Bush's family long ago entangled themselves in Middle East dealings

Dynasties in American politics are dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well see it with the Clintons and we're certainly seeing it with the Bushes.

Between now and the November election, it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president's family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links.

As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the US Senate from Texas, was labelled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of an Arab state, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore oil wells.

Over the four decades since then, the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first US political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern leaders and oil money. The family even has links to the bin Ladens - although not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden - going back to the 1970s.

How these unusual relationships helped bring about 9/11 and then distorted the US response to "Islamic" terrorism requires thinking of the Bush family as a dynasty. The two Bush presidencies are inextricably linked by that dynasty.

The first family member lured by the Middle East's petroleum wealth was George W. Bush's great-grandfather, George H. Walker, a buccaneer who was president of Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman & Co. In the 1920s, Walker and his company participated in rebuilding the Baku oil fields only a few hundred miles north of current-day Iraq.

As senior director of Dresser Industries (now part of Halliburton), Walker's son-in-law Prescott Bush (George W. Bush's grandfather) became involved with the Middle East in the years after World War II. But it was George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, who forged the dynasty's strongest ties to the region.

George H.W. Bush was the first CIA director to come from the oil industry. He went on to became the first vice president - and then the first president - to have either an oil or CIA background. This helps to explain his persistent bent toward the Middle East, covert operations and rogue banks.

In each of the government offices he held, he encouraged CIA involvement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued policies that helped make the Middle East into the world's primary destination for arms shipments.

Taking the CIA helm in January 1976, Bush cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal.

After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book False Profits, Bush "travelled on the bank's behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions."

Once in the White House, first as vice president to Ronald Reagan and later as president, George H.W. Bush was linked to at least two Middle East-centered scandals. It's never been entirely clear what Bush's connection was to the Iran-Contra affair, in which clandestine arms shipments to Iran helped illegally fund the operations of the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

But in 1992, special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh asserted that Bush, despite his protestations, had indeed been "in the loop" on multiple illegal acts.

Much clearer was Bush's pivotal role, both as vice president and president, in "Iraqgate," the hidden aid provided by the US and its military to Saddam Hussain's Iraq in its high-stakes war with Iran during the 1980s. The US is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons.

As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 Nightline programme after the 1991 Gulf War: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George (H.W.) Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

During these years, George H.W. Bush's four sons - George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin - were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini moneymen. The Middle East was becoming a convenient family money spigot.

Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late 1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessman who served as the North American representative for two Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) - billionaire Salem bin Laden and banker Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put $50,000 into Bush's 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using bin Laden-bin Mahfouz funds.

Second son Jeb Bush, now the governor of Florida, spent most of his time in the early and mid-1980s hobnobbing with ex-Cuban intelligence officers, Nicaraguan Contras and others plugged into the lucrative orbit of Miami-area front groups for the CIA. But he, too, had some Middle East connections.

Two of his business associates, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya and Camilo Padreda, both indicted for financial dealings, were longtime associates of Middle Eastern arms dealer and Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi.

Prosecutors dropped the case against the two, and a federal judge ordered Padreda's name expunged from the record. But a few years later Padreda, a former Miami-Dade County GOP treasurer, was convicted of fraud over a federally insured housing development that Jeb Bush had helped to facilitate.

Neil Bush, most famous for the scandal surrounding the corrupt practices of Colorado's Silverado Savings & Loan, where he served as a director during the 1980s, also picked plums from Arabian Gulf orchards. In 1993, after his father left the White House, Neil went to Kuwait with his parents, brother Marvin and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

When his father left, Neil stayed to lobby for business contracts, and after returning home evolved a set of lucrative relationships with Syrian-American businessman Jamal Daniel. One of their ventures, Ignite!, an educational software company, also included representatives of at least three Arabian Gulf families.

The Bush family's Middle Eastern commercial focus is further exemplified by Marvin, the youngest brother of the current president. From 1993 to 2000 he was a major shareholder, along with Mishal Youssef Saud Al Sabah, in the Kuwait-American Corp., which had holdings in several US defence, aviation and industrial security companies.

After losing his bid for a second term as president, George H.W. Bush joined up in 1993 with the Washington-based Carlyle Group. Under the leadership of ex-officials such as Baker and former Defence Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, Carlyle developed a specialty in buying defence companies and doubling or quadrupling their value.

The ex-president not only became an investor in Carlyle, but a member of the company's