Saturday, April 12, 2008

Fitzgerald: Appease Saudi Arabia?

Hugh Fitzgerald is saying what needs be said. Namely; we must stand up to the Arab oil barons.

Hugh: "In fact, the more unbending we become, the more they will bend."


Right on!

FROM JIHADWATCH.ORG:

Fitzgerald: Appease Saudi Arabia?
There is no reason to do anything to appease Saudi Arabia. Yet the assumption that the West must do this is commonly made. In order to obtain oil from Saudi Arabia, or from any other oil producer, the only thing that any consumer need do is offer the market price. That's it. And if for some reason one producer -- let's say Venezuela -- decided it did not want to sell oil to the United States, or all the Arab countries decided that they would not sell oil to Israel, or to Denmark, or to the Netherlands, it doesn't matter. Oil is fungible. Oil can be obtained through dozens of possible sellers. If buyer X won't sell, buyers Y and Z will. It is actually easier for buyers to put pressure and organize boycotts of sellers of oil, than vice-versa.
The repetition of the phrase above, and the unexamined belief of so many that we need to placate or appease Saudi Arabia, a backward land that is totally dependent on the West for its professional and managerial class, and dependent on the West for advanced education, medical care, arms, and protection for the Al-Saud, needs to be held up for inspection, analysis, and ridicule.

Now, there are those who, on the Saudi payroll, directly or indirectly, in the capitals of the West, keep parroting this nonsense. It is their job to make Western policymakers believe that "of course we can't offend the Saudis." But we can. We can and we should. They will still have to sell their oil on the world market. And as the rich Arabs have now been acquiring assets -- not all of them liquid, by any means -- in the Western world, these assets can be seen as hostages to fortune. For even if we were to seize all the assets of those countries that were funding the worldwide Jihad -- not the violent Jihad, but the Jihad that is proceeding through non-violent and stealthy means -- there is nothing that the daggers-and-dishdashas rulers of Saudi Arabia, or the rulers of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other places could do about it. (Why not seize the assets of countries funding the violent Jihad? No country is doing that outright. It is merely individuals in various Muslim countries who are doing what comes naturally. Or more likely, in the cases of some rich and decadent and outwardly westernized rich Arabs, funding the Jihad may be the best way they have, as they see it, of making up for their personal decadence -- financing the true-blue dedicated muhajideen, as a contribution to The Cause of Islam.)
Those states would still have to sell their oil. They need the money. And they have no way of imposing their will, other than to slyly buy up enough corrupt people, who in turn will attempt, and have attempted, and have succeeded, for quite a while in fooling some of the people all of the time. But only "some" of the people. The clear-sighted will understand that while it is very much in the interest of particular Westerners (those who are hirelings of the Saudis, those who can benefit directly from Saudi largesse or contracts) that policies in the West be made by those who have wrongly been made fearful of Saudi Arabia and the lesser sheikdoms of the Gulf, it is not in the interests of this or any Western nation, or of the West as a civilization, or of Western infidels as individuals, to continue to believe, and what's more to build policies on the belief, that anything at all needs to be done to placate those Muslim states. Nothing at all needs to be done. In fact, the more unbending we become, the more they will bend. For we have a thousand ways to make their lives more uncertain and unpleasant, beginning with the threat of seizing the assets of enemy aliens. And that is certainly a threat that should be carried out if Saudi Arabia, for example, does not stop funding, with public and private money from Saudis, the mosques, madrasas, propaganda, campaigns of Da'wa, and armies of Western hirelings all over the Western world. This should go all the way to military measures that, in another age, we would not have hesitated to have used long before now.