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Radio War Nerd EP #112 — Amal Saad on the November 4 Whirlwind in Riyadh (Patreon)

Published:
2017-12-11 22:27:32
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Amal Saad, author & professor

Recorded: December 8, 2017

Things got hot & weird very fast on November 4, and the War Nerd is honored to have Lebanese University professor and author Amal Saad return to the show to help us make sense of it all. Nov 4 was a big day in Riyadh & the Levant: Lebanese PM Hariri suddenly announced from the Saudi capital he was resigning due to an alleged assassination plot by Hezbollah; a Houthi rebel missile nearly hit Riyadh's airport; and the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman unleashed a massive purge of the Saudi elite, royals and billionaires all. And that was just the start of a flood of weird events — continuing up to last week's assassination of former Yemen leader Saleh, and Trump's announcement that the US recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel...

Afterwards (starting at 1:07:00) the Nerd and Ames discuss the latest in the world of wars: a closer look at the Sinai mosque massacre and the role of outsider jihadis vs local tribes; British "charity" aid delivered to Al Qaeda groups in Syria; British report says British intel maybe-shoulda-coulda flagged jihadists who attacked Britain (but were too useful for regime-change ops in Libya and elsewhere, so hey); Eric Prince's private CIA proposal; do Patriot anti-missile systems work?; crazy genocide talk from Anglo-America's North Korea armchair warriors; Subscriber comments & letters!...

Amal Saad is author of "Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion"; she's published  in Open Democracy, Foreign Affairs, and Al-Akhbar. She was a guest on RWN episode 92, on the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War.

Total time: 2:15:14

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

realBriannaWu

Already learning a ton. Great episode so far.

Ivan

Hey, RE the point about how the Spanish became poor and oil etc, William Bernstein (wrote A Splendid Exchange etc) though I don't like his somewhat Neoliberal politics, could be a good guest to talk more economics and trade of empire etc.

Maya Min

Amal is one of my favorite people on twitter and one of the best guests in recent memory...looking forward to this

Richard Kim

If you want to cover Spanish decline from an economic/institution-focused angle, I'll recommend the economic historian Mauricio Drelichman who's currently employed at UBC.

Karl Knight

Great episode! Amal Saad is a fantastic guest and I look forward to the next time she's on. Thanks for making sense of this concatenation of events. Haha.

Henry

Global Crisis by Geoffrey Parker kind of touches on Spain

eh

Tooze's Wages of Destruction is a good book on the economics of the Nazi war that discusses the resource constraints of Germany, they spent a large amount of money on building chemical plants to manufacture synthetic oil out of coal before the war. There's also a discussion of the starvation plan and how it nakes sense within the context of a profoundly racist ideology if you are going to pull millions of soldiers out of productive labor.

