Politics & Power Quote by Michael Scheuer

“The world is lousy with Arab princes” is deliberately coarse phrasing that turns policy into a barroom cost-benefit calculation. Michael Scheuer isn’t just venting; he’s performing a kind of moral triage meant to sound brutally clear-eyed. The line does two jobs at once: it retroactively justifies extreme measures against elites in the Middle East, and it preemptively shames anyone who would object as naive about what national security “requires.”

The subtext is a hard-edged indictment of the U.S. relationship with Gulf monarchies. Scheuer implies the real scandal isn’t collateral damage; it’s America’s reluctance to upset friendly royals whose survival has been treated as strategically sacred. “A few less... would have been OK” reads like a rebuke of that bargain: we protected princes, and the bill came due later in American lives. It’s consequentialist ethics delivered with a shrug.

Context matters: Scheuer, associated with the CIA’s early bin Laden unit, became known for arguing that bin Laden’s motives were political and rooted in U.S. policy in the region. This quote sits in the post-9/11 atmosphere of grievance and hindsight, when every missed chance became an accusation and every scruple looked like complicity. The intent is not subtle: normalize targeted violence against a class of people by reducing them to surplus (“lousy with”), then launder the ugliness through the sanctifying number “3,000.” It’s a provocation that tries to make brutality sound like prudence.