Bi-Weekly Political Happy Hour in Bridgeport

This is a new bi-weekly happy hour discussion on Thursday evenings, 6-8pm, for our members in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. The location is the brand new Conshohocken Brewpub in Bridgeport, just a mile east of the KOP Mall on Route 202 and right across the Schuylkill from downtown Norristown. We're hoping this location is convenient for you folks who live or work in the King Of Prussia, Norristown, Plymouth Meeting, Conshohocken & Main Line areas and enables more of you to come out & join us.

The area of focus will be somewhat different than our biweekly Saturday meetups in Fishtown. We'll be specifically focusing on international relations, military science, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and civil law. My co-host for this meetup, Wayne, is a practicing attorney in the Philly area who studied international relations in undergrad and served on a nuclear sub in the Navy, so he's very knowledgeable in these areas & a great asset to these types of discussions.

This week we'll be discussing the US's complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia & theories for why the US cannot effectively put enough pressure on the Saudis to reign in Islamic extremism:

1. Arab Lobby: Several Arab nations, most prominently Saudi Arabia, spend large sums of money lobbying US politicians and building ties with US defense contractors & oil industry execs. A major book that has explored this thesis is Mitchell Bard's The Arab Lobby. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arab_Lobby:_The_Invisible_Alliance_That_Undermines_America%27s_Interests_in_the_Middle_East

2. Petrodollar: The petrodollar system, whereby OPEC members require their oil to be purchased with US dollars, makes the dollar the world reserve currency and keeps international demand for the dollar & thus its value high. If the petrodollar system broke down, there's many who say the dollar would crash & the economic impacts in the US would be devastating. The major book to explore this thesis is William Clark's Petrodollar Warfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_recycling

3. Oil Price Manipulation: With the rise of OPEC, the Saudis were key to manipulating oil prices to serve US foreign policy ends. The latest example of this is the drop in oil prices in 2014 that hurt Russia. Of course, this has also been used against the US, as in the 1973 oil crisis that followed the Yom Kippur War. But the Saudis agreed to break the embargo when Nixon made deals with them, and they also helped stabilize oil prices by increasing production during the 1979-80 oil shock caused by the Iranian Revolution, during the Gulf War in 1990-91 when Iraq & Kuwaiti oil was offline, and right after the 9/11 attacks. And yet, the Saudis have dropped the price of oil recently to try to forestall the US shale oil industry. Robert Baer has commented on this extensively in his book, Sleeping With The Devil. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/05/the-fall-of-the-house-of-saud/304215/

4. Saudi Investments in the US: The Saudis have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in US banks and US stocks. While gov't sources estimate Saudi US holdings at $400-800 billion, Robert Baer estimates it's far higher - at about $1trillion in US banks and $1trillion in US stock. Pulling this investment would cause serious damage to the US economy, although it would be hard to liquidate these investments quickly. http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/jan/15/20060115-103622-3038r/?page=all

5. Regional Stability: This is basically the argument that "better the devil you know" - I.e. if the Saudis were toppled, we don't know who would replace them, but an Islamic fundamentalist regime is a good possibility. http://english.aawsat.com/2014/09/article55336237/opinion-saudi-arabia-is-essential-for-regional-stability

I'm surprised that none of these reasons for the US supporting Saudi Arabia have come up in recent discussions in the media about US Middle East policy. As many of you probably know, there's currently a lot of hubbub surrounding the release of the redacted 28 pages from the 9/11 Report that alleged some complicity from rogue elements of the Saudi government in the attacks, and the debate over whether American citizens who lost loved ones on 9/11 should be able to sue the Saudi government and go after their US assets - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/opinion/the-risks-of-suing-the-saudis-for-9-11.html?_r=0