Saudi - U.S. relations in shambles --U.S. facing 1,001 Arabian nightmares
<a href=www.khilafah.com>khilafah.com uploaded 29 May 2003
At the insistence of the Saudis, we are in the process of ending our military presence in that country, abandoning the Prince Sultan Air Base which cost us over a billion dollars and served as our former command and control center for the Persian Gulf until we were forced to move those functions to Qatar.
The recent terrorists bombings in Riyadh, which killed 10 Americans, and the rising hostility of the civilian population towards Americans, has led to the temporary closing of all of our diplomatic outposts in that country.
The Saudi bashers in the United States and the America bashers in Saudi Arabia might be happy about all this. But the rest of us should not.
For this has given rise to a situation which is a clear and present danger to the United States, dwarfing that which, we were given to believe, was represented by Iraq prior to our overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
If the House of Saud is overthrown, chaos would result, allowing the radical fundamentalists to either gain control or, at a minimum, guarantee that anarchy would prevail. This would open the door to those who would be both willing and able to cut off the supply of crude oil from Saudi Arabia to the West. This could happen either from within or without.
It would be the ultimate act of economic self-flagellation if it comes from within, one that, however, would bring the United States to its knees like no other.
For well over a half century the United States has been fully aware of the key importance of our alliance with the rulers of Saudi Arabia. It was based on a very simple quid pro quo. We provided protection to that country's royal family in return for its guaranteeing a reliable flow of crude oil to the world market upon which we now depend for over half of our crude oil needs -- Realpolitik at its best.
Due to its huge capacity -- the ability to pump as much as 12 million barrels a day -- Saudi Arabia is the world's "swing" producer. As such, it can move the world price for this fungible commodity more or less at will, within reasonable limits. It has proven this most recently by increasing its output by amounts sufficient to prevent violent swings in the price of oil when exports from two other key OPEC producers, Iraq and Venezuela, were suddenly suspended almost simultaneously.
Given the fragile state of the world economy the issue now, however, is not just price. It is supply. Should the supply of oil from Saudi Arabia drop to zero, economic growth of the West would drop to well below zero and stay there until a "solution" is found.
There are those who think that we already have the solution, namely our control of the Iraqi oil fields. That is a total illusion. It will take years to even get Iraqi output back over 2 million barrels a day. It will take years more to bring it to a target level of 4 million barrels a day. In the meantime, Saudi oil will remain indispensable.
Then there is military intervention. Since we will be maintaining a major military presence in the Gulf, especially in neighboring Iraq, for years to come, it should be a simple matter of our moving American forces in to occupy the Eastern Provinces where the Saudi oil fields are concentrated and keep the oil flowing. This is easier said than done, however.
We could get involved in a never-ending type of asymmetric warfare in Saudi Arabia where neither Abrams tanks nor smart bombs assure victory. Equally important, however, is that even today the transport and seaport facilities key to facilitating the export of oil from Saudi Arabia are extremely vulnerable to external terrorist attack.
They will be even more vulnerable in just a few months, after the military security umbrella which the United States has maintained over Saudi Arabia has been totally removed.
Al Qaeda could plunge the world into energy chaos by blowing up a single LNG tanker in the port of Ras Tanura. Over 10 percent of the world's oil supply flows through that single seaport. Sabotage of the crude oil pipeline from the Eastern Provinces to the Red Sea, which provides the only alternate route for the export of Saudi oil, would be even easier. Then what?
All this leads me to conclude that if a geopolitical nightmare occurs in Saudi Arabia, it would represent the mother of all external shocks. Potentially, it could jolt the economies of the West more than any event since World War II.
Source: CBS Marketwatch