In his speech accepting the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination in Boston last week Sen. John Kerry, the man who will face President George W. Bush in this fall’s election, promised to end what he termed “our dependence on the Saudi Royal family.”

Kerry was echoing the theme of Craig Unger’s book (HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD: The Hidden Relationship Between The World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties; details below) which has also inspired “Fahrenheit 9/11”, Michael Moore’s “documentary” attack on Bush.

It is hard to summarize Unger’s narrative.

But here is a modest effort: For 30 years the Bush family, or “dynasty” as Unger prefers, has been linked with the Al-Saud dynasty for reasons of personal gain. The Al-Saud helped the Bushes win the presidency and used them to advance their agenda. George W’s debt to the Saudis is greater than that of his father. Unger says: “He owed both his personal and political fortunes to the Saudis.” Unger calls W. “the Arabian Candidate” and insists that he came to power through a coup d’etat in which the Supreme Court played the role of the military in such exercises. Once elected, however, W. moved close to the pro-Israel “neocons” who changed American policy in the Middle East, thus angering the Saudis. Unger says: “Bush’s standing in the House of Saud, suddenly plummeted.” The Saudis retaliated with the Sept. 11 attacks in which 15 of the 19 suicide-killers were Saudis. Al-Qaeda, the organization that carried out the attack, was financed by the Saudi royal family and had contact with it through three princes.

To be sure, Unger says none of those things in a straight way. Instead, he uses the Michael Moore method of suggestion, insinuation and allusion. He hints at things with a “you-know-what-I-mean” twinkle in his eye. For example, he spends many pages to show, in painful detail, that the two Bushes were, at some stage in their careers and briefly, involved in the oil business. He then spends much time to note that there is also oil in Texas. Finally, he reminds us that the Saudis, too, are deep in oil, so to speak. He then asks: You see what I mean?

Here is another example: Unger wants us to believe that Bush pere was, somehow, connected with Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader. Having found no evidence, Unger is, nevertheless, anxious not to let go of the allegation.

So he comes up with this: “In May 1984 Vice President George H.W. Bush visited the Khyber Pass border of Pakistan and Afghanistan with a $14 million check for humanitarian aid to Afghan refugees. We do not know exactly where Bin Laden was at that moment, but during this period he was in nearby Afghanistan and had began working to build up the Services Office (the nucleus of the Al-Qaeda). Chances are that this is the closest that Osama Bin Laden and George W. H. Bush ever got physically. They were in the same region at roughly the same time. And most important they were fighting for the same cause.”

(Unger knows that Bin Laden was not in Afghanistan at that time. Elsewhere in his book, he shows that Bin Laden’s first visit to Afghanistan took place two years later.)

Not surprisingly, President Bush’s supporters have dismissed Unger’s book as another politically motivated attack in an election year.

Unger does not hide his dislike of the Bush pere et fils. But a careful reading of the book reveals it to be subject to the law of unintended consequences.

Here is why:

Having amassed all the possible allegations against Bush and the Saudis, Unger ends up by showing each and everyone to be either groundless or wildly exaggerated. Having mentioned and, at times embellished each allegation, Unger becomes aware of the fact that he has no evidence whatsoever. In some cases he is even obliged to include whole paragraphs of refutation of the allegations within his text. These paragraphs were clearly inserted at the behest of lawyers from some of the people accused, thus saving Unger and his publishers from libel suits.

For example, Unger spends much time reporting how the two Bushes won two, very small, oil exploration contracts from two Arab states. But then he is obliged to admit that neither contract involved Saudi Arabia. Bush pere won a contract from Kuwait while Bush fils landed one from Bahrain.

W., who is supposed to owe “the essential part of his fortune” to the Saudis, sold his share in an oil company that he had founded for $848,560 to a consortium that included the Harvard Business School, the speculator George Soros and two Saudi businessmen with a modest share. Unger shows that W. , in fact, lost money in the transaction.

Unger’s book opens with an account of how some Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, were illegally flown out of the US in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Without saying so, he implies that the flights were authorized by President Bush because he was beholden to the Saudis. But then we get this from Richard Clarke, at the time in charge of counterterrorism at the Bush administration and now an opponent of the president: “I authorized those flights but only after air travel had been restored and all the Saudis questioned by the FBI”. In other words nothing illegal or extraordinary happened at all.

Unger also shows that the two Bushes disagreed with the Saudis on many major issues.

He reports that in 1990 Bush Sr. and the Saudis were at odds about whether or not to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

“Bush’s relationship with Kuwait went back 30 years. When he was head of Zapata Offshore, he had built Kuwait’s first offshore oil well with the approval of the ruling Al-Sabah family. The Kuwaitis were his benefactors and he was forever indebted to them. By contrast Bandar (the Saudi ambassador to Washington) had only contempt for the Kuwaitis.”

So, now we know that Kuwait was liberated against the wishes of the Saudis!

According to Unger, the Saudis also opposed Bush Jr.’s, intervention in Afghanistan, and the liberation of Iraq. At the same time W.’s Middle East policy so angered the Saudis that Crown Prince Abdullah wrote him an abrasive letter.

What about the allegations that Unger makes against the Saudis?

