by Robert Baer
Whether there’s anyone in the Al Sa’ud willing to impose the rule of law in the kingdom, I don’t know. Whether anyone has the guts or determination to even try, I’m not sure. From what I know, Crown Prince ‘Abdallah might. He’s related to Asad through marriage; maybe something of Syria’s determination has rubbed off on him. But ‘Abdallah will be eighty years old soon, and he has enough enemies in the family to block anything he might dream up. In case he or someone else wants to try, Syria is a model, much as the bloodless policy wonks in Washington might blanch at the suggestion.
At the end of the day, what we need in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is rule of law. I’m not talking about a Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, a free press, freedom to worship, or the right to bear arms. I’m talking about something more basic - outlawing righteous murder, jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood. That would be a start; then you could move on to outlawing grotesque commissions, theft, and bribery. Only when you address those problems can you think about other rights or true democracy.
It would also help if we imposed a rule of law on ourselves, like enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, stopping bribery, and putting an end to officials retiring from the U.S. government on Friday and going to work for a foreign government on Monday. A little decency in Washington - and in Europe and the rest of the world that has lived off the oil bonanza - would go a long way toward cleaning up the mess in Saudi Arabia and beginning the process of telling the truth about what’s going on in that country.
Failing that, there’s always the 82nd Airborne.
IT’S NOT LIKE the United States has never thought about seizing Arab oil fields. On August 21, 1975, the Congressional Research Service presented to the Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the House Committee on International Relations a document entitled “Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study.” By the time the document was entered into the record, the OPEC oil embargo had been over for almost a year and a half, but the memory lingered on.
Gerald Ford, who ascended to the presidency on Nixon’s resignation, and the holdover secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had talked publicly about the possibility of seizing Persian Gulf facilities should the embargo escalate into a strangulation of American industrial capacity. Doing so, the Research Service estimated, would be no cakewalk, even in the best of circumstances:
If nonmilitary facets were entirely favorable, successful operations would be assured only if this country could satisfy all aspects of a five-part mission:
• Seize required oil installations intact.
• Secure them for weeks, months, or years.
• Restore wrecked assets rapidly.
• Operate all installations without the owner’s assistance.
• Guarantee safe overseas passage for supplies and petroleum products.
Achieving American objectives, the Research Service summarized, would require two to four military divisions, maybe sixty thousand troops, “tied down for a protracted period of time.” To keep the oil fields running, “drafting U.S. civilian workers to supplant foreign counterparts might be mandatory.” Because “U.S. parachute assault forces are too few to cover all objectives quickly [and] amphibious forces are too slow,” skilled localized sabotage teams could be expected to “wreak havoc” before invasion forces were in place. “In short, success would largely depend on two prerequisites: slight damage to key installations [and] Soviet abstinence from armed intervention.”
Even if we confine a takeover to Saudi Arabia, we couldn’t count on it going smoothly. Whether the House of Sa’ud were still in power or had been supplanted by some sort of Wahhabi putsch, we would still have to contend with all those weapons Washington sold the Saudis, and all those fighter pilots and infantry officers trained by American military personnel and private contractors to use the planes and other weapons. Happily, the U.S. has an adequate base of operations in Qatar. Additionally, U.S.-trained Saudi forces would realize the futility of resisting, in part because they know that however many planes and missile launchers they have, the U.S. has the next generation in far greater numbers. Also, corruption in the kingdom is so thorough that spare parts for its planes and tanks would quickly be truly spare and sparse.
Sure, terrorism would likely increase, locally and globally. Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, you name it - none is going down without a fight. Even if the Saudis aren’t widely loved in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is still my friend. Vilified for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. would take an even worse beating in international public-opinion polls. We would have to run roughshod over international organizations and our own long-standing principles, although the newly promulgated “doctrine of preemptive warfare” would certainly provide cover. But would all that be worse than standing idly by as the House of Sa’ud collapsed and the world’s largest known oil reserves fell into the hands of Muslim Brotherhood-inspired fundamentalists dedicated to jihad against Israel and the West? I don’t think so. Some things are more calamitous than others, and if the Bush-Cheney administration knows anything well, it ought to be how to rebuild and run an oil field.
THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE feasibility study on seizing Arab oil fields has mostly disappeared from history, in part because it’s embarrassing for Congress to be identified with such schemes and in part because the study is almost embarrassingly naive at times. (“The resultant survey covers the immediate future only, through the 1970s,” the authors write. “Thereafter, new United States and allied sources of energy could make armed intervention against petroleum producers an irrelevant act.” Right.) But the magazine article on which the CRS study builds - Robert W. Tucker’s “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,” from the January 1975 issue of Commentary - has been nibbling at the dreams of out-of-the-box Washington thinkers for more than a quarter century. Unlike the CRS bureaucrats, Tucker doesn’t beat around the bush. He wants to seize the Saudi oil fields, straight and simple:
Since it is impossible to intervene everywhere, the feasibility of intervention depends upon whether there is a relatively restricted area which, if effectively controlled, contains a sufficient portion of present world oil production and proven reserves to provide reasonable assurance that its control may be used to break the present price structure by breaking the core of the cartel politically and economically. [Remember: This was 1975.]
