Abdullah bin Abdulaziz

Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, identified in the discussion as the Saudi prince who visited the United States in April, serves as a revealing interlocutor in Noam Chomsky’s account of post-September 11 policy. He urged the United States to take Arab reactions seriously; the answer he received, as Chomsky reports it, was that Washington did not care what he or other Arabs thought. The exchange gives the prince a concise but consequential role in the book’s examination of American power and the limits of coalition diplomacy.

Intervention and the question he raised

During his visit, Abdullah asked the Bush administration to pay more attention to how the Arab world reacted to American support for what Chomsky calls Israeli terror and repression. His intervention placed regional opinion alongside the administration’s military and diplomatic choices: Arab governments and publics were not simply an audience for American policy, but a constituency whose response could affect the standing of the United States and its partners.

Chomsky presents the prince’s appeal against a broader strategic background. He describes Washington as seeking to consolidate military supremacy and global dominance, while relying on access to energy and other strategic resources. In that account, the central reserves of energy were concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, with substantial resources also in Central Asia. The prince’s warning about Arab reactions therefore enters a discussion in which regional relationships mattered, but were subordinated to larger calculations of power.

The answer from Washington

Chomsky recounts that American officials rejected the substance of Abdullah’s concern. A senior official, as reported by The New York Times, said that if Abdullah had thought the United States forceful during Operation Desert Storm, it was now ten times more forceful, and that Afghanistan demonstrated American capabilities. A former military official added that other countries would respect American firmness and stop bothering the United States. The reported exchange turns the prince’s appeal into a contrast between seeking attention to political consequences and making military capacity unmistakable.

The episode also complicates the administration’s efforts to assemble an international coalition. Chomsky argues that the need for coalition partners might soften official rhetoric without changing policy: allies were expected to support Washington quietly rather than participate in decisions, while the United States preserved its freedom to act as it chose. Abdullah’s appeal illustrates the limits of that arrangement. A prominent regional figure could raise the political cost of ignoring Arab opinion, yet the answer described in the account reaffirmed that American officials would not let that appeal govern their course.

Place in Chomsky’s argument

The prince’s appearance is brief, but it links a specific diplomatic encounter to Chomsky’s larger reading of the post-September 11 campaign. He suggests that the Afghanistan bombings served not only immediate military purposes but also a demonstration function: to show what the United States could do to anyone who failed to observe the rules of its game. The reported remarks to Abdullah make that interpretation concrete, connecting the display of force to an explicit message about American capability and resolve.

Chomsky also places the episode among consequences that he says were anticipated or intensified after the attacks: governments using the new counterterrorism campaign to pursue existing agendas, the establishment of major American military bases in Central Asia, and the expansion of policies of global military dominance. Abdullah is not presented as a decision-maker in those developments. His role is instead to expose, through his request and the response it elicited, the distance between American coalition-building and genuine responsiveness to regional criticism.