well.

From what I've heard in reports on public radio, Chinese businessmen abroad behave a lot like Americans in Third World countries in the 1950s: willing to invest in people and infrastructure and develop countries so as to get what they want out of them, but generally in person rude, boorish, brutal, and totally insensitive to local cultural and social norms. We made the Japanese over in our image after the war, but who says the Chinese haven't made themselves over in ours (with the eternal Chinese traits added in) since the Cold War?