The one area that would appear to satisfy these requirements extends from Kuwait down along the coastal region of Saudi Arabia to Qatar. It is this mostly shallow coastal strip less than 400 miles in length that provides 40 per cent of present OPEC production and that has by far the world’s largest proven reserves (over 50 per cent of total OPEC reserves and 40 per cent of world reserves). Since it has no substantial centers of population and is without trees, its effective control does not bear even remote comparison with the experience of Vietnam.
There is a second factor to consider: the Shi’a-Sunni split in Islam. The Saudi Shi’a in the Eastern Province, the majority of workers in Aramco, are ripe for a revolution. They are a poor, oppressed minority, not allowed to express their faith, forbidden from holding any important government position or serving in the military. From time to time, they’re subject to Wahhabi pogroms. If they’re lucky enough to own any property, it’s liable to be seized by the Al Sa’ud. Until U.S. and British forces started rolling into Iraq in March 2003, I would have bet that if we had offered the Shi’a a deal to rule the Eastern Province - the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry - they would have instantly agreed. Now, I’ve got plenty of doubts. Iraq’s Shi’a didn’t exactly welcome their “liberators” with open arms as the script called for. But the war still goes on as I write. Maybe by the time it ends, America won’t seem so arrogant to the Arab world, so intolerant of any world view but its own. That’s a steep learning curve, but winning over the Shi’a would be worth the effort.
The idea is not as far-fetched as it seems. Already the Pentagon has made an alliance with Ahmad
Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and a Shi’a, to set up a government in a post-Saddam Baghdad. Even if he were to take power, Chalabi isn’t likely to last long. He left Iraq in 1958, still a child, and has spent his adulthood in the West. He has no political base in Iraq. Few Iraqis know his name. Also, in 1989 he was convicted in Jordan of defrauding his own bank. If we’re ready to consider a Shi’a with all that baggage, couldn’t we consider a Saudi Shi’a for the same role?
If you carry the logic forward, it would be possible to extend an arc of moderate Shi’a governments from Tehran to Kuwait to Bahrain to the Eastern Provinces, all countries with a substantial Shi’a population. Before September 11, any talk about nation building on this scale would get you ejected from any serious policy discussion in Washington. Now we’re faced with the House of Sa’ud’s dissolution, and we may have no other choice. An invasion and a revolution might be the only things that can save the industrial West from a prolonged, wrenching depression.
Was it all inevitable? No, which brings me to the final thing I want to say in this book. Washington made us lie down with the devil. It made the bed, pulled back the covers, and invited the devil in. We whispered in his ear and told him we loved him. When things went a little wrong, Washington held his hand and said it was all right. And all that time we had our eye on his bulging wallet, lit by the moonlight on the dresser.
Index
The following items may be used as a guide to search for information in this eBook.
Note: Arabic names with the prefix al- or bin are alphabetized by their main element.
‘Abassi, Hashim
‘Abd-al-‘Aziz (Saudi prince). See Azouzi
‘Abd-al-Salam, Mansur
‘Abd-al-Wahhab, Muhammad ibn
‘Abdallah (Saudi crown prince)
reform potential and
U.S. presidents and
‘Abdallah ibn Ibrahim ibn Saif
Abqaiq oil complex
Acheson, Dean
Aerospace Engineering Design
Afghanistan
CIA and
bin Laden bases
Muslim Brothers in
Saudi Arabia and
Soviet invasion of
See also Taliban
Ahmar, ‘Abdallah al-
Airbus
Air Cess
Alaskan oil, xxiv
Alawites
Aleppo attack (1979)
Algeria
Aliyev, Heydar
Al Sa’ud. See House of Sa’ud
Amerada Hess
American University (Beirut)
American University (D.C.)
Amnesty International
Amoco
Amoudi, Muhammad Husayn al-
Angola
anthrax, weaponized
Arab-Israeli wars
Arafat, Yasir
Aramco
Armacost, Michael
arms dealing
Khashoggi and
Lebanese and
Russians and
Saudi purchases
See also defense industry, U.S.
Arms Export Control Act, U.S.
