Unger, Craig. House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between
the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. New York: Scribner, 2004. 370 pages.
With over a thousand end notes and a hundred books in the bibliography,
this is a rather good overview of the information and literature available
on the Saudi connection to the Bush family. It's about the oil-cash pipeline
between Houston and Riyadh, with the slick deals and greased palms from BCCI
to the Carlyle Group, that preceded and followed the two Bushes into the
White House. If you loved Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," you'll like
this book. If you think the problem runs deeper than two generations of
greed in two privileged families, then you'll find something lacking in the
party-partisan assumptions that motivated this research.
Author Craig Unger finds little fault with Bill Clinton, except that
Monica made it easy for his enemies. Unger primarily does magazine pieces,
and sometimes CNN or ABC Radio. This book succeeds within the limited scope
of its title, but Unger, it must be said, is a sound-bite expert. Here he
expands bites into chapters and end notes, but it still falls short. Would
Al Gore would have stayed out of Iraq? Unger probably assumes so, but we
don't. The problem isn't that the wrong person ended up as President.
Rather it's that no one with the values needed to make a difference has
even a slight chance of getting his message out and running a competitive
campaign. The entire system is corrupt, not just one political party.
ISBN 0-7432-5339-6
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