As'ad Abukhalil: The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (paperback, 2004, Seven Stories)

After reading Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, I wanted some more background history on Saudi Arabia. I picked up this short book, which helped a bit. The problem is not so much that it is intransigently anti-Saudi -- as one correspondent warned me -- as that it raises more questions than it answers. For one thing, the Saudis have gotten very little real value, especially in terms of their own independence and self-sufficiency, out of the huge amount of oil they have shipped to the developed world. As one of the charts here shows, the Saudis from 1987-97 (which were not especially good years for the oil business) spent an average of $10 billion/year on US arms, an investment for . . . what? The money they've spent on supporting anti-communist militias abroad (e.g., Afghanistan) has been a loss. Their religious propaganda has gotten them little if anything. Their private investments in the US and Europe seem to have confused their allegiances. Ever since the founding of OPEC there have been good reasons to nudge oil prices up, both to conserve diminishing supplies and to scratch out a little redistribution of the west's wealth, but the Saudis more often than not have undermined OPEC.

Chris Hedges: Real Journalists Don't Make $5 Million a Year. Glad to see something about the late Tim Russert that makes a lick of sense. I didn't particularly dislike Russert, but I can't see that his passing is going to have any effect on the quality of broadcast journalism (forgive all the oxymorons in that sentence).

James Wolcott: Bridge over Troubled Blather. On an op-ed by former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey advising Obama to win favor with voters by agreeing with McCain on many issues; e.g., "Sen. McCain, I appreciate your leadership on campaign finance reform, and my opting out of public financing isn't meant to abandon the system. There is a lot more that needs to be done to clean up the influence of money in politics. I will need your help to accomplish that objective." Actually, he'll only need McCain's help if he loses, which is what this advice is bound to do. One thing to remember is that Kerrey has flat out flunked two basic tests for any Democrat: by propagandizing for privatizing Social Security, he has shown: (1) he doesn't appreciate an issue where the Democratic Party brand has unassailable strength vs. the Republicans; and (2) he doesn't understand how Social Security works, and therefore why it's impossible to replace it with a private savings program that doesn't devastate retirement security for everyone now in the system.

Speaking of bad advice, I don't have the link but here's George Packer in the July 7 & 14, 2008 New Yorker:

Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia's recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

One thing this shows is that people who were fooled into supporting the Iraq war in the first place can be fooled again and again, no matter how many times they think they've recognized their errors. Packer is merely assuming that it's the US troops that have held Al-Qaeda and Al-Sadr in check, that only they can continue to do so, and that doing so is worth all the cost of keeping them there. Big assumptions for a bill that is running into trillions of dollars plus all sorts of other costs. Obama, at least, doesn't have Packer's checkered history of fuzzy thinking. If he wavers from his commitment to remove US forces from Iraq within 16 months in favor of Packer's favored "conditional engagement" he'll lose control of his policy and sight of where he wants and needs to go. The surge propaganda is a lot of wishful thinking insulated by a general dearth of facts. The dip in violence is little more than a lull, allowing marginal gains to be showcased without really changing much of anything. The US presence and manipulation is still the root cause of the violence, and Iraq will never stabilize until US forces leave.

One thing that's likely to happen is that Obama will weasel around the Iraq issue between now and November and possibly further until he figures out just how to effect withdrawal. This is partly to avoid having to swim upstream against the surge propaganda, partly to not let McCain pin the defeatist label on him. For an example, see this note by Steve Benen. This stuff may make his supporters nervous (as does the FISA flip-flop), but there is no reason to think he won't, once he gets the chance, take the most expeditious exit strategy out of Iraq, if for no other reason than that it's totally fracking insane that the US is there in the first place.

Jesse Helms is dead. He's the only politician I've ever seen spend an entire victory speech taunting his opponents and gloating over their humiliation. It would be totally disrespectful to him to say anything at all kind on this occasion, not that it's possible to actually recall anything. He was a complete, utter piece of shit, and inordinately proud of the fact.