Page 382 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

CHAPTER VIII

The 'Sting'

We shall ruin your industries as well as your trade with the Arab
world.

Muammar Qaddafi, October 1973

The Arab oil producers with their massive reserves are the true
friends of the West.

Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani, November 1976

It is our revenge for Poitiers!

Arab oil official, December 1973

By the winter of 1972-3 the ‘energy crisis’ was all the rage in the intellectual
salons and political pavilions of the West. The student radicalism of the 1960s-
the ‘hippy movement’, the ‘youth revolt’ and the ‘New Left’ - had spawned a
number of fashionable causes which were swiftly taken up by politicians on the

make and lark-brained leaders of contemporary thought, who affected to hear
in the raucous complaints of the young the very music of the spheres. Promi­
nent among these various causes were the preservation of the ecological
balance, the protection of the environment and the conservation of the world’s
natural resources. On the basis of predictions of what the energy requirements
of the industrial world were likely to be in five, ten or twenty years’ time, it was
discovered and solemnly proclaimed around the globe that mankind faced an
imminent and perhaps catastrophic shortage of crude oil supplies - if, indeed,

the shortage had not already materialized. What lent the discovery its particu­
lar piquancy was that it harmonized so agreeably with the reigning liberal
canon on the subject of Western guilt for the economic backwardness of Asia
and Africa and the need for the West to purify itself by self-abnegation and
atonement. Now, it seemed, the day of retribution had dawned, and the
temples of the higher thinking in the West rang with solemn prophecies of the
economic wrath to come as a requital for the West’s extravagant and heedless
consumption of the earth’s irreplaceable resources.