This book will test you. When you wonder aloud why Congress doesn’t get anything done, foreign wars continue without reason and deficits are so high, most are unable to see the cause. Unger doesn’t explain it all but he explains the relationship between money and power better than any book I’ve read to date.
The storyline of the book takes you through how the rich Saudi ruling class and really a group of Texan oilmen bonded over business. When you read about the genesis of the relationship in the 70s during the first part of the book, it looked merely like the cozy insider-only type of stuff that is common in the fabric of corporate America and most human relationships.
But the nuance Unger uncovers with his hawk-like ability to pull minutiae from rivers of source material outlines a darker agenda. His fact finding mission lays bare a Saudi elite trying to nudge the levers of power in Washington. And with this insight, Unger explains the nearly invisible pattern in which money buys powers in America. Unger’s work uncovers so many conspicuous connections amongst so many smart, ambitious men that coincidence is ruled out as the cause. Complicity makes the case here as well as any outsider like Unger can.
But the circumstantial nature of this book cannot be completely swept away. Unger has grokked the nefarious nature of this relationship but is missing the proverbial smoking gun. There is no ipso facto ‘A funded B which lead to C relationship’ outlined in the book. The closest we get to this as a reader is when the Bin Laden family and other Saudi royals are ferried out of the country while the FAA has all airspace on lockdown, a fascinating story that makes the TSA’s security theatre we endure at every airport comically irksome.
Recommending this book is easy, but to whom I would make that recommendation is difficult. If you sometimes watch/read the news with an open mind and wonder, “How did we get to this place?”, then I’d put this book on your list. If you’re knowledge of the middle east and current events is low, try paying attention to that news first, watch for the patterns and then read this to learn the connections. Most importantly though, any citizen trying to understand the ways in which money buys power in the modern nation-state needs to read this book.
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