Re: this is about oil. It's always about oil

At 2:36 PM -0400 14/10/01, Threehegemons@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/14/01 9:42:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time, boles@svsu.edu
>writes:
>
><< Again: why is it coming out of the Middle East?
>   >>
>
>I would have to say that its because Islam provides a unifying ideology, one
>which can be transformed in a millinerian direction into an us vs. the
>infidels thing and is not policed by a centralized 'pope'.

This is rather bothersome as explanation. Islam, in its various 
guises, has been around for more than a millenium. Muslim societies 
have experienced the peculiar crises of the modern era for over a 
century. Over the last fifty years alone, Muslim societies in the 
Middle East have gone from Pan-Arabism with a veneer of socialism, 
secularism, nationalism to Islamism, the last increasingly sweeping 
the region. Over the last thirty years, "terrorism" has gone 
international twice, once in the 1970s (the Palestine-inspired plane 
hijackings), and again in the 1990s -- under very different flags, 
the earlier largely secular, the latter, largely Islamist.

And while this is the world systems list, it strikes me that the 
specificity of events need something more than an apparently enduring 
feature such as cited by Steve Sherman. Why now? Why this particular 
form? Why these particular responses, both from the West and from the 
Rest?

In addition, Steve's characterisation sits uncomfortably close to 
Huntington's and its variant, Fukuyama's, if not their politics. 
Curiously, too, a Huntingtonian-Fukuyamian characterisation can also 
be said to provide a unifying ideology, which can be transformed in a 
millenarian (indeed in Fukuyama's case, it has been so transformed, 
via a Hegelian "end of history") direction, and not policed by a 
centralised 'pope' either (as attested to by the popularity of the 
notion of 'hegemony' in understanding contemporary 'western' 
ideology.)


>True, the fact that the US has rarely intervened in parts of the world  where
>it does not have any oil to worry about (such as Chile, the Dominican
>Republic, the Korean Peninsula, Nicaragua, Congo, Vietnam, Kosovo, Haiti)
>weakens my case, but even so, I'm going to stick to that argument.

What constitutes intervention? It appears to me that one can hardly 
say that the US has rarely intervened in E/SE Asia over the last half 
century -- Indonesia in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s/1970s, 
Indonesia in the 1960s, the Philippines, Indochina in the 
1970s/1980s, Indonesia again in the 1970s, etc. There's the Kahin's 
Subversion as Foreign Policy.

As for Kosovo/Yugoslavia, others have pointed out the oil connection.

kj khoo