Politics & Power Quote by Michael Scheuer

Scheuer’s line reads like an autopsy report on a state’s illusion of control: Saudi Arabia, once framed as an island of order, suddenly bleeding violence into the daily news. The phrasing “until just a few years ago” is doing quiet but heavy work. It compresses decades of bargain-making into a ticking clock, suggesting that stability wasn’t a permanent feature of the kingdom so much as a temporarily functioning arrangement.

His intent is less to marvel at Saudi “decline” than to puncture a common policy shorthand: that an authoritarian ally equals a reliably secure ally. By anchoring the shift in “activities and shootouts” and “the paper,” he points to a measurable, public-facing deterioration, not an abstract geopolitical claim. The emphasis on routine (“daily full”) implies normalization: violence has moved from exceptional event to background condition.

The most charged subtext sits in the clause “Islamists who supported Osama bin Laden.” Scheuer collapses distance between the Saudi state’s past tolerance (or instrumental use) of certain Islamist currents and the blowback that follows when those currents turn inward. It’s also a rebuke to the post-9/11 tendency to treat “terror” as something that happens elsewhere: here, the fight is domestic, inside a U.S. partner, among actors with shared ideological ancestry.

Context matters: Scheuer, a longtime CIA analyst associated with hard-edged critiques of U.S. counterterrorism, is signaling that the “war on terror” isn’t just an external campaign. It’s a destabilizing mirror held up to regimes whose legitimacy rests on managing the very forces they once found convenient.