House of Bush House of Saud old book now but quite good.

"Two days after 911 US air traffic was all but shut down. Except for 140 Saudi citizens many kin to Osama Bin Laden.

Introduces the reader to Prince Bandar very much a western style playboy.

House of Saud oversees the Holy mosques in Mecca and Medina.

We find the house of Saudis a most important ally of The Great Satan the USA.. The US arms and protects a brutal theocratic monarchy in "House of Saud".

On the other hand held an alliance with Wahhabi fundamentalism a strident and puritanical sect a fertile breading ground network of terrorist waging Jihad. (I do not think so I think house of Saud has a lot of trouble from the fundamentalist Muslims or basically the poor.)

US bought the OIL Saudis bought the weapons.

The Bushes apparently have been tight with the Bin Ladens which is bizarre. This book does demontrate the connection between the Saudi royalty and the Bushes. In fact they were all desert oil people and got along quite well,

15 of the 19 hijackers in 911 were Saudis yet the US attacked Afghanistan and Iraq.

Alliance Carlyle Group-the Royal Palace of Saudi Billionaires and the White house.

The country of Saudi Arabia is a mix of Saudi royalty and the Bin Laden group was "comfortable with "the infidel culture" and men who run fatwas against women driving.


The Royal famial are seen by the poor as scumbags tasting the pleasures of the west. i.e this book sites an article by Seymour Hersh that states al Saud bough huge quantities of Viagra.
This book also hit up the connection between "Thousands of Afghan Arabs who streamed out of Saudi Arabia to join the mujaheddin. CIA's Afghanistan campaign was the biggest most successful operation vs the Soviets. On the Advise of Brzezinski the US give aid (stinger missiles) to the Afgan rebels. Resulting in BLOW BACK latter on ? That is the story we are given anyway. Democrat Charlie Wilson -came up wit h 3 Billion. See Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
Far Right Christians and hard line pro Israeli neoconservatives who poured big money into the freedom fights of Afghanistan were not happy they lobbied Clinton to remove Saddam and he would not go for it in fact Clinton favored containment through periodic air strikes.

So after Clinton's finial term was up Bushes son was put in?

'I know it's hard to put food on your family."


'I know it's hard to put food on your family"


BCCI was also key and this book goes on and on with a lot of controversial information.

House of Bush, House of Saud delves into the relationship between the Bush crime family and the Saudi Royal family. It also goes into the Bin Laden family and their interactions with both, as well as stuff about the Carlyle Group and the allegations that members of the Saudi Royal family flowed money to Cial-queda. After all there was a captured high level cial-queda op that blabbed that members of the Saudi Royal family and other super wealthy Saudis helped Cial-queda and knew 9/11 was going to happen beforehand. A funny thing is that many of the people named turned up dead under very fishy circumstances within the next few years. I also thought this book did a good job of going into the how and questioning why Saudis were allowed to fly out of the USA right after 9/11 when all air traffic was suspended and hundreds of completely innocent Muslims from other countries that were staying in America were being rounded up. This included sevral memebers of the Bin Laden family. It seems awful fishy to me when you consider that even by the US governments own account 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

There are lots of other interesting tidbits in this. Like how Saudi Arabia is an Islamo-Fascist state where you can be executed for adultery and have your hand chopped off for stealing an apple but at the same time the Saudi Royal family are notorious gambling, whoring, drinking and drugging party animals. They also talk about how in the 1980s Saudis were helping the CIA instigate war between Iraq and Iran by sending them intelligence that exagerated Irans military weakness in order to encourage Iraq to attack them. Criticisms I have of this is when going into Poppy Bushs history it fails to mention that Reagan hated Bush and was bullied into choosing him as Vice president as well as failing to mention that Bush was a lackey for Kissinger for several years. Also some of the extraneous history seems like filler, it unnecessarily goes into neo-con war policy in Iraq for example. It seems like he gets almost all the info for this book from other sources but its put together well. The Saudi Royals are definitely close to the top of the new world order pyramid. Certainly overall they have more power than the Bush crime family who are really just high level servants to the people that really run the world.

