Success Quote by John Perkins

Perkins knows exactly how to make geopolitics sound like a crime novel, and that is the point: to pull U.S. foreign policy out of the abstract language of “stability” and “development” and drop it into the concrete register of coercion. “Successful in Saudi Arabia” is delivered with a cynic’s smirk. Successful for whom? The phrase pretends to be technocratic while quietly indicting an arrangement where debt, contracts, and oil security align neatly for American interests and friendly local elites, not necessarily for ordinary people.

The line “Saddam Hussein didn’t buy” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s idiom: he didn’t accept the deal. Underneath it’s accusation: policy is a sales pitch, and sovereignty is something to be purchased. By framing Iraq as a failed transaction, Perkins invites the reader to see war and regime change not as tragic last resorts but as escalations in a pressure campaign.

Then comes the most loaded word in the quote: “jackals.” It’s a metaphor with teeth, designed to bypass policy debate and trigger moral recognition. Jackals are scavengers, predators that move in after subtler tactics fail. Perkins’ “economic hit men” and “jackals” create a tidy hierarchy of power: first persuasion through money and leverage, then violence through covert action. Whether one takes his account as insider testimony, provocation, or self-mythologizing, the rhetorical intent is clear: he’s building a vocabulary that makes imperial management legible, even lurid, to a general audience.

Context matters: Perkins emerged as a prominent critic of U.S. interventionism in the post-9/11 era, offering a narrative that recasts Iraq not as an intelligence failure but as a predictable outcome of a system that treats nations like balance sheets.