"The Kingdom"

When I first heard about the "The Kingdom", I thought I would like to see it. Later I heard some hype that really put me off. It sounded like a really cheesy thriller, kind of like "24", whose target audience must be twelve year olds. It's out on DVD now, and my wife and I like thrillers, so we rented it at the local video store.

Turns out it was pretty good. There were a couple of corny bits, but most of it agreed with my view of reality.

• Big shot politicians interfering with police work? Check.
  
• Big shot politician sounding like a complete fool? Hmm, a little corny, or maybe not.
  
• Terrorists bombing US installations in Saudi Arabia? Check and double check. Photos of one blast site I found on the web look very similar to the scene in the movie.
  
• Small group of FBI agents sent to investigate the bombing? Check.
  
• Totally incompetent Saudi Arabian police work? Perhaps not quite as close to the mark as we would like to believe.
• Fabulous palaces? Check.
• Bureaucratic interference? Check.
• Home grown (Saudi) terrorists? Check.
• Four FBI agents taking out a couple of dozen terrorists in the firefight. Arguable. We hear stories about agents muffing a gunfight, and for people who have never been in one, I can understand that. But put four combat experienced, trained agents against a bunch of fanatical amateurs, and I will bet on the agents any day.
  

There were other things though, that I would to like to know about, one way or the other.

• Was the convoy technique realistic? That is, four black Suburbans tailgating each other at 100 MPH down the freeway.
• Was there a firefight when they finally tracked down the mastermind of the attack? Was it is a big as it was portrayed?

Then there were some other items that I doubt actually happened and were probably just added to make a better story. These did not bother me, and they did make it a better movie.

• Having a woman on the FBI team allowed the movie makers to show what kind of problems they would encounter if there had been one. Besides, I enjoy watching Jennifer Garner. I used to be a big fan of "Alias", at least before it got turned into a soap opera.
  
• Having the FBI in on the firefight.
• Having one of the FBI agents kidnapped.

One thing that I do not understand is why the FBI insists on calling all of their agents "Special". I mean we never hear about ordinary agents. Is this some kind of secret self esteem program the FBI is working on?

We do not hear much about why Osama (bin Laden) has declared war against us. As near as I can tell his biggest complaint is that we support the Saudi government, a government that is essentially a corrupt tyranny. Of course, we support the Saudis because they supply a large fraction the oil we consume. Some people complain about the amount of money we spend on our effort in Iraq, but it is roughly the same amount of money we send to Saudi Arabia for oil. Any time you have that much money concentrated in that few hands, you are going to have trouble.

It's interesting that the oil business does not seem to cause as much corruption here as the drug trade, even though the oil business is several orders of magnitude larger. I mean you do hear about high level corruption, but you don't have people running up and down the street shooting each other over a tank of gasoline. In oil producing countries in the Middle East, you do, but the tanks of gasoline they are fighting over are much bigger: the tankers that hold a million gallons of oil for shipment to the US.

I suspect Osama is secretly pleased that the US invaded Iraq and took out Saddam. I wonder if he is really attached to his Jihad, or whether he is only really interested in changing the government of Saudi Arabia.

There is one positive aspect to the war in Iraq, and that is a few more people in the US are aware of something beyond our borders. Without the war, I doubt whether this movie would have been made.