Posted on 08/08/2002 6:15:12 PM PDT by RCW2001
The PowerPoint That Rocked the Pentagon
The LaRouchie defector who's advising the defense establishment on Saudi Arabia.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, August 7, 2002, at 4:49 PM PT
Diplomatic china rattled in Washington and cracked in Riyadh yesterday when the Washington Post published a story about a briefing given to a Pentagon advisory group last month. The briefing declared Saudi Arabia an enemy of the United States and advocated that the United States invade the country, seize its oil fields, and confiscate its financial assets unless the Saudis stop supporting the anti-Western terror network.
The Page One story, by Thomas E. Ricks ("Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies: Ultimatum Urged To Pentagon Board," Aug. 6), described a 24-slide presentation given by Rand Corp. analyst Laurent Murawiec on July 10, 2002, to the Defense Policy Board, a committee of foreign policy wonks and former government officials that advises the Pentagon on defense issues. Murawiec's PowerPoint scenario, which is reproduced for the first time below, makes him sound like an aspiring Dr. Strangelove.
Just who the hell is Laurent Murawiec? The Post story and its follow-up, also by Ricks, do not explain. The Pentagon and the administration insist that the presentation does not reflect their views in any way. The Rand Corp. acknowledges its association with Murawiec, but likewise disavows any connection with the briefing. (Neither Murawiec nor Rand received money for the briefing, Rand says.) According to Newsday, Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard N. Perle, a former Pentagon official and full-time invade-Iraq hawk, invited Murawiec to brief the group, so Perle can't exactly distance himself from the presentation. But he can do the next best thing—duck reporters' questions. Murawiec also declined reporters' inquiries, including one from Slate.
The first half of Murawiec's presentation reads calmly enough, echoing Fareed Zakaria's Oct. 15, 2001, Newsweek essay about why the Arab world hates the United States. Its tribal, despotic regimes bottle up domestic dissent but indulge the exportation of political anger; intellectually, its people are trapped in the Middle Ages; its institutions lack the tools to deal with 21st-century problems; yadda yadda yadda.
But then Murawiec lights out for the extreme foreign policy territory, recommending that we threaten Medina and Mecca, home to Islam's most holy places, if they don't see it our way. Ultimately, he champions a takeover of Saudi Arabia. The last slide in the deck, titled "Grand strategy for the Middle East," abandons the outrageous for the incomprehensible. It reads:
Egypt the prize?
Because none of the Defense Policy Board attendees are talking candidly about the session, it's hard to divine what "Egypt the prize" means or if Murawiec's briefing put it into any context. It sounds a tad loopy, even by Dr. Strangelove standards. The Post report does mention a "talking point" attached to the 24-page PowerPoint deck that describes Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East. That's extreme talk even by the standards of the anti-Saudi editorialists at the Weekly Standard and the rest of the invade-Iraq fellowship.
Who is Laurent Murawiec, and where did he learn to write like this? The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs' Web site lists him as a faculty member, but it lists no current or future classes by him. The site's biographical page adds that he's a graduate of the Sorbonne University, that he worked as "A foreign correspondent for a major French business weekly in Germany" (isn't that kind of vague?) and is the co-founder of GeoPol Services SA, "a consulting company in Geneva, Switzerland, which advised major multinational corporations and banks." It also lists him as a former adviser to the French ministry of defense and the translator (into French) of Clausewitz's On War.
A sweep of the Web shows that he lectured on Islamic terrorism in Toronto on March 11, 2002, under the aegis of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies. He wrote an article titled "The Wacky World of French Intellectuals" in the Middle East Quarterly, co-edited a Rand Corp. book, and made these comments at a Nautilus Institute conference. When he spoke on panel with Richard Perle at the American Enterprise Institute on Dec. 1, 1999, Murawiec was introduced as having just moved to the United States after "a dozen years" of working as managing director of GeoPol in Geneva, "a service that supplies advice to European clients, similar to what Kissinger Associates offers from New York, except without the accent." That is a bit of an overstatement. A Google search of "Murawiec and GeoPol" produces 12 hits. Compare that to the 10,300 hits on Google for "Kissinger Associates."
Murawiec's résumé would predict many Nexis hits, but a search of his name reveals just five bylines: Twice already this year, Murawiec has contributed to the neocon publication the National Interest, on the subject of Russia. In 1999 he wrote for the Post's "Outlook" section on "internationalism," and in 1996 he contributed a piece to the Journal of Commerce on Russia. His only other Nexis-able byline is a dusty one from the Jan. 23, 1985, edition of the Financial Times, which describes Murawiec as "the European Economics Editor of the New York-based Executive Intelligence Review weekly magazine."
