One of the things that often eludes people about Steve Bannon, still apparently a presidential* adviser and the only surviving heir to House Harkonnen, is the money. For example, without the Mercer fortune, he’s stapling his Deep Thoughts about world politics to a lamp post in Washington Square. He’s also cozied up to people like Erik Prince, the founder of the former Blackwater murder gang and—Bannon hopes—possible future U.S. Senator from Wyoming.

And, as the McClatchy folks tell us, he’s also luxuriating in the warm embrace of the United Arab Emirates in their fight against the existential planetary threat that is the nation of Qatar.

On Monday, Bannon is scheduled to speak at a day-long conference in Washington organized by the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank and paid for by multiple donors, entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood.” The speech follows Bannon’s September meeting in the UAE with its crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The two weren’t strangers: Bannon, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and ousted National Security Adviser Michael Flynn met with the crown prince at Trump Tower during the presidential transition in December. That meeting triggered controversy, as the UAE hadn’t notified the outgoing Obama administration about the visit as is customary. The UAE also helped broker a meeting in January between a Bannon friend, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin to try to establish a back-channel line of communication to Moscow for Trump just days before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Washington Post; Prince met with the Russian in the Seychelle islands off East Africa. Prince lives in the UAE and had a multimillion dollar contract with that government to assemble a mercenary security force there. His firm also does security work in Africa, much of it for Chinese interests. But Bannon has encouraged Prince to move back to the U.S. and run for office, and in recent weeks, Prince has begun to publicly consider a primary challenge to Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso.

One big happy family. For hire.

I once spent 13 days in Qatar. This was back before the United States decided to turn the country into an aircraft carrier. I never want to go back. The main job of the native Qataris seemed to consist of making sure they could shanghai enough Filipinos to do the real work. It struck me as a stagnant, oppressive, parasitic society, and the country’s record in this regard has not improved substantially in the ensuing years. Still, Bannon’s not in this to improve the lot of captive labor any more than he really was in this last United States election to improve the lot of idle coal miners in West Virginia or idle mill-hands in Pennsylvania.

Erik Prince Getty Images

He’s in it for the money, and the UAE, which presents all the same problems that Bannon attributes to Qatar, was willing to meet his price. If we had an actual president*, he might be concerned that this breed of bunco artist is mucking around in a pretty dangerous part of the world.



Bannon has said he is planning to start a global conference series through Breitbart. “We are in advance discussions about having Breitbart sponsor a major security conference in sub-Saharan Africa, the Persian Gulf, central Europe, and East Asia, in early to mid-2018,” he told Bloomberg recently. Trump’s comments attacking Qatar this summer were at odds with what other administration officials were saying. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called for the Gulf countries to resolve the dispute. “We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences,” he said.

But, of course, we don’t.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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