Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Far more than the secular Ba'athist regimes targeted by the Washington neo-cons, the Saudis have turned the face of Islam against the west. The war on Iraq has only provided a rallying cry for al-Qaida supporters. The country that has played by far the greatest role in advancing global Islamist militancy was never listed in Bush's "axis of evil" speech, and is a major US ally.
In what appears to be an example of a phenomenon identified by Slavoj Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso, 2002), few in the U.S. have been willing to confront this relationship and what it has lead to without suggesting that U.S. power has the ability to resolve the situation. Zizek contended that the surge of relatively friendly U.S. interest in Islam and the area around and including the Middle East was clouded by an inability to see how the U.S. had been a major player in creating this world. Similarly, the Bush Administration doesn't want to press Saudi Arabia, at least in part, because doing so would likely mean admitting that U.S. intervention doesn't always bring all good things. The hawkish intellectual class wants to avoid bringing it up for a similar reason.
On the other hand, people like me who are opposed to the U.S. trying to run the world may be uncomfortable –I certainly am- bringing it up, because I am afraid that it will be interpreted as merely a call for taking over Saudi Arabia and setting them straight. posted by micah holmquist at 6/14/2004 07:58:00 PM