Executive Intelligence Review, as scholars of parapolitics know, is a publication of the political fantasist, convicted felon, and perpetual presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. It's not clear exactly when Murawiec left the LaRouche orbit. An article by LaRouche that appeared last year in Executive Intelligence Review calls Murawiec "a real-life 'Beetlebaum' of the legendary mythical horse-race, and a hand-me-down political carcass, currently in the possession of institutions of a peculiar odor." In 1997, LaRouche's wife Helga Zupp LaRouche wrote in Executive Intelligence Review (republished in the LaRouche-affiliated AboutSudan.com Web site) that Murawiec "was once part of our organization and is now on the side of organized crime." The truth value of that statement surely ranks up there with LaRouche's claim that the Queen of England controls the crack trade. To say, zero.
When Murawiec departed LaRouche's company is unclear, but Dennis King, author of 1989's Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, thinks it came when many followers split as LaRouche's legal problems grew and climaxed with a 1988 conviction for conspiracy and mail fraud. "[Murawiec] was not a political leader," says King, "but a follower who did intelligence-gathering."
Now that Murawiec has assumed such a vocal place in the policy debate, the man who gave him the lectern owes us the complete back-story. Over to you, Richard Perle.
******
Laurent Murawiec's 24-slide presentation to the Defense Policy Board was obtained by Slate and is presented here in type-treatment that approximates the original.
000000000000
Taking Saudi Out of Arabia
Laurent Murawiec
RAND
Defense Policy Board
July 10, 2002
1
|
Taking Saudi out of Arabia:
Contents
2
|
The Arab Crisis
3
|
The systemic crisis of the Arab
World
4
|
Shattered Arab self-esteem
5
|
What has the Arab world
produced?
6
|
The Crisis of the Arab world
reaches a climax
7
|
How does change occur in the
Arab world?
8
|
The continuation of politics by other
means?
9
|
The crisis cannot be contained to the
Arab world alone
10
|
"Saudi" Arabia
11
|
The old partnership
12
|
"Saudi" Arabia
13
|
Means, motive, opportunity
14
|
The impact on Saudi policy
15
|
Saudis see themselves
16
|
The House of Saud today
17
|
Strategies
18
|
What is to be done?
19
|
"Saudi Arabia" is not a God-
given entity
20
|
An ultimatum to the House of
Saud
21
|
Or else ...
22
|
Other Arabs?
23
|
Grand strategy for the Middle
East
• Iraq is the tactical pivot
• Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot
• Egypt the prize
24
You couldn't make that up.
Because none of the Defense Policy Board attendees are talking candidly about the session, it's hard to divine what "Egypt the prize" means or if Murawiec's briefing put it into any context."
Context????????? Hoisted by their own petard, these twits.
JUST let's talk about context, shall we, boys and girls?
I, and probably thousands of you, use PowerPoint or Freelance or something of that ilk on a damned near daily basis (or, Heaven forbid, we're subjected to others' use of such presentation tools) as we conduct our daily business in the corporate world.
I cannot possibly tell you how many of the damned things (such presentations) I have saved on various hard drives of the various computers I maintain........but there are many. What's always fun is to go to one that seemed oh-so-valuable a few months ago or a year ago and open it up now for review.
Without verbal accompaniment.........i.e., CONTEXT...........most are damned-near incomprehensible. I mean, you can't make hide nor hair out of what the creator of the presentation was trying to say!!!
What I'm pointing out is the obvious: These twits ADMIT they don't know the context.......nor have the slightest clue about the accompanying discussion points...........of these slides, yet publish an entire article on "how extreme" they are and what a nutcase this guy is.
Sloppy, transparent, horrifically one-sided bulls**t.
Sometimes they note that the crisis has lasted for the last 1000 years, not just the last 200 years.
It's just about a millenium ago when the Arabs lost control of their own empire. It was taken over by the Turks, then the Kurds, and then the Turks again.
In the aftermath of WWI, it was taken over by the Brits.
Oh, yes, the Arabs "double whammied" themselves. Not only did they lose their empire to foreign powers, they also inflicted the Sharia Law on themselves.
I see what he's driving at about Egypt. Egypt is the intellectual center of the Arab world. It has been that way since the Nasser era. The rest of the Arab world is a collection of oil dictatorships. The Egyptians actually have a civilization. Never call an Egyptian an "Arab".
Anyway, the power point presentation that is being roundly condemned is actually embarrassing only because it is a public pronouncement of what is already being said in private among American strategic planners: Saudi Arabia is a focus of global terrorism. There is where Bin Laden and others were able to get their money.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
WTF???
Yep. The Saudis have got to be feeling a little uneasy at the moment. Personally, I believe the Saudis are the bullseye on the target. That's the home of radical Islam. They are who we're going to have to deal with one day- soon hopefully.
What you mean! 30 Years?!?!?!? How long ago did the "Assassin's Cult" exercise terrorism to gain power?? Wasn't that more like 900 years ago?? Or even longer.
That aside--most of the guy's points seem pretty much on target.
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