If you want to read lose sleep at night, read about the Carlyle Group, Saudis, and CIA.
One source is a 1985 book titled
The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection by Steven Emerson, which exposed the oil connections in the Middle East, particularly during the two "oil shocks" of the 1970s.
Emerson went on to become a "terrorism expert" with a specific animus toward Arabs and Muslims, which comes across in his book along with the obligatory hosannas for Israel. It was Emerson who, as news of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing broke, wasted no time in declaring that it was undoubtedly the work of Middle Eastern terrorists with no regard for human life. (Remember that this is before 9/11, although after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing led by Ramzi Yusef.) Then Emerson was forced to backpedal when homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh was caught for the crime.
Nevertheless, my recollection is that Emerson does some decent reportage on relationships between the Saudis and the West; he particularly notes that while the Arab oil-producing states were making loads of petrodollars (remember how Britons were alarmed at how the Arabs were buying up London? It's even in an Elvis Costello song), Western oil companies were also raking in huge profits as a result of refining and distributing all those petroleum products, and although average Americans might have been hurting economically during the mid-decade recession, those oil companies such as Standard, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and the others that used to be known collectively as the "Seven Sisters" were doing quite nicely during this time.
erudite925, it is interesting that you say your father was a petroleum engineer. My father was too, a chemical engineer in oil refining (at one point we lived in Kuwait for two years), and there is no question that between the two 1970s oil shocks we were living fairly high on the hog. My father also had a tendency to get fired, but like programmers during the tech boom, he would get another job practically the next day.
After the 1979 oil shock resulting from the Iranian revolution, and then Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran, the good times ended with a worldwide recession that did not correct itself until the mid-1980s. Ironically, my father, then working for Fluor, did a lot of work in Iran in the 1980s despite all the "Great Satan" rhetoric and the enmity between Iran and the US. Of course, it helped that he also had Canadian citizenship. Capital knows no country.
As for the Carlyle Group, can you say George H.W. Bush Administration? Bush, James Baker, Frank Carlucci, Richard Darman. No surprise that they were so eager to liberate Kuwait following Iraq's 1990 invasion. I know Craig Unger has the book
House of Bush, House of Saud, but I haven't read it yet.
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"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." -- William Faulkner
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