Asad, Bashar al-
Asad, Hafiz al-
Ashcroft, John
Asad, Rifa’t al-
Atlantic Richfield/ARCO
Atta, Muhammad
Autumn Leaves arrests (1988)
Azerbaijan
Azhar, al- (Cairo university)
Azouzi (Saudi prince)
greed/bid for power by
militant Islam and
‘Azzam, ‘Abdallah (“Amir of Jihad”)
Bahrain
Baker, James
Bandar bin Sultan (Saudi prince; U.S. ambassador)
background/personality of
Saudi money flow and
Washington connections
wife’s Islamic charity gifts
Banna, Hassan al-
Barger, Thomas C.
Basmachi revolt
Basra
Bawazir, Tahir
Bayyumi, Omar
BCCI scandal
BDM International
Bedouin
Begin, Menachem
Beirut
Bell, J. Bowyer
Bentsen, Lloyd
Beschloss, Afsaneh
Beschloss, Michael
Bill (CIA officer)
bin Laden. See Laden, Osama bin
Boeing McDonnell Douglas
Bojinka plot
Bosnia
Bout, Victor
BP Amoco
Brady, Nicholas
Bridas
British Aerospace
Brown, Ron
Brzezinski, Zbigniew
Buckley, Bill
budget deficit, U.S.
Burayk, Sa’d al-
Burma
Bush, Barbara
Bush, George H. W.
Bandar friendship
Carlyle Group and
Bush, George W.
‘Abdallah and
oil interests and
Cambridge Energy Research
Capitol Trust Bank
Carlucci, Frank
Carlyle Group
Carlyle Partners II fund
Carter, Jimmy
Casey, William
Caspian Sea oil
Caterair
Central Asia
militant Islamics
oil resources
See also specific countries
Centre Islamique (Geneva)
Chalabi, Ahmad
Chechnya
Cheney, Dick
Cheney, Lynne
Chevron
Chowan College (Murfreesboro, N.C.)
Christopher, Warren
Churchill, Winston
CIA
Afghanistan and
arms dealers and
Central Eurasian Division
cold war focus
Counter-Terrorism Center
lack of Middle East sources
Lebanon and
militant Islam and
Muslim Brotherhood and
Saudi policy
Syria and
Citicorp
Clinton, Bill
Bandar and
Boeing-Saudia deal and
Bosnia policy
Iraq policy
Qatar and
cold war
Muslim Brothers and
Saudia Araia and
Syria and
Cole, U.S.S., bombing
Congressional Research Service
Cordesman, Anthony
Cutler, Walter
Dalkimoni, Muhammad Hafiz
Darkazanli, Mamoun
Darman, Richard
Defense Department, U.S.
defense industry, U.S.
Defense Policy Board
Delta Oil
democratization
rule of law as prior need
Deutch, John
Dodge, David
Dome of the Rock
Drake, Edwin
drug dealing
Dulles, Allen
Dulles, John Foster
Eagleburger, Lawrence
East-West pipeline
Economic Offset Program
economy, global
Eddy, William
Egypt
Muslim Brothers
Eisenhower, Dwight
Enron
Ericsson
Export-Import Bank
F-15 aircraft
Fahd, king of Saudi Arabia
stroke of
Fares, Issam
Fasi, Muhammad al-
Faysal, king of Saudi Arabia
FBI
Qatar and
Saudi Arabia and
Fergana Valley
Feurth, Leon
Florida
Fluor Daniel
Foley, Tom
Ford, Gerald
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
Forrestal, James
Fowler, Wyche, Jr.
France
Freeh, Louis
Freeman, Chas W.
French Riviera
Frontera Resources Corporation
fundamentalists. See Islamic militants
gas reserves
Gates, Robert
General Electric
Georgetown University
Germany
Gerstner, Lou
Gerth, Jeff
Ghawar
Giuliani, Rudy
global economy. See economy, global
Golan Heights
Gore, Al
graymailing
Great Britain
Central Asia and
Saudi arms deals
Green Line (Beirut)
Gromyko, Andrei
Guantanamo Naval Base
Gulf Oil Corporation
Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation
Gulf War (1990-91)
Bush (G. H.W.) and
Saudi Arabia and
Haifa, Princess (wife of Bandar)
Islamic charity gifts by
Washington ties
Halliburton
Hama, destruction of (1982)
Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad Al Thani (Qatari black prince)
Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al Thani (Qatari foreign minister)
Hamas
Hamburg terrorist cells
Hamdan, Jamal
Hamdi, Tarik
Hariri, Rafiq
Hasa (mother of Sudayri Seven)
Hashemites
Hassan, king of Morocco
Hawali, Safar al-
Hawsawi, Mustafa Ahmed
Heikel, Mohamed
Hersh, Seymour
hijackings
Hills, Carla
Holiday, Edith
hostages
House of Sa’ud
corruption of
enemies of
family tree
future of
impact of Fahd’s stroke on
Israel’s 1967 victory and
militant Islamist funding by
