Page 386 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The ‘Sting’ 383

Amuzegar, the head of the Persian economic mission in Washington and a man
of similar outlook to that of his namesake, the doughty Jamshid. Living up to
its title, the article contained a fair amount of fiction and some not inconsider­
able playing with facts. It opened with a sermon on the wickedness of the West
and Japan for having consumed oil at a prodigal rate over the preceding three
decades, and for having achieved their industrial growth ‘by subsidies from
oil-producing countries, mostly poor and struggling countries, at the expense
of their irreplaceable assets’. In contrast, Amuzegar claimed piously, all that
OPEC had done in return had been to secure proper recognition and represen­

tation of the producing countries’ interests, and to ensure that ‘the price of
crude oil like other energy prices reflects its true cost’. Considering that the
price of crude oil at the time that Amuzegar was writing was at least twenty
times its marginal cost, and that within the next eighteen months it was to rise
to over one hundred times, the claim set something of a record for effrontery. It
was, however, by no means the limit of the Persian ambassador’s audacity.
OPEC’s strength, he went on to explain, lay in ‘the awareness, wisdom and
determination of its members’, and any move by Western consumers to try to
break the organization’s ranks would be ‘incredibly naive’. Nor would it do
them any good to set up a counter-organization (‘innocuous’, ‘swashbuckling’,
‘impractical and counter-productive'), still less to toy with the notion of taking
over the oilfields (‘preposterous’). In fact, Amuzegar declared darkly, if the

consuming countries tried to act in concert against the producers, all manner of
evils would result, including the cutting off of all oil supplies. The consumers
had no choice, he concluded, in a distinct echo of Akins, but to pay whatever
price for oil OPEC asked of them. ‘Any attempt to hold down OPEC’s oil
revenues by “drastic measures” may not only result in fruitless and even
dangerous reprisals and counter-reprisals, but would indeed be self-defeating.’
This was the authentic voice of OPEC, not the mellifluous sounds being
diffused in the West by OPEC’s apologists. It had, moreover, been heard
earlier in the year, in February 1973, when Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani had
declared, in response to a suggestion that the consuming countries might act in
concert to defend their interests, that such a move would mean ‘war’. If the

consumers dared to combine, he said, OPEC would ‘destroy their industries
and civilization’. It was this mood of belligerence exhibited by OPEC in the

first half of 1973 that lent Akins’s article more significance than it intrinsically
possessed. Whether he was writing to a State Department brief or whether he
was merely expressing his own view was immaterial. The fact remained that he
wrote in his capacity as the State Department official responsible for oil policy,
and what he had to say was as clear a signal as could be sent that the United
States government would not resist the pressure then being exerted by OPEC
for higher oil prices. At an extraordinary general meeting of the organization at
Vienna on 26 May it was resolved to seek a straight 12 per cent increase (twice

that warranted by the Geneva formula) when negotiations resumed with the oil