It’s the end of an era as Prince Bandar-Bush has resigned his post as U.S. Ambassador. His replacement, Prince Turki, has an interesting perpective on the war in Iraq.
“No matter how exalted the aims of the U.S. in the [Iraq] war, in the final analysis it was a colonial war very similar to the wars conducted by the ex-colonial powers when they went out to conquer the rest of the world.”- Turki al Faisal- the new Saudi ambassador to the United States.
Prince Turki is a complex and thoughtful man, who headed up Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services for 25 years. That means he is intimately familiar with the CIA, and our other intelligence agencies. He an insider’s insider, just as Prince Bandar was before him.
Speaking of which, wouldn’t you like a peek inside these briefcases?
A few months after September 11th, Bandar went to Aspen, where he has a thirty-two-room mansion. A major part of his success, one foreign leader told me, was that Bandar could be trusted to convey King Fahd’s private views when they differed from his public statements. Bandar had gone to Aspen to relax, but also to do a little housecleaning in a place that has fewer diversions than Washington. He had brought with him sixteen of thirty or so locked attache cases that he keeps in McLean. They contain evidence of the covert operations and secret agreements that Bandar coordinated at the behest of King Fahd and the United States, mostly during the Reagan era – such as records of a Swiss bank account that Bandar had personally set up for the Nicaraguan Contras.
Both Prince Bandar and Prince Turki know enough secrets to put the whole Reagan administration in jail for life. And that bodes well for continuing ‘good’ relations between the Bushistas and Saudi Royal Family.
