A Summary of the Arab Lobby by Mitchell Bard (Guest Post)

 

One very interesting book I've been reading lately is the Arab Lobby by Mitchell Bard. https://www.amazon.com/Arab-Lobby-Invisible-Undermines-Interests/dp/0061725978, a book about the efforts of Arab governments to find a lobbying footage in the US. I feel like I might as well summarize my take aways:

The support for US hawkish candidates (and support of Israel) get their money from American citizens from the bottom-up generally. In contrast, pro-Arab groups tend to come from wealthier sources than AIPAC or the AEI or even most rich Americans, and can offer very lucrative opportunities when someone is no longer a politician with the spectre of foreign jobs in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and at one point Iraq. But Al Jazeera and Saudi Arabia have never been popular in the US mainstream. The donations parties got for taking a hard stance on foreign policy was more than oil states could offer outright, even as they looked for American nationals to be given money to spend on their behalf. As a result, the best these states did was (starting with the Saudi's in the 40's) work with oil companies to try and sway public opinion, mainly against Israel. This was led by Iraq and SA, and the economic relationship of the states and America was levied to try and oppose concerns from the CIA and President. But as the two states became hostile to each other, their ability to cooperate on this endeavor weakened. What was especially interesting was that Iraq spent a lot on a Hail Mary (or in this case Mohammed) to try and weaken the GOP before the Gulf War, and it continuously tried to find ways to oppose the Bush dynasty after the war.

Probably the biggest issue shown again and again is that Saudi Arabia has quite a lot of ways to influence US policy. This started out mainly focused on Israel, but post 9/11 a huge concern has been curbing US backlash to its terror-ties. The Saudi's spent lots of treasure on this, but I'd personally bet it didn't change US policy that much. Whats more troubling is their attempts to find and support pro-Oil, anti-Israel lobbyists usually led to attempts to convert American Muslims to a radical vision of Islam. The Saudi Arabians directly contributed to the first anti-Israel groups in the US, and have tried to use donations to Arab groups as a way to try and make them more Wahhabi in character.

One other interesting takeaway is that, despite the large percentage of Christians in the Arab-American community, power and resources is overwhelmingly based with Muslims relative to their size in lobbying on issues. The strong opposition to the ideas of many Arab groups by Lebanese Christians (and soon after some free Syrians) weakened an organized lobby the most in the 80's. A larger issue Bard hinted at is fissures between Muslim and Christian Arabs.

One thing the book doesn't focus on simply because its year is the high level of influence Qatar has had on US politics (or rather attempted to have). I think an update on that front is in order, being CAIR's Qatar ties and bend towards Arab Muslim terror groups like Hamas.

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