Brad deLong wrote:
I still can't figure out whether such an extraordinary degree of willed obtuseness is the result of pure stupidity, or of something more sinister.
If Osama bin Laden were on Saudi soil and in the control of the Saudi government, if Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia were to announce that he would not hand him over to the United States because it was his duty to give 'panah' [shelter] to a Brother Muslim, if such an announcement were not accompanied by strong diplomatic representations that every member of Al Qaeda within reach of the Saudi government would shortly lose his head...
.then the United States would be bombing Saudi Arabia now.
__________
Oh, no Brad, you're quite possibly wrong. If bin Laden had sought cover somewhere on Sa'udi soil, it's probable that not only would he not have been handed over to the US, the US would not then have bombed a 'recalictrant' Sa'udi Arabia. It's possible that the US would have accepted an offer to hand him over to a a muslim court or third party. Neither the US nor the House of Sa'ud has any interest in pulling the curtain down to reveal the royal family to be the lackeys of US economic imperialism. That is, there well could have been a great show of how independent the House of Sa'ud is. In short, neither the US nor the House of Sa'ud would have risked the possibility of a mass uprising in response to the appearance of those compradorial elites kow-towing to their masters. After all, the toppling of the House of Sa'ud would be an economic disaster to our American capitalist masters.
US and UK companies could lose all those sweet deals, e.g., "our" royal ministers ordering jets or technical petroleum services at 2-3x their market rate from Anglo American companies which then reward them (see the 1997 expose of the House of Saud by the Pulitzer prize winning Charles Hanley). The US could lose the support to its Treasuries and currency that has been faithfully provided by its client (see David E. Spiro The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets). The priviliges of oil being priced in dollars would be endangered--don't forget that the pricing of oil in dollars is basically an interest free loan as long as the clients don't use the dollars for the purchase of goods and services (again see Spiro). And of course those tens of billions US dollars in arms contracts, security services and subsidizations of US foreign policy adventures could be threatened.
Basically the US keeps the royal family in power (and in the lap of luxury) so that it will disburse oil rent in a way that suits US capitalist interests (see Cyrus Bina in Arab Studies Quarterly on the objectives of foreign policy--the article can be downloaded via melvyl).
The threats of a cut off of Sa'udi oil and putative Sa'udi 'monopoly" power falling into the "wrong" hands are simply ungrounded fears that Bina's dispassionate economic analysis dissipates. The US need not worry about the supply of oil at prices that the competitive market will ultimately determine and enforce; the US does however have to worry that it could lose indirect control of the rent generated by the most productive fields which rest in the geological formation on top of which Sa'udi Arabia sits.
So Prof. Brad, the Bushies will do nothing that risks the toppling of the House of Sa'ud which as Michael Klare has shown depends on the US for weapons, intelligence and military training. That is why the US has not demanded that its clients allow for military operations on its soil since that could inspire a popular uprising the risk of which authoritarian, irrational Wahhibism after all attempts to reduce. The US is only being apparently obsequious to the Sa'udis in order to not to bring popular pressure against its clients; the foremost interest of our capitalist masters is to ensure its continued economic plundering of the Arab world. This has made us Americans unsafe, and it has left a young Arab population increasingly impoverished, and without a future. Moreover, in plundering the Arab world, the US has propped up--as Bernard Lewis himself clearly recognizes--tottering tyrannies the only resistance to which that can survive is itself authoritarian, irrational and anti democratic.
But about this US system of plundering neither you nor Hitchens nor Henwood has much to say. Why is that?
Control of oil rent and the correlative subversion of democracy--such is the nature of US foreign policy in West Asia. Chomsky's analysis of US policy against Iraq reaches the same conclusion in what is surely one of the brilliant examples of satire from contemporary American political writing (see Chomsky's piece in the Arnove, ed. book on sanctions against iraq).
Such aggressive, imperialist policy cannot be otherwise even if (as the economic illiterate Hitchens imagines) the US removes from office a few wicked, self aggrandizing men like Kissinger...or Cheney. US aggressiveness is built into its political economic structure. Bauer and Kautsky, like bourgeois economists, were wrong about the superfluity of imperialism, Luxemburg and Grossmann correct.
But your ignorance of Marxist debates in value, accumulation, and imperialism is a highly cultivated form of distinction that may yet get you into the highest levels of US govt again. It's of a piece with your refusal to have even once condemned the US use of atomic weaponry even as you have mailed off in three or so years countless posts on communist aggression and savagery. These are apparently the silences that a respectable academic must keep.
You can rage all you want about the hatefulness of the American left, but there is no US left for all practical purposes. The American left (hitchens, henwo od, alterman) has in fact spent more time distorting and criticizing Chomsky than analyzing in any detail the US system of plunder. Between the US and al Qaeda there is no choice at all. An apologist for one is as ugly as as apologist for the other.
Rakesh