House of Bush, House of Saud reads much like the conspiratorial rantings one would expect to hear from an intoxicated drifter while riding a New York subway at 3:00am , and is just as incoherent. The opening statements of the book are absolutely saturated in the hypocracies of Mr. Unger's political philosophies.

Let us first put aside the truth that Mr. Unger's writing style is rather sophomoric, akin to a school child writing a term paper, abound with grammatical errors and blatantly factual errors, some of which could have simply been avoided had Mr. Unger simply spent ten minutes, rather than five mintues, Googling his "references." In fact, let us simply put the entire book aside, as it is simply a waste of time, money, and resources - did trees really have to die to print this vitriolic, asinine, nonsense? Sadly,

House of Bush, House of Saud has become the poisonous basis for countless baseless conspiracies that have seeped from foaming-mouthed lunatics the world over, from Alex Jones to Osama bin Laden himself. The collected works to date of Mr. Unger clearly define a deeply troubled mind, arguably psychopathic and obsessive-compulsive. His books are simply the masturbatory material for the most deranged, dangerous, people our society has ever generated. One would have to be rather disturbed to find truth or answers in House of Bush, House of Saud. If this book can teach us anything, it would be the absolute lunacy people will resort to as a means to justify how deeply troubled they truly are.

the book was absolutely incredible and I cannot understand why all this was not reported by the media. Fear of reprisal is no excuse!

I am surprised that people are still surprised at GW's behavior.
Steeped in Privilege and Nurtured with Deceit....how could this man have turned out ANY Differently. This book is an EYE OPENER, into the Bush Family, and what we should ALWAYS expect from them!

This book was presented to me as a birthday gift from my sister in January 2005. I only just read it. It is a fantastic expose of the close relations between the Saudi Royal Family and the Republican Party, specifically the Bush dynasty.

I am a Conservative myself (the British version of the Republican Party) and I wanted George W. Bush to win during the 2000 and 2005 elections. I agree with many of the Republican/Conservative policies but the foreign policy remains much to be desired. So how did I react after reading this book?

Well, I didn't realise how powerful the Saudi Govt. was in influencing the US Govt. I had always thought that Saudi Arabia was influenced by the USA and strait-jacketed, with no room for manoeuvre. But this book shows it is the other way round. How is it possible for all planes to be grounded after the 9/11 attacks except for those planes that were carrying Saudis? This could only happen if the US-Saudi relations are set in stone.

The book is also an expose of failed foreign policies that led to the creation of the Mujahadeen, who were drawn in to fight the American Jihad under the pretext of fighting in the cause of Islam against Atheists. The multinational force of the Mujahadeen didn't seem to bother the US and Europe as they served a purpose. The ex-National Security Adviser, Zigniew Brzezinski didn't see a problem with the terrorist threat from the Mujahadeen as he had a higher goal of removing the Soviet Empire. Unfortunately some of these Mujahadeen (a group of which was named as the MAK, the precursor to Al-Qaeda) came back to bite their masters in the bolloks. This is a lesson for the US, never to support terrorists, whether it is the Mujahadeen or Saddam Hussein or any future groups of a similar nature.

If the facts of the book are correct, it would mean that Saudi Arabia, despite its lack of military capability, is probably the most influential country in the world as it can influence US policy. The word, `can' is the operative word here. It can influence, but doesn't as much as I would like it to. Given that the Middle East Peace Process is in crisis and there are human rights violations in other parts of the world, the Saudi muscle must be flexed harder in order to pressure the US to find lasting peace in the Middle East. The era of the petrodollar is over, now the era of diplomacy must prevail. The Saudi-Bush relation must be used now more than ever to change the landscape of the Middle East and achieve results for Jews, Muslims and Christian in that region.

But foreign policy must be just. Unlike the Israeli lobby, which also has a large influence on the US Govt. (regardless of whether it is a Republican or Democrat Govt.), the Muslim/Saudi lobby should not lobby for a particular group or sectional interest, it has to go beyond the `national interest' philosophy and bat for the interests of everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike as Islamic justice is for all. As a Muslim who is also politically Conservative, this is the view I take.

