Obama bin Sultan and Bandar ibn Israel

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

12 September 13

ow much did Obama's threat of a not-so-limited U.S. military strike push Russia and Syria to accept, at least in words, the international control and destruction of Syrian chemical weapons?

How much did the threat of losing a Congressional vote on military authorization push Obama to grab onto Putin's offer with its lack of specifics and enormous difficulties in implementation?

Americans will debate both questions well into the next presidential election. But these are only the political atmospherics surrounding a much larger strategic question. Will the redline issue of chemical weapons end up escalating the war against Bashar al-Assad? Or will the long-term Russian cooperation Obama will need to control and destroy Assad's chemical weapons end up slowing down the brutal momentum of the Syrian civil war?

The point man behind all this global intrigue is an old Washington favorite, the Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, who is pushing the U.S. to provide the military muscle for a Sunni takeover of Syria. Now, with Vladimir Putin's masterful diplomacy, Bandar's mission has become a whole lot trickier.

Appointed the director general of Saudi Intelligence this past July, Bandar took responsibility for installing a compliant Sunni regime in Damascus. As the Wall Street Journal reported, his appointment convinced officials inside the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that Saudi Arabia "was serious about toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad."

Having previously served as Saudi ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005, Bandar pulled major strings under five U.S. presidents. He worked closely with the CIA to arm the anti-Soviet Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, which ended in the creation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. He played a supporting role in the Iran-Contra scandal, and loudly urged the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As Craig Unger documented in "House of Bush, House of Saud," he also grew so personally and financially close to the Bush family that George W nicknamed him Bandar Bush.

Slipping into the shadows in 2006, Prince Bandar encouraged Vice President Dick Cheney to join Sunni leaders in a new sectarian alliance against Iran and its Shia allies in Syria and Lebanon. Sy Hersh described this "redirection" of American policy in The New Yorker, and I showed the continuity in "How Obama Fans the Flames of Islam's Holy Wars." Far from doing nothing, as his hawkish detractors claim, Obama began using the CIA to help the gas-rich Qataris, and increasingly Bandar and the Saudis, fly in heavy arms to the Sunni rebels in Syria. Many of these Sunni rebels - like Jabhat-al-Nusrah - have links to al-Qaeda, an inconvenient truth that John Kerry and his new neocon allies are falling all over themselves to minimize.

The effort is embarrassing. Kerry's chief source on the subject, Elizabeth O'Bagy, worked for the neocon Institute for the Study of War and was affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which supported the supposedly moderate rebels that she, Kerry, and Senator John McCain were boosting. According to Politico, she has since been fired for falsely claiming to have completed her Ph.D.

Prince Bandar, Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the die-hard neocons are all using the highly circumstantial evidence that Assad was behind the August chemical weapons attacks on the outskirts of Damascus. They are openly fanning the flames of a larger war all the way to Tehran. "Humanitarian interventionists" like Obama's national security advisor Susan Rice and U.N. ambassador Samantha Power also seem to favor more war.

The Israelis are also backing the escalation in Syria. They had earlier hesitated because they had found Assad easy to deal with over the Golan Heights, which they continue to occupy. Their major interest remains building an alliance against Iran, and - unlike the Saudis - they would like to see the war in Syria go on without either side winning, hoping to grind down the Iranians, Hezbollah, and their Sunni antagonists. The prince has nonetheless grown close to Tel Aviv, and his Arab enemies have dubbed him "Bandar ibn Israel."

Where, then, does Obama stand? In his Tuesday night speech, Obama sounded far more hawk than dove, playing up the very real suffering of those who underwent the gassing while hypocritically ignoring America's own use of white phosphorus and depleted Uranium and its support of the Israelis and Saddam Hussein using chemical weapons. He appealed to the chauvinistic nonsense of "American exceptionalism," and went out of his way to sell military intervention in Syria as part of his opposition to Iran's nuclear program.

At the same time, he has U.S. Special Forces in Jordan training Sunni rebels to fight in Syria as part of what Bandar and the Saudis call their "southern strategy" for strengthening the opposition south and east of Damascus. The White House is also setting Putin up to be the fall guy for delaying military escalation in Syria.

The problem with all this is that it hardly encourages the kind of cooperation Obama needs to control and destroy Assad's chemical weapons, a task that will take many years. It also ignores Putin's own experience with Prince Bandar. According to the widely respected British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Bandar met with the Russian leader at Putin's dacha outside Moscow early in August.

"We understand Russia's great interest in the oil and gas in the Mediterranean from Israel to Cyprus. And we understand the importance of the Russian gas pipeline to Europe. We are not interested in competing with that. We can cooperate in this area," Bandar said, purporting to speak with the full backing of the U.S. He also pledged to safeguard Russia's naval base in Syria if Assad was toppled.

Bandar made an interesting offer, with economic implications involving major Saudi arms purchases from Russia and global cooperation between OPEC and the Russians. But, reports Evans-Pritchard, Bandar also hinted at a Chechen terrorist attack on Russia's Winter Olympics next year. "I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year," he allegedly promised. "The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us."

If Putin did not go along, Bandar implied that the Saudis might allow the Chechens to attack the Winter Olympics. With Mafia-like threats of that sort, I doubt that Putin will prove terribly cooperative if Obama continues to channel Prince Bandar al-Sultan al Saud.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

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