Oil/ Saudi Arabia

Washington Post: Don’t expect oil prices to go down significantly EVER AGAIN.
Here’s why. – This is the first in what will be a series of articles… interesting and informative.
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Also, I just finished Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens, an excellent book that traces not only the history of the Bin Laden family from village poverty in Yemen to the multi-millionaires they are today, but also the history of 20th century Saudi Arabia.

"My grandfather rode a camel. My father rode in a car. I fly in a jet. My son will ride a camel." Saudi Arabian Proverb

Al Qaeda Complains

Don’t you just hate it when someone else gets credit for something you did? All that time, all that hard work you put in, only to see others bask in the glory. Anybody can understand the frustration.

Well, that’s how Ayman Zawahiri and the rest of Al Qaeda feel when people blame 9/11 on “the Jews.” -----See the BBC article here

Zawahiri, on a recently released audio recording on some Islamist website, claims it as an idea propagated by (shia) Iran to discredit the Sunnis.

Please, don’t forget to rub this in the face of any conspiracy theorist/anti-Semite you might meet in the future.

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As an addendum, the Onion beat me to it:

What I'm Reading

The history of the twentieth century was a clash of ideologies: Communism, Fascism, and Capitalism. Will the 21st century be an ideological/civilizational clash as well? Capitalism? Secularism? Zionism? Whabbism? Salafism? And God knows what else?

Over the past year I’ve been trying to read up on the Middle East. History, literature, journalism, you name it. I really want to know every detail of how the U.S. got itself into Iraq, how the Middle East came into it’s present state, and what the future holds.

I just finished The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker. Published in 2006, the book traces the rise of Islamic fundamentalism from the mid-century writings of the intellectual Sayyid Qutb to 1970s Egyptian jails to Soviet occupied Afghanistan to Al Qaeda and 9/11 with a lot of stops in between. It’s a very informative read, it illuminates a lot of issues, and brings even more questions to the fore. Wright is a great story teller and really moves you through the book, no easy task given the subject matter.

Next up is Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski on the 1970s overthrow of the last Shah of Iran. In addition I’m planning to read Once Upon a Country by Sari Nuseibeh.

I am also itching to read War and Decision, Douglass Feith’s recently published memoir of his time in the Bush administration. Feith is the former Undersecretary of Defense -he worked for Rumsfeld- and has (in)famously been called “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet” by General Tommy Franks (ret). He was one of the driving forces behind the decision to invade Iraq. It’ll be interesting to read his side of events, and his self-criticism – I’m assuming it’ll be there anyway. (But I’ll wait until the book comes out in paperback).