The House of Bush must be rectified so that Bush's pledge of Compassionate Conservatism can break through the US border and migrate to other countries and replace the bombs that have wreaked havoc for countless of innocent civilians. The Saudi Govt., which is the guardian of the Two Holy Mosques, must also be rectified so that it can truly purge the Muslim world of terrorists and ensure that the correct message of Islam is spread and to flex its muscle harder on the US Govt. (Republican or Otherwise) to achieve a solution in the Middle East.

Here is a saying: `The Pen is Mightier than the Sword'.
Here is another saying: `Oil is mightier than the bomb'.

The Saudi Govt. does not need billions of dollars of AWACS or other military hardware. It has a secret weapon which took 65 million years to make and didn't cost a penny.

Hasan Ali Imam
(Ex-Parliamentary Candidate, Conservative Party)
London
UK

I feel like I have been on an overdose of these books having read House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger (this present and excellent book) - the biggest tell all blockbuster (my opinion), The Choice by Zbigniew Brzezinski (an excellent analysis), Disarming Iraq, by Hans Blix, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony of Survival (truly a book that makes one think), Thirty Days (about Tony Blair) by Peter Stothard, and Price of Loyalty, Paul O'Neill (excellent book), Why America Slept by Gerald Posner, the popular Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke, and the Rise of the Vulcans by Mann and Mann. I put together a "listmania" list of the 25 best books - the best books - mainly non political taken together, no strong bias conservative or liberal - a spectrum of opinion when you take them all together.

There is certainly a wide variety of views and all of these books are excellent. I have read and for the most part digested the views and ideas and I would strongly recommend any or all of these books to get a diverse view. One cannot begin to give these books justice in book reviews. In any case there are generally two types of books, i.e: the "gotcha" books which try to show how Bush has made errors or done something illegal such as this Craig Unger book, or the "solution books" like Brzezinski, Soros and Chomsky.

In my humble opinion this present book is the best read of the lot. Intellectually the Chomsky book or perhaps the Brzezinski book would take the prize for the best contents but this Unger book is by far the best read. The first 10 pages are simply riveting. He goes into great detail on the Saudi relationship with America starting back in approximately 1975 and takes it forward to the present time - just post the 9-11 attack. It is simply an outstanding read. That leaves you shaking your head - and I suspect might change the way you tink about politicians.

This book is a well-researched and highly detailed account of how the Bush family established their close political and financial bond with the Saudi royal family. It all began back in 1974 when a Texas aircraft broker named James Bath sold a F-27 turboprop to Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother. From there developed the "Houston-Jeddah Connection" which allowed wealthy Saudis to gain access to powerful Texas politicians including Papa Bush. The Bush family then went on to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with their fellow oil business tycoons -the Saudi royal family.

Unger also points out some of the highly dubious foreign policy decisions made along the way. These include the Reagan-Bush administration's policy of militarily backing the Afghan mujahadeen in their fight against the Soviet Union. One of these Muslim "holy warriors" was Osama bin Laden, who was transformed by his war experience in Afghanistan from a pious but spoiled rich kid to the world's most deadly terrorist. Reagan and Bush also continued to support Saddam Hussein, even after they found out he was using chemical weapons against his own Kurdish citizens, because Iraq was considered an ally against Iran.

Of course, Saddam's relationship with Papa Bush went quickly downhill after he invaded Kuwait and threatened to invade Saudi Arabia, thus endangering the global market for petroleum. Saddam was quickly expelled from Kuwait. But many called Bush a "wimp" for refusing to finish the job and take Saddam out of power. Meanwhile, Osama declared a terrorist jihad against the United States because U.S. soldiers were being based in Saudi Arabia. He considered this be a blasphemy against Islam, with the "infidels" now standing on the "sacred soil" of his homeland. Osama was sent into exile. But the wealthy Bin Laden family remained close to the Saudi royals who also maintained their "special relationship" with the Bush family.

When W Bush came into the presidency he was determined to finish off what his daddy had started in Iraq. This goal also involved a highly personal grudge, as Saddam had previously attempted to have Papa Bush assassinated. In fact, even prior to W's election, a policy favoring the overthrow of Saddam had already been written up by a neo-conservative group, called "Project for a New American Century," which had strong ties to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfild and others. Basically, W Bush and his cohorts were waiting for any excuse to invade Iraq.

