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

<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.>

Agreed--I was trying to answer--why is this coming out of the middle east, as 
opposed to elsewhere?  I'm not sure Latin America has any less of a beef with 
the US than the Middle East. And as modernist ideologies there exhaust 
themselves, and the promises of nationalists, socialists, secularists, etc 
start to seem fraudulent, they could turn more millenarian.  Sendero style 
Marxism for example. But it hasn't really caught on. Liberation theology didn't 
really move in a millenarian direction, but in any case, the Pope has been 
pretty successful at crushing it and refocusing Catholicism around a quite 
conservative critique of modernity.  The key thing about Islam is a:  its broad 
appeal, as a central idiom for a billion people, and b: the lack of any 
authority who can convincingly say they have a monopoly on true Islam a la the 
Pope (or the Soviet Union, who did so much to drain the life from Marxism).

<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?>

The West's responses seem so similar to what its been doing for the last five 
hundred years that it barely seems worth trying to identify why it is doing x 
right now.  I think its attacking Afghanistan right now more because of 
September 11 than because it believes that South Central oil is urgently 
needed--but I wouldn't rule out the combination of a number of factors.


<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.)>

Huntington and Fukuyama have two quite different philosophies.  Fukuyama 
believes that the cultural questions of history have been resolved, and, but 
for a few recalcitrants, everyone is recognizing that free markets plus formal 
democratic institutions are the best way for everyone. This is quite similar to 
what Bush, Blair and Clinton say.  I've never heard Fukuyama explain why there 
have been so many wars lately; presumably its because there are recalcitrants 
who don't 'get it'.  Because the answer to history is so self evident, 
unlimited force can presumably be used against those  in the wrong  (On the 
other hand, it is not likely to be used against the US!).

Huntington, on the other hand, claims that the overweening ambition of the West 
is being countered by a diversity of civilizations that the West can no longer 
claim hegemony over.  Thus the US should adopt a position of watching its back 
in a dangerous world.  I've yet to hear a major Western leader adopt this 
position  (Those Western leaders--Sharon and Berlusconi, for example--who adopt 
rhetoric similar to the clash of civilizations have been denounced by the more 
powerful Blair/Bush types).  It is the opposite of what Bush/Blair say when 
they go on about how they are not fighting Muslims (or even Afghanis), how what 
everyone there really wants is free markets/elections, etc.

Huntington's formulations do sound a lot like Bin Laden's. Like Huntington, Bin 
Laden  believes an overweening West can no longer dominate the world, and that 
the US should watch its back. Bin Laden's argument that this is in fact a war 
against Islam seems to be hitting a receptive chord among a considerable 
portion of the Islamic world.  Huntington's book has also enjoyed a 
considerable popularity among the Chinese (according to Aihwa Ong).
It can be read as the manifesto of those who would counterpose supra-national 
cultures ('Asian values', 'Islam') against the West.  Its not a political 
project I particularly like, but it is certainly out there--again, not through 
Western leaders, who are convinced their values are universal, but among the 
non-left 'rest'.

  
<>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.>


I was being sarcastic.  I was suggesting that the US so routinely intervenes in 
so many different places that it is difficult to pin too much on the specific 
importance of a particular area in terms of supplying oil.  Even though Chile 
lacked oil, the US did everything it could to overthrow Allende.  US foreign 
policy combines a number of elements--efforts to maintain cheap access to raw 
materials(including oil) and labor, a (barely) secularized missionary 
conviction that it can solve all problems for everybody (which I'm convinced 
many in the political establishment genuinely believe), geostrategic 
considerations of alliances (the source of the 'great game' in the nineteenth 
century, right?  Before oil was all that important...). 

But making a list of all the considerations of US policy will not necessarilly 
explain the actions of September 11, since these were committed by forces 
opposed to the US.  I presume they were what Elson was asking about.  And on 
that level we would have to look at differences in the ideological world among 
the victims of US hegemony.

Steven Sherman

kj khoo