Jibran Ludwig

In Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano provides some reasons for Spanish decline and how exactly the massive Iberian colonial empires managed to spawn British, US, French, and Dutch empires. Discussing the vast fortune of silver and gold extracted from the Americas by Spain: "The Crown was mortgaged. It owed nearly all of the silver shipments, before they arrived, to German, Genoese, Flemish, and Spanish bankers. The same fate befell most of the duty collected in Spain itself: in 1543, 65 percent of all royal revenues went to paying annuities on debts. Only in a minimal way did Latin American silver enter the Spanish economy; although formally registered in Seville, it ended in the hands of the Fuggers, the powerful bankers who advanced to the Pope the funds needed to finish St. Peter's, and of other big moneylenders of the period, such as the Welsers, the Shetzes, and the Grimaldis. The silver also went to paying for the export of non-Spanish merchandise to the New World. The rich empire had a poor metropolis, although the illusion of prosperity blew increasingly large bubbles into the air. The Crown kept opening up new war fronts, while on Spanish soil the aristocracy devoted itself to extravagance, and priests and warriors, nobles and beggars, multiplied as dizzily as living costs and interest rates. Industry died with the birth of great sterile latifundia, and Spain's sick economy could not stand up to the impact of the rising demand for food and merchandise that was the inevitable result of colonial expansion. The big rise in public expenditures and the choking pressure of the overseas possessions' consumer needs accelerated trade deficits and set off galloping inflation. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, French minister of marine under Louis XIV, wrote, "The more business a state does with the Spaniards, the more silver it has." There was a sharp European struggle for the Spanish trade, which brought with it the market and the silver of Latin America. A late-seventeenth-century French document tells us that Spain controlled only 5 percent of the trade with "its" overseas colonial possessions, despite the juridical mirage of its monopoly: almost a third of the total was in Dutch and Flemish hands, a quarter belonged to the French, the Genoese controlled over one-fifth, the English one-tenth, and the Germans somewhat less. Latin America was a European business." (From Chapter 1, Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver, pages 23-24) In the next chapter Galeano describes how the English came to dominate the Atlantic slave trade and even ended up holding the Royal Spanish slave trading monopoly. It is the slave trade that he credits with the rise of British and US maritime empire and industry. As you may know, Galeano has since been critical of the specific political economy arguments in Open Veins, so I'm presenting this as an interesting starting point rather than anything approaching a complete or authoritative account. I think these arguments of his are worth taking seriously and amending and criticizing with the nuance of someone with more expert knowledge of these topics.

xnfec

As an idea for a show, how about the role of banking in the two world wars? A good start would be the opening chapters of Liaquat Ahmeds book "Lords of Finance" After that you could talk about the secret meetings between the combatants banking representatives during WW2 in Switzerland. I've read that the Germans blew through their whole budget for WW1 in the first month - though I can't remember where I read it.

Allen Brambleshire

If mark actually wrote that stuff its more than just a hit piece. Mark can you please adress this or direct me to where you have addressed it? It was i that reached out to you on twitter. Thats some serious nasty and scary stuff. I am apalled and heartbroken. I love yalls show, ive beena patron since ep1, but without some serious explanation/apology i cannot continue to financially support you. Not just because of my conscience but because this seriously damages my impression of you and your credibility to me. I understand it was a long time ago. I also understand most of us have pasts we are not proud of. Myself included. But we have to come clean to put this shit behind us. I do not feel comfortable continuing to support you unless in can be sure that either this is all proven to be false or you are genuinely changed and understand the horrible nature of the things you have done or wrote. Especially as liberation of women has been a recurring topic on your show. Please. Sincerely, a war nerd fan.

Tupac Chopra

Amal Saad made a comment in the podcast about how Saudi Arabia and Iran are not rivals, though Saudi likes to think of it this way. Can someone explain this to me (or point me to a good article)? More generally, why are Saudi and Iran hostile to each other. It must be something less facile than just Sunni vs. Shia. Assume that I know nothing.

michiganpizza

thanks again for the excellent interview.

Ernesto Che

It really is just Sunni vs. Shia hate. They got along normally when Iran was a secular monarchy, but when it began defining itself as a Shia theocracy and competed with the Saudis for leadership of the Muslim umma, it was pretty much a Cold War from then on

Mark Morales

Portugal's decline wasn't really due to mismanagement - they just had the misfortune of falling into a personal union with Spain during the Eighty Years' War with the Dutch, who started conquering Portugal's colonies after Spain declared an embargo and ended the formerly prosperous spice trade between Portugal and the Netherlands. The Dutch didn't just try to take Asian colonies. Recife in Brazil actually has a some cool Dutch architecture from its brief period as the capital of New Holland. A really cool episode from the Portuguese empire's glory days was the Ethiopian-Adal War, which overlapped with a conflict between the Portuguese and the Ottomans over control of the Indian Ocean. Vasco da Gama's son led a small contingent of Portuguese troops that fought alongside the Ethiopians against the Somali-led Sultanate of Adal, which had its own contingent of elite Turkish troops. After suffering a crushing defeat, most of the Portuguese were killed, including da Gama, but in a later battle the survivors got revenge by killing the Adali general - which helped turn the tide of the whole war in Ethiopia's favor.