http://www.cornellprogressive.org/articles/issue_1/Harry.shtml
Ramblings by Harry
In the fall of 1990, the United States military deployed troops in eastern
Saudi Arabia in order to "liberate" the tiny Emirate of Kuwait from the Iraqi
invaders. More than seven years later, there are still troops deployed in the
area to defend the oil wells from whatever might happen to them.
To see how we got into this, we have to look at the history of the oil
industry in the area.
In the late nineteenth century, the regions around the Persian Gulf were
ruled by two great kings- the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of the Ottoman
Empire. These rulers became the focus of rivalry between the European powers
of the day. Over time they became heavily indebted to European banks in order
to support their extravagant and corrupt courts, and these loans were used to
extort commodity contracts from them. One of these, a contract where a
British company bought a monopoly on the production of tobacco in Persia, led
to widespread discontent. A fatwa was pronounced by the religious authorities
of Iran banning the production and use of tobacco. Amazingly, the population
actually quit until the contract was cancelled, leading to a pronounced
increase in the edginess of the Persian population. This edginess worked to
develop an opposition in Persia that demanded the creation of a Persian
parliament and restrictions on the king’s power in 1908.
In that same year, oil was discovered by British geologists near the Persian
Gulf in the southwestern portion of the country.
Shortly afterward, the British government developed a close relationship with
the Sabah family in the nearby Ottoman town of Kuwait. When World War I
began, they also contacted a friend of the Sabah family, the chieftain
Abdel-Aziz Ibn Sa’ud of the independent kingdom of Najd. Both became allies
of the British in their attempt to foment a revolt of the Arabs against
Ottoman rule which led to the end of the Ottoman empire and the creation of
several squabbling countries (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq,
Kuwait and Hijaz) in the Middle East, all of which were largely dependent on
Britain or France. After Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saud conquered the nearby kingdom of
Hijaz, he established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom was a medieval
and poor land until Socal (now Chevron) struck oil at Jebel Dhahran in 1935.
The early development of the oil fields led to an expansion of the old
colonial system. Once again, rulers made contracts in which most of the money
went to the West, a little was left for them (which was promptly spent on
Western goods and collateral for Western loans) and nothing went to the
people. But in Persia, by now called Iran, there was that parliament who
pointed out that it was Iran’s oil in 1953 and led a drive to nationalize it.
However, by then the CIA was in town, and its agents, H. Norman Schwarzkopf
and Kermit Roosevelt, together with a local Mafia thug known popularly as
"Ahmad the Brainless" and two suitcases full of US currency, engineered a
coup which eliminated this "communist" hazard to America and gave Muhammad
Reza Shah absolute power to send oil off to American and British oil
companies. For twenty-six years, this heroic anti-Communist Shah explored new
heights of corruption and oppression - buying weapons from American
companies, using them on his own population, having the secret police throw
dissidents out windows, and giving plenty of campaign contributions to
Richard Nixon. The court’s lifestyle discovered all of the worst features of
Western glitz, including a $200 million party to celebrate Iran’s 2500th
anniversary in a province which was experiencing a famine at the time and the
bizarre Shiraz Arts Festival sponsored by the Queen. This arts festival was a
gathering of the most tasteless artists of the 1970’s. The last such
festival, in 1978, contained a live disco sex show by a Brazilian dance
troupe. The people of Iran, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, did not give the
Shiraz Arts Festival good reviews, so they canned the Shah in a bloody
revolution in which over 40,000 people were killed with those bright shiny
American weapons bought on all those loans. World TV audiences were then
entertained by the videotapes of all the weird 70s home furnishings of the
Shah’s palace. Soon afterwards, a house furnished in the same style in
Beverly Hills by one of the Shah’s courtiers was put on the market and became
Steve Martin’s house in the movie "The Jerk". Some of the American banks
still think they should get paid on those loans to the Shah. The CIA, of
course, was outraged, and they got to work on things.
