Laurent Murawiec is the RAND Corporation analyst who gave the briefing on Saudi Arabia as the Bete Noir of Islamic Terrorism which made the Bushies howl, and many folks on the Left and Right say “at least someone with the Beltway’s ear gets it.”
Murawiec’s briefing is, as far as I know, a classified document, but you can get a sense of what he said from remarks he made on 24 September 2001, at the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley:
How about: the Moslem world needs a Renaissance, a Reformation, an Enlightenment all wrapped in one? How about: since the end of ijtihad in the 11th century, an intellectual, scientific, cultural and social decline has benumbed and stultified the Moslem world, with frightful consequences, in particular an inability fully to participate in the world of science, technology, industry, and the persistence of archaic, dysfunctional forms of governance which make torture, killing, arbitrary and capricious rule, patrimonial appropriation of the State by tribes and clans, the norm in the Arab and in the Moslem world?
The content of his briefing’s an open secret, if you Google on Laurent Murawiec, you’ll see he’s been taking this argument on the road. Mind you, it’s an argument I tend to agree with. But like the Abraham Lincoln Brigades who fought the Facists while Hitler was the darling of American industrialists, it’s impolitic to be a “premature anti-Saudi”.
