An interview with broadcaster of Ugly Truth Radio Network, Mark Dankof, getting his views about Saudi Arabia and its ties with the United States.
Below is a rush transcript of that interview:
Q Mr. Dankof, [former US] ambassador [to Saudi Arabia Richard William] Murphy is telling us there that he believes since there are thousands literally of princes in Saudi Arabia, the question here is, can we take these kinds of criticisms seriously or can we see it rather as a threat to the Saudi Kingdom?
Dankof: I think ambassador Murphy’s remarks are very well taken. I personally believe that the house of Saud will only allow this kind of dissidence to go on for so long before there are major crackdowns. The fact of the matter is the Amnesty International report on Saudi Arabia this year tells the average person everything that he or she needs to know globally about what a ruthless, repressive, criminal regime this really is, whether you are looking at what they are doing to women in that country or to the anti- or to the Shia minority in that country, and the despicable policies that they are supporting with al-Qaeda and al-Nusra in Syria, in an attempt, along with the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad to overthrow the President of the Alawite Shia regime in Syria.
The composite picture on this is pretty clear and the American support for this regime will continue at all costs, because the April 15, 1971 petrodollar agreement between [former US President] Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on the one hand, and the Saudi regime on the other, which pegs the survivability of the dollar as the world’s reserved currency to the Saudi regime’s survival and to the Saudi’s ability to enforce the notion worldwide that all petro transactions are going to be conducted with the American dollar. This will guarantee that the symbiotic relationship between the American political elite and this criminal regime in Saudi Arabia will continue.
Q: Mr. Dankof, a lot has been said about the decisions that the king has made concerning various ministers being changed, especially, with Bandar bin Sultan’s case. Do you think these indicate that Saudi policies are going to change with regards for instance to Syria?
Dankof: I don’t think so. I think they are merely rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, in terms of what they are involved with in Syria. The fact of the matter is that the Saudi Arabian regime, like [Israeli Prime Minister] Mr. [Benjamin] Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, have been banking on being able to bring the United States into a direct military involvement against President [Bashar] Assad in Syria and ultimately to attack the regime in Iran. The fact of the matter is Mr. [Barack] Obama is very reticent to do that because he is beginning to understand the dangers of that, it seems to me. And the other wild card in all of this is [President] Vladimir Putin of Russia and his very effective diplomacy to thwart what the Saudis and Mr. Netanyahu and these American neo-conservatives sought to do with both Syria and Iran, and of course Mr. Putin is successful in sticking to his guns in eastern Ukraine and Crimea and if he and his friends in this BRICS alliance continue to be successful in trying to undermine the status of the dollar as the reserved currency of the world, then all bets are off in terms of what is going to happen in that part of the world.
So I think this is a time of great frustration for the Saudi regime, the Israeli regime, and their backers in Washington and their mutual backers in Washington because a lot of the things in the old playbook are simply not working.
Q: Let’s go back to another issue that was raised in the beginning of the program, before we run out of time, and that’s the role that Saudi Arabia, Mr. Dankof, has been playing in the region. It’s been called the head an anti-revolutionary movement. Tell us about that role from Saudi Arabia and whether you think the United States is giving support to Saudi Arabia in terms of the role it is playing in the region?
Dankof: Well, I think again this goes back to August 15 of 1971. It’s important for your viewers to understand that in 1944 there was an international financial conference called Bretton Woods. It was held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It would defy the entire post-World War II global system that we have seen since that time and the British pound which had seen the reserved currency of the world, was replaced by the American dollar, with the understanding that Bretton Woods in 1944, that the American Federal Reserve Board would control the printing of the dollars and that the American dollar would be tied to gold, the value of gold at 35 dollars an ounce.
By 1971, as more countries began to figure out that the United States' printing press at the fed was simply off the charts, that they were not honoring the promise at Bretton Woods to control the number of dollars being printed and disseminated worldwide, more countries began demanding a surrender of their dollars in exchange for gold.
So, the American gold reserves of some 20,000 tons after World War II had whittled down by 1971 to approximately 8,100 tons and at this particular point Richard Nixon had to do something or so he thought, to stem the flow of gold outside of the American gold reserve system and he knew that welfare-warfare state in the United States would continue to spend and spend and do so with this fiat money created by the Federal Reserve Board.
That’s when Kissinger and Nixon entered this agreement with the Saudi regime to tie the American dollar, not to gold and the gold standard, but to oil and to the utilization of the dollar for all international oil transactions. This guaranteed a symbiotic relationship between the United States and the Saudi regime and ironically enough, guaranteed that there would be a non-spoken symbiotic relationship between the Saudi regime and the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv whose international power also depends on the preservation of the international central banking systems that we have known up to this point.
This guarantees American support for the present regime in Saudi Arabia no matter how reprehensible their policies are domestically or internationally.
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