by Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post
Laurent Murawiec, 58, a think-tank geostrategist who stirred an outcry in 2002 by contending that Saudi Arabia was the “kernel of evil” in the Muslim world and that its oil fields should be seized if it didn’t do more to fight terrorism, died Oct. 7 of multiple myeloma at his home in Washington.
Mr. Murawiec told the Defense Policy Board in July 2002 that “Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader” and that “Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies.” He recommended that the United States seize Saudi oil fields and target its financial assets if the Middle Eastern government did not take definitive actions against terrorists.
His 24-slide PowerPoint briefing to the Pentagon advisory panel was leaked to The Washington Post, and the subsequent front-page article caused an international stir. Pentagon and State Department officials distanced themselves from his comments to avert a major diplomatic crisis between the United States and its longtime ally less than a year after the terrorist attacks of 2001. Many of those who participated in the attacks were Saudi citizens, but the government had expelled the leader, Osama bin Laden, a decade earlier and fought al-Quaeda attacks on its soil as well.
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Mr. Murawiec wrote eight books, including a 1999 French translation of Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War,” “Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West” (2005) and “The Mind of Jihad” (2008).
The last two books drew extraordinarily heated reviews. “Princes of Darkness,” wrote political scientist F. Gregory Gause III in a 2005 review in The Washington Post’s Book World, “raises serious issues here but does not treat them in a serious way. . . . In his zeal to indict the Saudis for everything that has gone wrong in the Muslim world (and beyond), Murawiec loses all sense of proportion. He twists facts, distorts history and ignores contrary evidence to hammer away at his target.”
The next book, “The Mind of Jihad,” called contemporary radical Islam an ideological heir to Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Nazism, Marxism and nihilism. “This, then, is the ultimate problem with ‘The Mind of Jihad’: It tries to explain jihad by largely ignoring or minimizing Muslim precedents and doctrines in favor of Western precedents and philosophies,” wrote Raymond Ibrahim in the Weekly Standard.
Mr. Murawiec took issue with the latter review, and Ibrahim, the associate editor of the Middle East Forum, posted his rebuttal online.
Mr. Murawiec’s first marriage, to Lana Murawiec, ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of five years, Claudia Kinkela of Washington; a daughter from his first marriage, Morgane Murawiec of Falls Church; and a daughter from his second marriage, Johanna Murawiec of Washington.
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