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THE ROVING EYE
Lake Arabia
By Pepe
Escobar
PARIS - They had been waiting 20 years
for this moment. Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux and the
whole Lac Leman are immersed in what even by the local
staid, dull standards can only be described as a wave of
excitement, which obviously had to be money-related.
Switzerland is for sale - and all the buyers are from
the House of Saud.
Since May 20, King Fahd Bin
Abdel Aziz Al-Saud has been living in Switzerland. For
the first time in 20 years, since he ascended to the
throne in 1982, he is visiting his sprawling
40,000-square-meter property in Collonge-Bellerive,
accompanied by a court of hundreds of people. Officially
he is in Switzerland for an eye operation - besides the
matter of inaugurating his magnificent property.
Hotels around the Lac Leman are having a masked
ball - since most of the guests are court members or
wealthy visiting Arabs. Asia Times Online learned that
on any given day there are from two to 10 Saudi Arabian
Airlines arrivals, carrying ultra-wealthy visitors not
only from the peninsula but from all over the world.
Their wallets could easily solve the current Latin
American crisis. It is estimated that the court Arabs
plus the visitors are spending as much as 4 million
euros (US$3.9 million) a day. And the best is yet to
come: the flurry of last-minute gifts on September 30,
when King Fahd is supposed to leave Geneva for another
of his residences in Marbella, Spain.
According
to a Swiss journalist, a resident of Geneva, a
department store even had to pay a fine of almost 7,000
euros because it opened its doors in the middle of the
night for the royal court - an absolute anathema as far
as the rigid Swiss labor laws are concerned.
King Fahd bought this property in the late
1970s. At that time he was Minister of Foreign Affairs
to his half-brother Khaled. He later ascended to the
throne - and never found time to visit Geneva.
All through July the king was in the center of a
real diplomatic Swan Lake - receiving everybody from
Jordan's King Abdullah to Egypt's strongman Hosni
Mubarak. But suddenly the insistent rumors stressing
that the king is dying picked up again: on August 3 he
transferred the rights of his property to his second
wife, Princess Johara Al-Ibrahim. There is wild
speculation in Geneva that the king could be formally
sidelined from the throne to the benefit of one of his
staunch pro-American brothers.
This is a very
serious matter as far as the king's official heir -
Prince Abdullah - is concerned. It is being constantly
repeated in Washington that the US needs Prince Abdullah
and vice versa. But the fact is that Washington hawks do
not evaluate the importance of Prince Abdullah as the
crucial counter-power to Osama bin Laden's apocalyptic
designs, and are suspicious of the prince's intentions
of eventually convincing the Americans to abandon their
Saudi military bases. The prince's efforts to get closer
to Iran and Iraq and his landmark peace proposal for the
Middle East - Israel retreats to its 1967 borders with
Palestine in exchange of recognition by the Arab world -
also do not fit the designs of Washington's hawks.
While King Fahd was gazing peacefully at the Lac
Leman and Prince Abdullah was frantically trying to
design a more peaceful Middle East for the benefit of
the Arab world, Washington's hawks showed where their
money is - through a now infamous leaked report to the
Defense Policy Board, a consultative Pentagon body.
The chairman of this board is none other than
ultra-hawk, former Pentagon official Richard Perle. The
fact that the report is authored by Laurent Murawiec, a
Rand Corporation analyst specializing in "international
security" and former adviser to the French Ministry of
Defense is beside the point. The point is that it
perfectly reflects the powerful Dick Cheney view of the
Middle East - widely shared by Pentagon civilians.
To follow the report to the letter, Saudi Arabia
should be immediately included in the axis of evil: it
is described as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover,
the most dangerous opponent" of the US. Says the Rand
Corporation analyst: "The Saudis are active at every
level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers,
from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to
cheerleader." And if Riyadh does not stop its support
for terrorism, "Saudi oil fields and overseas financial
assets should be targeted". Swiss banks will not be very
enthusiastic.
The White House, the State
Department and diplomatic Saudi sources may spin it as
they like it ("it's not the official view", etc), but
this does not alter the fact that the "evil Saudis"
characterization is extremely influential in the
pinnacles of Washington. Hawks do not seem to realize
that they are just playing bin Laden's game. Or maybe
they do - and that's just how they want it. One would
give a million Cartier gold watches to know what goes on
in that royal mind gazing placidly at the Lac Leman.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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