Elkader, anecdotally

I'm going to hold back on my Elkader reporting until I have a chance to really sit with the story for a while, but there is one anecdote that I want to write out, in the hope that the writing will shake something loose, that it will expose some angle I haven't yet seen.

After the formal presentation last Wednesday, a group of participants and observers--both local and not--retired to the local Irish pub for an impromptu celebration. During our conversations, one of my Elkader contacts told me that the Elkader-Abd al-Qader story will be featured in an upcoming issue of Saudi ARAMCO World, the magazine published and distributed by the Saudi ARAMCO corporation. ARAMCO, for those who don't know, is the oil company that was founded, some seventy-five years ago, by Americans hoping to exploit the oil wealth of the Arabian peninsula. It was later nationalized, by the Saudis, at some point in the 1970s. ARAMCO is, in some sense, the beating heart of the Saudi monarchy; it is also, arguably, the most important player in the international oil economy. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, the biggest problem for the oil industry is not maintaining or increasing supply, but establishing and controlling scarcity in order to regulate price. The business model of the oil economy was set by the Rockefellers early on, and it was monopolistic. Because John Rockefeller controlled almost all aspects of the production and distribution of oil in the United States, he could, as a consequence, basically name its price. The break-up of Standard after 1911 meant that such monopolies could not be pursued within the framework of American law.

Enter Ibn Saud, his desert kingdom in Saudi Arabia, and ARAMCO. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Ibn Saud had been slowly consolidating his control over the Arabian peninsula, but prior to the discovery of oil in 1938, the biggest source of revenues for his kingdom came either from the British empire, or from pilgrims on the way to Mecca, which he conquered in 1925. The Great Depression cut into the revenues that one could make off the hajj, so by the mid-1930s, Ibn Saud's government was in negotiations with American oil companies for the exploration and drilling rights throughout Saudi controlled Arabia. Liberated from the democratic pretense of American capitalism, the company that eventually became ARAMCO was in a position to effectively control the price of oil, simply by virtue of their control over the enormous oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Because Saudi oil reserves are believed to be so vast, they can out produce anyone else on the market, meaning that the rhythm and volume of the international oil economy, at any given moment, is set by Saudi ARAMCO. If, for instance, Venezuela was going to start dumping vast amounts of oil on the international market with the intent of driving down its price--something that seems somewhat logical, given Chavez's proclivities--the Saudis could simply shut down production to offset the volume of oil coming out of South America. If, on the other hand, Iraq (in the pre-war period, obviously) wanted to flex some political muscle by shutting down oil production, thus forcing the price upwards, the Saudis could simply increase production, and all would be well.

As galling as this may be, equally significant (and troubling) is the relationship between the growth of ARAMCO, the expansion of Saudi sovereignty, and the emergence of Wahhabi extremism within Islam. There is a long-standing association between the house of Saud and the Salafiyya movement that traces itself back through Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the modern Saudi monarchy has maintained its rule over the peninsula by expanding the influence of the Salafist ulema among the population. This is one of the most conservative movements within Islam, specifically targeting any doctrinal innovation as kafir, and calling for the violent purification of "originary Islam" from its illegitimate latter-day expressions. As anyone who knows anything about fundamentalism knows, this is no more "the real Islam" or the "original" Islam than big box church evangelical Christianity is the old time religion of Jesus. Nonetheless, the appeal to the old days has great authority. One way or another, however, the Saudis have, through ARAMCO, helped to bankroll the emergence of fundamentalist extremism throughout the Muslim world.

The picture is, of course, much more complicated than this. However, there is a very good argument to be made that America's relationship to Saudi Arabia is one of the things that is driving Al-Qaeda, at the very least; in his interviews with Robert Fisk, Osama bin Laden has said as much. These were, however, the very points that I could not quite begin to articulate when my contact in Elkader asked me why I grimaced when I heard about Saudi ARAMCO World's interest in their project. "What's wrong with them?" she asked. "Are they linked to terrorism?" To answer either of those questions, in a bar in Iowa, seemed almost impossible; and, honestly, if terror is going to be the lens through which you study the Middle East, you're going to need a finer grind. Terrorism is hardly the only problem in the modern Middle East, and to read all political violence as terrorism is to perpetuate the egregious lie that "terrorism" is somehow a response to "development," to "modernization" in the Middle East and North Africa. The nations of the Middle East are plagued by long-standing class inequalities, many of which fall along ethnic and religious lines, and until we can appreciate how the political violence that we name "terror" might represent a tactical response to such conditions, we have little hope in ending terrorism. This is not to defend terrorism as such, or every ideology that attempts to forward itself through political violence; in general, however, I would suggest that actually policy solutions to the problem of terror need to be based upon serious sociological, political, economic, and cultural inquiry--not broad caricatures.

Perhaps this clarifies something of my ambivalence about the Elkader project. As I'm talking to people in Elkader, I keep flashing back to Robert Vitalis's book about the early days of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, to all the political deals that were done, and all the human rights abuses that were (and continue to be) overlooked. I'm not a missionary for human rights--it generally feels like a pretty opportunistic discourse--but I do care about decency, fairness, respect, and justice. And I don't believe that entrepreneurialism can get you there.