Once again Harun Rashid waxed himself lyrical in his recent column. He claimed that when writing on something as critical as the 'impending disaster' that awaits the United States economy, it is impossible - for him - to get away from 'polemics'.

Here's the thing, Harun: the Arab oil producers belonging the oligopolistic cartel Opec cannot - contrary to your claim, again - 'price their oil as they please, since they are not dependent on oil sales for economic survival'.

Do your homework, sir, and you'll find that Opec, for starters, no longer has the political or economic clout it once boasted. It has been overtaken by fundamental geopolitical shifts in the wider Middle Eastern region, and all the way across northern Africa.

Secondly, Opec's clout has been seriously undermined over the decades by non-Opec oil producers. Third, even those within Opec are competing for market share among themselves, so they've consistently disagreed over oil prices and output.

And fourth, take a close hard look at each of the Arab petro-states and tell me which one of them doesn't depend on oil sales to grow their gross domestic product.

Already Saudi Arabia (and lesser Arab petro-states like Qatar, Kuwait and Oman) are counting the cost of their financing the two Gulf Wars plus stationing of (particularly) US armed forces in their states.

These costs have eaten deeply into their budgets that over the 1990s and early 2000s, they cringed as oil prices slumped from the 'shocks' of the 1970s. Then they had clout, when Israel again took on the Arabs in the 1971-72 war.

On the so-called 'impending disaster' facing the deficit-wracked US economy - get real, Harun. Fact is, so long as the US economy acts as the economy of last resort to the world economy, and as long as these deficits continue to be underwritten by the rest of the world, including the Euro zone and Asia - including Malaysia, which hoards tons of US dollars and other financial assets held by Bank Negara - it'll be the same old game for the US and the world economy. Both for this decade and even the next as it has been so for the last four decades.

The ball game changed in 1965 when the US recorded its first trade deficit with Japan. That plus financing the US' war in Vietnam and against the Soviet empire led to the making of the Nixon doctrine, with implications for US foreign (and military) policy, the world economy and the US economy.

And every export-dependent economy in the world knows the central importance of the US economy to their own in spite of the US' massive and growing twin deficits.

Sure, there'll be problems for the US sometime down the road in dealing with this. Irony is, though, people like you who are driven by naivete, polemics and drivel have been saying these things for a long time now.

Bet you didn't mind the imperilled US economy throughout the 1990s when it grew exponentially, thus lifting the so-called Asian 'miracle' economies higher on their high-debt financed growth trajectories, did you?