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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13921 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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In the end, a lot of the ‘alternative blame stories’ for 9/11 don’t really make a lot of sense. Even blaming the Saudi Arabian state, which is kind of the ‘safe edgy’ of 9/11 theories, isn’t really fair. The Saudi monarchy was in some ways substantially more anti-Islamist, than, say, the (Republic of) Irish political leadership was anti-PIRA, although both were broadly opposed to terrorism. There were just a lot of rich individual Saudis who had access to plenty of oil money and political and religious institutions that heavily sympathized with Islamist aims, and the pact between the House of Saud and the clergy after the siege of Mecca made it very difficult to root out bin Laden allies and sympathizers from state institutions, so everybody kind of ignored it. The CIA also knew this. It is not hugely surprising that some Saudi diplomats, security officials, embassy employees etc might be involved.

The worst that the ‘Saudi state’ as a whole can be credibly accused of is tolerating religious extremists for understandable reasons and not undertaking a religious purge that would have risked the entire legitimacy of the state and made enemies of millions of its own people.

and the pact between the House of Saud and the clergy after the siege of Mecca made it very difficult to root out bin Laden allies and sympathizers from state institutions, so everybody kind of ignored it

As MBS showed it is quite easy. Sometimes cutting the Gordian knot or heads is the good way to do something.

He did it after the War or Terror began and likely had US backing.

I am sure that the saudi monarch at the time would have gotten Reagan on board with - I need to summary execute shitton of clerics and relatives that are too crazy, will you deploy couple of thousand of marines for peacekeeping while my forces subdue the backlash. Reagan needed KSA for the final breakage of the USSR at the time.

Islamists we’re on the US side of the Cold War

As the Rambo 3 misquote goes:

This movie is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan

(real quote from Rambo 3's end card is that it's "dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan", which well, has more plausible deniability now despite likely meaning the same thing in the people who wrote it's mind)

They were too busy shipping Islamists to Afghanistan back then.

MBS had to do an emergency crash purge to root out a conspiracy against him. That was after his father made fundamental changes to what was in effect the Saudi Constitution. It seems like he’s a smart guy, and he pulled it off. But none of that was easy or safe, and there were a lot of scenarios where the whole thing could have turned into one of the more lurid Call of Duty sequels.

It was easy but a lot of people had also died out, younger middle class Saudis had become more liberal, or spent more time in Dubai, globalization had become more entrenched, the time was comparatively ripe. It would have been extraordinarily brave to not do what they did after 1979 and I don’t think one can really fault them for it.

An interesting counterfactual I sometimes wonder is if Reza Shah, or more likely a replacement monarch, could’ve made a similar Pahlavi-Political Islam pact in Iran to what we saw in Saudi Arabia.

I suspect he could have but, especially being closer to Russia geographically, he saw the Islamists as a nuisance and the communists as the real threat, rather than the other way around. He was wrong, but so were a lot of people, including the communists. While being nominally Muslim he also spent a great deal of time and money hyping up the pre-Islamic glory days of the Persians past. To be fair, Sisi has gone all in on Ancient Egypt hype over the last decade, but secular Egyptian military dictators from previous eras were more careful before the brotherhood was fully crushed.

As a general, you are always preparing for the last war, and as an autocrat, you are always preparing for the last revolution. In Pahlavi’s case, that was the revolutions of 1917 (or maybe 1871, really) to the middle of the 20th century, not a religious insurgency.

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