Here is what he says: “It should certainly be said that allegations against the Saudi merchant elite and various members of the House of Saud are precisely that: Allegations. Charges that many of them knowingly facilitated and transferred funds to terrorists have been brought to court and have not been proven.”

The obvious question is: So why build a book around such allegations? Unger does not pose the question. Instead he names three Saudi princes who were supposedly in contact with Al-Qaeda. The problem is that all three are dead, and cannot speak for themselves, let alone file a libel suit.

Ironically, Unger shows that the Saudis had far more extensive business contacts with senior Democratic politicians than Republicans, including the Bushes.

Among Democrats the names are Clark Clifford, a former defense secretary, Bert Lance, President Carter’s budget director, Lloyd Bentsen, treasury secretary in the first Clinton administration, Ralph Yarborough, a patron of the liberal wing of the Democrat party, Congressman Charlie Wilson, Jackson Stephen, a classmate of Carter and friend of Clinton, and John Connolly, once Texas governor. Even the Carlyle Group, which Unger identifies as the business base of the “House of Bush”, was founded and chaired by a Democrat, David Rubenstein, who served in the Carter administration.

Many pages are devoted to the debacle of the BCCI, a Pakistani bank that was later taken over by investors from all over the world before going bust. Unger never mentions that the majority of shares in BCCI belonged to the United Arab Emirates, and that Saudi investors had a very small presence in its equity.

As for the Bush “dynasty” Unger himself suggests absolutely no connection with BCCI. Instead he offers a portrait gallery of senior Democrats who were involved in the bank’s scandal. Since the Saudis were only marginally involved with the BCCI, and then as a small group among tens of thousands of investors from more than 70 different countries, while the Bushes had nothing to do with it, why mention the affair? The answer, again, lies in the Michael Moore method: The BCCI was set up by Muslims. Saudis are Muslims as well as friends of the Bush “dynasty”. So, there you go!

Unger cites one example of Carlyle Group trying to influence the administration. Frank Carlucci, defense secretary in Bush Sr. administration lobbies Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary in Bush Jr.’s Cabinet, to get the go-ahead for the Crusader tank. But what did actually happen? Unger tells us, not in the body of his text but in a footnote, in small print, that Rumsfeld simply scrapped the whole project!

Unger frequently uses the technique of refuting in a small print footnote, which may be ignored by most readers, what he has alleged in page after page of text. Often he also includes answers given to various allegations by the American and Saudi businessmen and officials or their lawyers. The technique is simple: People say so and so is a thief, but he or his lawyer say he is not!

Unger claims that W. won the presidency thanks to American Muslim votes, especially in Florida. This, he claims, was a result of Saudi efforts on his behalf. But then he tells us that the point man for Bush among Arab-Americans was George Salem, a Michigan businessman who is, in fact, a Christian and not a Muslim and no agent of the Saudis.

In any case, Unger does not realize that if many Muslims voted for W. in 2000, it was, in part at least, because they saw Sen. Joe Libermann, Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate as too pro-Israeli. If Bush won most of the Muslim votes, Gore ended up with almost all the Jewish votes.

Unger claims that, soon after entering the White House in 2001, President Bush began “thinking of Iraq.” He implies that Iraq was a non-issue that was put back on the front burner by Bush. But then he reminds us that the Congress had passed a law committing the United States to the liberation of Iraq during the Clinton presidency. Thus it was not Bush that invented the Iraq issue: All he did was to tackle it with the degree of serious attention it merited.

Unger’s book appeared before the Sept. 11 Commission published its report in Washington. The report states categorically that the Saudi government was in no way involved with the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington. Thus Unger’s book loses any raison d’etre except that of satisfying those whose hatred of the Saudis and the Bushes has reached pathological proportions.

It is impossible to point out in a review such as this the numerous errors of fact and analysis that Unger makes in his book. He is most confused with Saudi names and often finds it hard to know quite who is who.

One of Unger’s most outlandish claims is that there are 10,000 princes in Saudi Arabia and that each receives over $3 million a year from the government. He does not realize that this would amount to more than half of the average annual Saudi budget during the past two decades.

Unger’s biggest error is to pretend that the Saudi-American “special relationship” is an invention of the House of Bush.

These relations, however, go back to 1945 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz aboard a US warship in the Suez Canal. Extending protection to the Saudi Kingdom in exchange for virtually endless supplies of cheap oil was one of the two crucial decisions that Roosevelt took in the final years of his life. (The other was the Yalta accords that offered Stalin a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe.) Roosevelt’s Saudi policy was endorsed in 1947 when President Harry S. Truman met King Abdul Aziz. Since then all American presidents of both parties have endorsed the policy without examining its multifaceted impact on key aspects of American economic, political and diplomatic life.

Had Unger used his talents to probe that policy he might have made a real contribution to the debate on American foreign policy in the post Sept. 11 world. Instead, he has decided to enter the market for conspiracy theories of the kind that Arabs love, and, it seems, so do a growing number of Americans.

HOUSE OF BUSH

HOUSE OF SAUD

The Hidden Relationship Between The World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties

By Craig Unger, 355 pages, hardback: £17.99, published by Gibson Square Books, London