It has always seemed to me that we weren't getting (duh!) the full story on 9/11. But so many of the smooth, pat, party-line conspiracy theories about it just seem wrong.

Personally, I like my conspiracy theories like I like my men--smart, funny, a little rough around the edges, and just unpredictable enough to keep me interested. (Fortunately I finally found a lovely guy who fits the bill.) But enough about me.

One freakishly admirable thing about the NeoCon thinking that dominated the Bush administration is that those NeoCons didn't sweat the small stuff. They had a big PNAC plan to transform the world and make the US its sole superpower--but they were willing to be somewhat flexible about how that sausage got made and adjust to whatever inconveniences reality would throw at them. In their Strauss--influenced worldview, truth, logic and right action took a backseat to the greater "good" of how much of a difference you could make. (It's fundamentally unlike Liberal/Democratic thinking, in which stuff actually matters.)

Their game-theory-influenced strategy struck me as sort of like thousand-pin downhill bowling--it doesn't matter which particular pins get knocked down, because as long as the overall numbers are on your side you can go back and clean up later. (For the purposes of this essay we're going to ignore the wildly stupid nature of the sole-superpower effort--it was what it was. Let's stick with the fact that they were willing to game the thing.)

It seems clear looking at the old PNAC documents that Iraq was a big part of the plan and takeover of Iraq was a vital first step, what with the fact that Saddam was the guy with the most oil and the least friends. Where the Saudis fit into the plan was a little murkier, but I suspect that they were the most reliably capitalist and influential group, and with the importance of oil and their solid ties with the Bush family and US companies, any effort to control the Middle East would depend heavily on them.

However, there was a hitch--the Saudis were also big funders of terrorists. So I am curious about whether there was an assurance, spoken or unspoken, that the Saudis would help make it easy for the Bush administration to accomplish its ambitious domestic and FP goals by keeping Saudi-financed terror off the US doorstep. They'd handle Osama, he was one of them. Hey, he was busy in Afghanistan with the Taliban, and any Saudis living in the United States were just there to do the usual rich Saudi stuff, like taking random college courses, learning to fly planes, and flirting with American girls.

If there was such an assurance, 9/11 demonstrated that the Saudis had really screwed up--and if it was George Bush who was in charge of delivering the assurance, Bush really screwed up. Looking through this lens is helpful--if true, it might explain why the threat of in-county terrorism was discounted or even covered up, and if the NeoCon worldview depended that heavily on competent Saudi partnership, it might help explain why the response to 9/11 in the first few days was so weird, with Bush appearing like a deer in the headlights and Cheney wandering the halls of the White House wondering if there was still a way to pin the thing on Iraq. (Through this lens, you could also argue that the Bush administration never really recovered from 9/11--Afghanistan turned out to be a horrible move, and once people really started paying attention, the marketing effort to invade Iraq was made impossibly difficult. Turns out people did care about whether Saddam had purchased yellowcake in Niger. And then there was the underestimation of the military requirements, but that's another story.)

The idea of a Saudi assurance that went bad also might help explain the flight of 160 Saudis during the no-fly days. The current theory is that they bought their way out to avoid embarrassment or to avoid being questioned by US authorities. But what if some of the Saudis living in the US did not know the extent of Osama's betrayal and were worried about being assasinated on US soil by other AQ operatives in the US? You can see why Bush and Cheney would have been happy to get them out of here, over and above the sheer reality that it all just wasn't a very nice situation.

The Able Danger article got me thinking about all this. I guess my overall point is that stuff tends to get covered up because some facts are inconvenient for one group--but it tends to stay covered up if the facts are inconvenient for everybody and advantageous to almost no-one. The current "truther" theories don't accept this--they just seem too obvious and require a clear evil genius winner and victimized loser. In this sense, they fail to catch the more subtle reality of really smart game-oriented people who sometimes made it up as they went along.

Update: Well, sure enough, I found a report that the Saudis had been financing OBL on condition that they would not be targeted. It doesn't say whether this condition included their US friends. But in any case, it seems that 9/11 weakened their ideas about whether they were safe in the US. Note--this report was found on a very questionable site, but there's no reason to believe that the basic gist is incorrect, especially in view of the accounts in the Broward newspaper which do support it.