What is the Saudi royal familys attitude toward the threat to their oil?
Well, even the King, back in the early seventies, when there was the Kissinger plan of seizing the oil fields, the King said “Fine, seize our oil fields and we’ll go to war with you and we’ll go back to the desert and live off camel’s milk and eat dates.” There’s this mentality in Saudi Arabia that oil has been a curse. And maybe Saudi Arabia would be an ideal utopia if you got rid of the oil and all this money that it’s generated that has caused more problems than it’s solved for the majority of the Saudi people. So it’s this convergence of terrorism and this attitude that we really need to watch in the future; not even in the future, right now. One of the things you mention in your article is that in the past you accepted on faith the U.S.’s assumption that the Saud family could keep their position and their oil safe. What caused you to change your mind? September 11. I figured that we’d be attacked eventually in the United States, but I never suspected that they would be able to put