Of course, the opportunity arrived following 9/11. W played down the fact that all of the 9/11 terrorists were actually Saudi citizens. He then proceeded to give wealthy Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, special permission to leave the United States without even a formal interview to gather information. This occurred while all other airplanes in America were being grounded.

W tried, without success, to establish links between Saddam and the 9/11 terrorists. A foolish idea since "religious" Osama and "secular" Saddam were bitter enemies. Then there were the bogus claims about Saddam's supposed "Weapons Of Mass Destruction" that were never found. All of this being a prelude to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the military quagmire that we currently find ourselves in. Today substantial numbers of American soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians continue to die in this senseless war started by the cowardly "chicken hawks" of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, Osama and his fellow terrorists continue to run free, no closer to being captured than the day of 9/11.

Unger manages to cover all of this and much more, while writing a brillant critique of the Bush family and their close links to the tyrannical and highly corrupt royal family of Saudi Arabia. Highly recommended.

If anyone had any doubts as to the relationship between the Saudi royal family and the Bush family, they need to read this book. "House of Bush, House of Saud" explores the interconnected relationship of the Saudis and Bushes since the early seventies. It goes through the history of the rise of both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, which evidently was the result of aid from the United States. "House of Bush, House of Saud" is a mixed tale of money, oil, and power that everyone should read. This book is an important history lesson of both the United States and it's dealings with the Middle East, but also how the age of terrorism was born. Most people would rather choose to see what they would like and that is not always the whole picture, so I implore all to read this book and find out for yourself. The evidence is all there, all you have to do is look. Knowledge is power!

This book was very informative. It explained a lot of things going on in this world that I didn't or couldn't understand before. A must read for everyone!!

It was during the 1930's that American geologists informed President Roosevelt about the immense oil resources of Saudi Arabia. Aware that the future of nations would greatly depend on oil, the Americans quickly established courteous diplomatic relations with the Saudi family. Craig Unger's book offers a descriptive account of this enduring relation. Popularized by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the book goes way beyond the bin Laden and Bush connections. It provides an understanding of the families' growth and how a mutual friendship developed between the two clans. The relations between the Saudi and the Bushes are analyzed from a diplomatic perspective that includes personal motives. Well-written and very informative.

The Founding Fathers were deliberately narrow in their definition of treason so that treason could not be used as a tool to remove political rivals. As such, the idea of treason as the most unforgivable of national sins has passed beyond public recognition in favor of lying about sexual matters or other high crimes of that ilk.

It is time to resurrect treason as a topic of discussion in the United States today.

"House of Bush, House of Saud" is not a polemic against the malfeasances of the Bush dynasty in American politics or an attack upon retrograde conservative beliefs, but rather, it is an in-depth piece of journalism that reads like a fast-paced spy novel of the Cold War era. It would make highly entertaining fiction, but good gracious, this story is true. The Bush's financial connections to a foreign power are beyond question; their actions in support of that foreign power are also beyond question. What remains is the motive, which must be greed. What results is 9-11 and a war in Iraq; historic national debt, the degeneration of American society, and the loss of American prestige abroad. When one reads "House of Bush, House of Saud", one reads a well-documented chronology of the mess we are in today, a decades long study of causes and effects, of actions taken in the 70s and 80s whose outcomes were predictable. But even if these outcomes weren't predictable, once Islamic terrorism was unleashed against America, the Bush's did nothing but carry on business as usual and, perhaps, impede President Clinton in his campaign against Al Qaeda. The Bush's certainly took no action once they regained power in Washington D.C.

"House of Bush, House of Saud" begins and ends with Saudi Arabian citizens, many of them relatives of Osama bin Laden, being spirited out of the United States after 9-11, flying out in luxury while all other private aviation was grounded. Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

Craig Unger has provided us the chronology, the footnotes, and the corroboration. It is up to us to do the rest.

