A different perspective?

Yesterday we heard an interesting interview of Stephen Schwartz on a (liberal) Pacifica radio station. He sure talked like a Marxist ("material interests have inevitable consequences"), yet he's been a frequent contributor to the National Review and The Weekly Standard. (Q&A at NRO here) He is a vociferous critic of Wahhabism and the author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror. His perspective is that Saudi Arabia is a rotten structure that will eventually be overturned, that Washington has accommodated the reactionary Saudi leadership, and that accommodation is preventing Americans from learning of the close Saudi-Sept11 connections. Except for the Marxist/progressive remarks by Schwartz about Big Oil running the show, his outlook is similar in some ways to that of the neocons ("we must reform the region"). We don't have a transcript or link to the interview, but we present the key points he mentioned in the diagram below:



UPDATE: In a related vein, Calpundit has some thoughts about Greg Palast's theories (which claim a tight relationship between Bush himself, and Saudi financial benefactors).

UPDATE #2: If it's not on this page, we diagrammed the money trail between senior Saudi officials and al Qaeda here.

posted by Quiddity at 8/05/2003 04:24:00 PM