However, the US Embassy in Teheran, which contained the CIA’s section
headquarters, was seized by radical students who had a little too much time
on their hands, and while they held some American hostages they taped
together the huge piles of shredded documents in the trash and found all the
documents outlining the agency’s support of the shah’s regime- right up to
the end, even when the shooting had started in the streets of Teheran. The
CIA was outraged, of course, and President Carter sent a "rescue mission" to
free the hostages. The mission’s orders included a directive to try and
disperse the crowds around the embassy with machine gun fire from
helicopters. Fortunately for the future of US-Iranian relations, the mission
got stuck in a sandstorm before it arrived. President Carter failed to win
this victory for his human rights-based foreign policy and so he lost the
1980 elections. The US government has been a sore loser in its relations with
Iran ever since. Shortly after that, Iraq attacked Iran. This is because
Saddam Hussein thought he could seize the Iranian oil fields near the Gulf
and improve his standing with the rich kings of the Arabian Peninsula, who
were getting worried that their countries were a lot like Iran. But Iran was
able to fight off the attack and Iraq barely survived, running up huge debts
to Western, Kuwaiti, and Saudi banks for all the weapons he used. Then he
couldn’t pay the loans, and the Kuwaitis seized Iraqi assets there. So the
next war started.
Fortunately, we’d been planning for that war since the early 1970’s- the
troops moved into prebuilt facilities, bombed away, and moved in to Kuwait to
defend the democracy they don’t have. I’ve wondered if they had already sent
off the tapes to CNN ahead of time. We couldn’t take out Saddam Hussein (his
subordinates have been trying to do that for twenty years) and so we’ve been
sore losers ever since, throwing in a few more bombs whenever they need to
distract attention from Congress’s probe into important presidential acts.
That brings us to today. Now we have troops in Saudi Arabia. Why is that?
It’s because there has been a lot of discontent there, and we’re ready to
use them on the Saudi people if they try to start a revolution. This might
seem pretty weird to you. Why would they want to do that? After all, when
they show them on TV they’re all happy and rich from all that oil, right? A
little calculation should explain everything. Saudi Arabia’s oil production
is about 8 million barrels a day. Since oil drilling technology gets better
all the time, allowing us to get oil from more and more difficult oil fields
(which are typically not in Saudi Arabia) for less, the oil price has fallen
to a sixth of its 1979 peak, corrected for inflation, to $12 a barrel. So
Saudi Arabia’s oil output is worth $96 million a day. While this oil output
has been constant and prices have fell, the Saudi government has been free
(because of all the money coming in) to pursue a policy of religious
fanaticism which prevents the population from getting an education and
learning how to make it in a modern economy without the generous assistance
of the King. The greatest victims have been Saudi women, who are not allowed
to own property or even drive. Besides, how could they see the other cars in
those black veils? Half the women and a quarter of the men are illiterate,
and more babies die in the first year of life than in China, Mexico, or Sri
Lanka after trillions of dollars in oil sales to build schools and clinics
with. The women are confined more or less at home, where they have an average
of more than six kids apiece. These kids mean that the Saudi population has
grown to 20 million people- who each get $4.80 a day. Or they would if it
wasn’t for the profits of the oil companies and the interest of the over $100
billion in loans the kings have run up to pay for all those American weapons,
trips to Las Vegas, and lots of palaces which I’m sure we will get to laugh
at the interiors of on TV someday. It’s believed that the Saudi government is
$12 billion in the red just this year, and it’s getting worse- would you keep
giving them loans if you were their banker?
So, this is American free enterprise- we’ve got a system now where oil is so
cheap that all those dictators we’ve set up to sell us oil cheap are going
broke. And pretty soon oil consumption is going to go down- it’s less per
person in the US that it was in 1973, and lately we’ve been noticing that
it’s been a little warm. Maybe it’s time to sell those oil stocks and invest
in something more productive. Maybe when you buy bank stocks, you should see
if they have Saudi loans. And when the Saudis finally figure out who the
problem is, I don’t think the weapons stocks will do too well either. That
war will be more like Vietnam than the last Gulf War, and we aren’t going to
do that again. We’ll just get smaller cars and better oil rigs in Venezuela
(now the largest source of US oil imports), and tell the King: Your Majesty,
Hell, no, we won’t go!
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