I wish this book was a mandatory reading for everyone in the United States. Unger details all areas where the Saudi Crown Prince's family is in good with the Bush Klan. He also goes into great depths in outlining the areas where conservatives have no base for blaming Bill Clinton for the country's failure in defending terrorism today. There are several areas where the book gets really boring only because of how much detail is involved. If the 51 million idiots who voted for Bush last year read this book, the United States would be a well-respected nation today.

I read this book cover to cover and, contrary to those who believe any criticism of Bush must be wrong, found it to be a good explanation of some of the causes of the mess we have made of the Middle East. Even the foot notes are interesting and informative

This is one important history lesson.

MOST HoS reviewers are imbalanced, vindictive liberals who're impersonating into reviews defamations of Bush with every frenetic conspiracy-theory their anti-government minds invent. Their reviews divulge the extreme of liberals' cancerously black detestation of Bush, that they're shamelessly willing to stoop to unconscientious fraud by insidiously masking themselves as literates who've read it, really abusing that façade as a screen to galvanize immaterial, conspiracy-theory, insane slurs!!!! If you're afflicted with schizophrenic Bush-animosity, DON'T get pollutedly mistaught by these SICKOS; Unger's book isn't blinded, anti-Bush fanaticism like the sordid crap vomited by shameless demagogues so much as a history lesson, albeit a biased one. The otherwise informative book, chronicling Arabs' obsession with Islamic fundamentalism that was tactically used by the Reagan Admin. to help defeat the U.S.S.R. in the Cold War, is ruined by Unger's prejudicial and stealthy selectivity in order-chronology and his sometimes worse misdeed on disadvantageously believing untrustworthy sources.

Unger's thesis is Bush intimacies with Saudis may've facilitated profane, Islamic fundamentalism's rise; something plausible. Unger begins by detailing the materialization of Binladen repatriation after 9/11, contending that, contrary to FBI's insistences, they weren't screened probingly as required, but received WH, FBI clearance. While true, Unger's first wrongdoing is committed. Unger plagiarizes this fact from other books' and articles' sources, an illness he perpetrates for most of his book's discussions, reducing his merit because he doesn't investigate independently. Unlike other liberal partisans posing as authors, Unger at least balances his planned accusations that the WH jeopardized national security by not scrutinizing Binladen's relatives with confessions that, in the Binladen repatriation, there's only speculation regarding their connections to Osama, and the Binladens renounced him.

Parts dealing with the Saudi-American connection's infancy are historically informative and edify that not only did Saudis begin their Americanization through Houston businessmen like Bath, but Demoncrats were also involved, like Carter's director of the OMB, Bert Lance. The Saudis' ultimate goal was blatantly to infiltrate access to American power's inner sanctum-the presidency. Saudis partook in particularly shrewd habits of having businessmen such as BCCI's Abedi and Mahfouz rescue American politicians' companies that were in financial direness, even Bush's Harken. Saudis would continue to ingratiate themselves in America's interests by covertly assisting two Reagan policies: arming the Contras and Iraq to counter Iran, excellently strategic maneuvers. Unger puts in perspective that Iraq's arming was actually CARTER policy; he encouraged Hussein to attack Iran to ultimately free the hostages. However, America realized that Iraq was gaining strength, so they'd backslide to once more financing Iran. For liberal scum who sanctimoniously, IGNORANTLY decry this, this isn't a duplicitous policy as much as it's savvy politics.

Ultimately, the Reagan Admin.'s dealing with Saudi Arabia developed into their defining tactic of Cold War victory: mujahedeen-financing in Afghanistan. Unger, by his intractable, liberal categorization, HAS to demeaningly "argue" that constitutes American creation of the jihadist monster, but upon examining evidence Unger cataclysmically presents himself-that Egyptian Qutb and militant scholar Azzam indoctrinated students at Jeddah's Aziz University with Wahabbi fundamentalism-there exists likelihood that LOTS of Arabs would've dilapidated independently into mujahedeen psychopaths. This policy was started by Carter Admin.'s Brzezinski to halt the Soviets' expansion.

