Reddit reviews Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

I have not downvoted you. But I want to clarify why many are.

We don't completely disagree with you, but while your outlook is more educated than the average, you still seem to be whitewashing the U.S intentions in these engagements.

Examples:

>Had we not supported, say, the Taliban, the the Soviets would likely have overrun Afghanistan. The Bin Laden thing, well, it's a nice theory because it makes it easy to demonize the US, but it's just false.

Should read: Had we not supported any and all radical regimes in the middle east and elsewhere worldwide, including dictators and brutal thugs; whomever we're cooperative with our economic, political and hegemonic aspirations, (who would receive our funding, weaponry, and on the world stage, our backing), --- We would not have control of the vast array of global resources that we do now, most importantly in the middle east, crude.

It wasn't to just keep the Soviets out, it was to keep the soviets out of our oil and natural resources.

>Hussein we supported and created. And then when we went to clean up our mess, America went ballistic.

Hussein we supported and created, for the reasons described above. When he no longer supported our agendas, we revealed him to the world as who he always was. A brutal dictator, which up until that point, did not bother us so long as the sweet crude kept flowing. As soon as it was politically better to remove him, we murdered his ass.

>The US didn't support the Taliban for funsies. The US didn't support Hussein because we thought he was a swell fella. The US did those things because at the time they were expedient and we were facing a threat from the Soviet Union - a bloc of countries responsible for a fair number of heinous things including genocides on par with the Holocaust.

Again, this could be summed up with. DON'T LET THE COMMIES GET OUR OIL. - Side note, again I cannot stress enough that we as a country, yes the US has murdered 10's of millions simply by financially, and politically supporting brutal dictators around the world whom were cooperative with our regional interests. Even this argument wears thin in the case of iraq, were specifically our military and our private contractors have killed thousands of civilians, and displaced millions from their homes, tortured people, denied them the right to a trial, etc....

Overall, the concern is this (For TL;DR users): While we may not actually use our military to murder millions, (I still use this loosely, as we only have a much quieter way of doing so, check out COIN theory) we by proxy support brutal dictators, thugs and otherwise in the pursuit of our goals, even when we know for a fact that our support is the reason why the millions of deaths they pursue are possible.

We are murderer enablers. Not because we like to. But because we have no choice in an economic system that demands permanent growth. The raw materials and oil have to come from somewhere, somehow, essentially NO MATTER THE COST.

I highly recommend reading Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival for references to whom we have supported and why, as well as Sleeping with the devil, how we sold our souls for Saudi crude, by former CIA agent Robert Baer for insight on our rather strange relationship with our Saudi "friends", The House of Sa'ud.

EDIT: Spelling.

Here is an excerpt from an article by The Guardian suggesting but not proving beyond a doubt what I am getting at:
article: "WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices"
"Seven months later, the US embassy in Riyadh went further in two more cables. "Our mission now questions how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged period."

Other parts of my education on the topic come from author Robert Baer who spent most of his 21 years in the CIA stationed in the Middle East. He focuses on the Saudi-US symbiotic relationship in great detail in his book Sleeping with the Devil.