updated. again.

The *serious* American left

I've had about enough of this guy

time to cut this mf loose

if for no other reason than I'm getting steamed on behalf of Jake Sullivan, I mean good lord.

Mohammed bin Salman thinks he can push America around. He needs to be taught a lesson.

Defending the honor of the National Security Advisor, with an added sense of disgust watching this beautiful country corrupted by swarthy autocrats.

if for no other reason than I'm getting steamed on behalf of Jake Sullivan, I mean good lord

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) April 20, 2022

Back to liberalism 2004, or 1992 

From its very start in the 1940s, the alliance has always rested upon a cynical deal, that America will provide diplomatic and military cover for a brutal, fossilized Saudi regime...

The fossilized regime, America's Kingdom,  was founded in 1932. 

Cooper accuses American elites of not living up to our inherited exceptionalism.

Bin Salman might be forgiven for thinking that the American foreign-policy and business elites are so preposterously corrupt and/or stupid that they can basically be “bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.”

He's quoting Orwell, on the English Genius

Public life in England has never been openly scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.  

We've been corrupted not only by the niggers but the French.

---

Why not. 

Although nobody remarked upon it at the time, the strange episode in the Mosul mosque [al-Baghadi's declaration of the Islamic State] should have also triggered memories in the minds of at least some historians. Not only were the contents of the sermon and the method of its delivery wholly in tune with Britain’s historical efforts to buttress the Ottoman Caliphate and then its stillborn attempts to recreate one in Mecca, but it also resonated strongly with the White House’s plans for Saudi Arabia’s Ibn Saud to become ‘the great gookety gook of the Muslim world’ and a counterweight to Gamal Abdel Nasser. Moreover, the spectre of the big-bearded al-Baghdadi preaching from the pulpit tallied even closer to a less well-known CIA project dating back to the early 1950s to create a ‘Muslim Billy Graham’. So-called after a Christian evangelical preacher who had rapidly acquired celebrity status – the CIA’s chosen man was to serve as a ‘great mystagogue’ who could promote caliphal ideas and thus help the US counter the threats to its interests posed by the Levant’s rising secular and progressive Arab republics. With a secret committee of specialists having formed to ‘advance the idea of promoting [such a man] to mobilize religious fervour in a great move against communism’, the memoirs of two CIA officers indicate it got as far as selecting a ‘wild-eyed Iraqi holy man to send on a tour of Arab countries. Moreover, the spectre of the big-bearded al-Baghdadi preaching from the pulpit tallied even closer to a less well-known CIA project dating back to the early 1950s to create a ‘Muslim Billy Graham’. So-called after a Christian evangelical preacher who had rapidly acquired celebrity status – the CIA’s chosen man was to serve as a ‘great mystagogue’ who could promote caliphal ideas and thus help the US counter the threats to its interests posed by the Levant’s rising secular and progressive Arab republics. With a secret committee of specialists having formed to ‘advance the idea of promoting [such a man] to mobilize religious fervour in a great move against communism’, the memoirs of two CIA officers indicate it got as far as selecting a ‘wild-eyed Iraqi holy man to send on a tour of Arab countries”*

*Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Metropolitan Books, 2006, p. 87; C. Swift, T. Powers, The Man who kept secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Pocket, 1979), p. 72; M. Copeland, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s original political operative (London, Arum 1989), pp. 121, 134–6.