America's handled two winning approaches to Islamic and Communist threats, ensuing to the Gulf War, whose chronicling Unger treats less than perfectly, injuring his legitimacy. Unforgivably adverse is Unger's selective reliance on untrustworthy, rabidly psychotic, anti-war sources for almost all of one chapter. Detailing the Gulf War, Unger exclusively abuses sources from the guiltiest anti-war forgers: the "Disinformation Company" and John MacArthur, slippery dissembler. Instead of recounting the intriguingly supposed offer Binladen made to fight Hussein with his "Afghan warriors" instead of the "infidel" Americans in response to Hussein's Kuwait invasion to reclaim Iraq's "stolen" oil, Unger descends into hazardously unstable, anti-war propaganda. Using MacArthur's source blindly, Unger subserviently regurgitates the sham Hussein DIDN'T amass a large army into Kuwait. This is THE worst objectionable aspect of Unger's otherwise decent effort, and citing another roguish "reporter" from St. Petersburg Times, Unger fabricates that alleged Soviet satellite photos of Kuwait and Iraq DIDN'T show buildup except America's own. Unger covers-up varying reasons the SAME experts he quoted offered as probabilities for said phenomena, including camouflage, wide troop dispersion, or glare. Another discomforting questionableness is Unger's preoccupation with disproving "Nayirah's" credibility, which CAN'T be "confirmed" other than on mentally ill, anti-war sites!!!!

Unger progresses to Clinton, his amoral partisanship lapsing conscience!!!! Unger lies through his teeth Clinton was first to "identify" Al-Qaeda as the premier hazard; if you believe this, you're a gullibly mistaught, liberal patsy-cretin.

_House of Bush, House of Saud_ by Craig Unger is one of a recent series of books on the United States-Saudi Arabia relationship (or otherwise dealing with American activities in the region), and like several of those works is critical of the Bush administration. The central tenet of this book is that the "secret relationship" between the House of Saud and what Unger termed the "House of Bush" (both Bush presidents as well as a number of close associates such as James Baker, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney) helped to create the current age of terror we are now living in and lead to the horrible events of 9/11; that American (in this book, Bush and friends) interests in Saudi Arabia precluded any intensive investigation of Saudi roles and involvement in terrorist acts and quite remarkably that George W. Bush owed his 2000 election to the mobilization of Saudi-funded Islamic groups. In the course of the book Unger also found the space to show how the House of Bush was instrumental in the rise of Saddam Hussein, downplaying the unsavory qualities of Hussein during the Reagan years and the Iran-Iraq War, the instigation of the 1991 Gulf War, and misleading the world about the real nature of the threat posed by Iraq both as a result of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and prior to the second Gulf War.

Quite extraordinary claims, and significant ones, as this book was one of those apparently cited by Michael Moore in his controversial documentary _Fahrenheit 9/11_. Does Unger prove them? In a word, no.

First of all, I think Unger tried to tackle too much. His narrative is all over the place, trying to cover a great deal of history, from the early days of Saudi involvement in Texas businesses and development of Saudi oil resources to the internal divisions within the Reagan administration and the secret deals during the Iran-Iraq War to the history of the neocons to some of the minutia of the 2000 presidential election to the invents leading up to the second Iraq War. As much as Unger would like to think that all of this was very closely related - and in truth, as they all involve more or less the same region, there was some relationship - they were not as closely tied together as he would like the reader to believe. Some important points he made about the "House of Bush's" or the Saudi's complicity one some matter or another only got a page or two or even a few paragraphs before he rushed on to the next issue. While some of the background history was actually quite interesting - I will admit I didn't know much about the Iran-Iraq War for instance - a good amount I think had little to do with the case he was trying to make.

I don't have the space to review every point Unger made in his book. Some of his criticisms have been well answered elsewhere. That the Americans (with Saudi and Pakistan help) inadvertently created Al-Qaeda by supporting the Afghan Arabs and other insurgents in the Soviet War in Afghanistan I think is not in dispute, and the case has been made, even to an extent in this very book, that the war was a major if the major cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Supporting Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, overlooking his use of chemical weapons, and his build-up of huge conventional forces has been criticized before, but again I don't think it had anything to do with Saudi Arabia for instance (or only marginally) and wasn't done out of any profit-making motive or for naked political power on the part of any member of the "House of Bush" (and George W. Bush had absolutely nothing to do with this at any rate). In hindsight American support for Hussein was quite regrettable, but again, that is hindsight. At the time there was a greater fear of Iran and its possible export of a Shiite revolution.

