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gee, it is interesting to see what a tight grasp you folks have on the entirety of the arab world. obviously, that world is basically one thing, everyone there is one way, and you folks know what that way is.
it is impressive to be amongst such wise cats.
look, the americans became the largest weaspons supplier to israel after the 1967 war
it was a function of geopolitical choices that were made within the cold war framework
the americans wanted to use israel to counter egypt and syria, which were understood as being more pro-soviet/more left in orientation at the time.
the inititial calculation was that the americans could balance against them support for israel and for more pro-western arab states. that part did not work out so well, but the policy choice remained in place.
you could map the inability of americans to make even basic differentiations amongst arab countires onto the collapse of this geopolitical situation.
perhaps the decision to arm israel into a regional superpower that no combination of neighboring states could threaten militarily simply reinforced this.
and perhaps this refocus of american policy generated it.
because in some situations the logic of particular policy choices gradually becomes the framework through which entire political situations are processed
because in the states the dominant media speak whatever discourse the party in power uses
as part of their general sycophantic relation to power
so those terms become the terms through which debate is staged
and the language of power dissolves into a natural-seeming frame of reference.
the above seems little more than a symptom of this.
so in dragonlich's post, you get a residuum of the anxiety generated across the 1970s by the emergence of opec as a fundamental economic force that endangered the older colonial monopoly on control of resources.
you also get traces of subsequent mutations in perceptions of the arab world--the neoliberal version is all over--they do not grow enough, they do not invest enough--as if neoliberal understandings of the fiction of markets overrides the need to supply even the slightest context for an "analysis"
if it was not for the floating racism that gets tangled up in all this, courtesy of cowboy george's particular way of spinning the "war on terror," this kind of thinking would be goofy but not a problem--things are, sadly, otherwise.
you could at least specify if you are talking about saudi arabia (which has many particular problems, not least of which are mecca and medina and their religious importance, whcih creates the space of religious modes of opposition to economic activity) or the other gulf states, or syria, or egypt, or jordan (each of which is particular) or algeria or morocco or anywhere else in the conversation.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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