Two issues that Unger focused a lot of attention on were admittedly interesting but again I don't think he made the point strongly enough that there was any real wrong doing. He noted the well known fact that Bush won in 2000 by the slimmest of margins in Florida and that Bush actively courted the Arab-American and Muslim-American vote in Florida (and in other states, notably Michigan). While studies showed that anywhere from 88% to 91% of Muslims in Florida voted for Bush and no doubt this was a factor, who is to say that this was the decisive factor in winning Florida? Anyone can pick out any one interest group that voted for Bush and say that they were the factor.

Unger also noted that several fund-raisers and campaigners in Florida had ties to terrorism, such as Sami Al-Arian, a Kuwait-born Palestinian who was a professor at the University of South Florida, later shown to have ties to Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian terrorist group, but then later noted that "Bush could not have known at the time" that a case was being built up against him and others (as well as noting the Democrat's complete absence of criticism of their involvement at the time). While certainly a few of the Muslim and Arab campaigners in Florida had such ties, Unger did not make a very strong case that Bush knew this or was complicit in this.

Unger opened and closed the book with criticism of the flight of a number of Saudi nationals and their associates out of the United States days after 9/11, when American airspace was still closed to private planes, both for the administration for allowing them to leave starting on September 13 and for their lax questioning by officials. That was probably his strongest and most interesting criticism of Bush, though the chronology he provided indicated it might have been the case of bureaucratic bungling, not some sinister conspiracy with a foreign power.

There is a basic problem in this country that we are in a deep relationship with the Saudis. They have too much influence. It effects our foreign and domestic policy. Saudi visitors have more rights in this country than American citizens. Every civilian aircraft in the United States was grounded on 9/11. Governors and ex-presidents were stranded wherever they happened to be. Yet members of the Saudi family were allowed to get into planes and fly home. The FBI denied this fact. Later, it was substantiated.

Many have talked about this U.S.-Saudi relationship. Senator Bob Graham discusses it in his own book for example. Michael Moore touched on it in his typically superficial and cartoonish way in his movie, "Farenheight 9/11". But to my knowledge no one has illuminated the history and details of this relationship as well as Craig Unger.

However, despite this book's thoroughness and explosive revelations, the forces that have pushed us in this direction are too powerful. The issues are far too subtle and complex for the majority of voters to grasp. American's understand BIG SYMBOLS and simple catch phrases. Those who benefit from U.S.-Saudi interdependancy have the resources to influence public opinion.

I highly recommend this book. This one should be separated from the general pile of anti-Bush rants because it looks at the whole context of the situation instead of a few sensationalistic facts, and it supports its arguments with solid research. Ultimately however, I don't think anything is going to change because our country doesn't have enough attention span.

As a free world citizen, We hate to see Non-Democratic regimes like Saudis. King and his family (around 1000's princes according to this book)live in faboulous life. But the regular citizens get no job no education (Except religious education)
Women can not vote and even can not drive. Which country or democratic leader wants to have very close relationship with that kind of country. I guess nobody!!!

But USA has strong relationship with this non democratic regime, during Clinton Administration it was little bit shaky, but with elder and junior Bush make this relation higher not only for US interest also for their personnel interest too.
The most important claim of the book (According to me), captured Al-Qaide leader gave 3 names of the Saudi Royal family to help him and these three royals have got killed by Saudi Royal family. These are the people Bush's making business and getting closer personell relationship. US Army is in the Iraq to give Freedom and Democracy for the Middle East. Are they really on the right spot?

I enjoyed reading a more factual, less sensational, assessment of recent foreign policy between the US and the middle east since the 1980s until the current Iraq war. This book helped give me a greater understanding of past events and the fine line the Saudi royal family must balance between relationships with the US and their general citizens. So interesting that the US is really responsible for much of the training and arming of the people we know consider terrorists. It was interesting to read a fact-based history of American foreign policy which helped me put current events into perspective.