Page 391 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

388 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

near future. But it was not the market, or even its own concern with production
levels, that was preoccupying ARAMCO’s attention in the late summer of
1973- There was something else in the wind, of a far more disturbing character.
As 1973 wore on, politics was coming to exercise more and more of a baleful
influence upon the Middle-Eastern oil scene. That influence had always been
present, of course, whether in the form of the enduring and deep-seated

resentment felt by the Muslim states for the Christian West, or in the shape of
their own regional, dynastic or ideological rivalries, ambitions and antipathies.
But it was the particular attribute of the year 1973 that it should bring forth, at
one and the same time, a growing aggressiveness on the part of OPEC towards
the Western industrial nations and an even more marked distemper in the Arab
attitude to the Western powers, especially in connexion with the unending and

unrelenting Arab quarrel with Israel. Inevitably, the two sentiments nourished
each other, the more so since their roots were intertwined. When they eventu­
ally fused in the early autumn of 1973 they engendered a convulsion in the oil
markets of the world the like of which had not been seen before. Somewhere
near the epicentre of that convulsion was the singular and tangled relationship
that subsisted between ARAMCO and the government of Saudi Arabia.

Talk of the possible use of Arab oil as a weapon in the Arab-Israeli dispute had
been in the air for some years. As we have seen, a short-lived embargo upon the
shipment of oil to the United States, Britain and West Germany had been
imposed by Saudi Arabia at the time of the Six-Day War in June 1967- Itwas
lifted within a month, partly because other oil-producing countries like Persia
and Venezuela had promptly taken advantage of the temporary deficit in

supplies to increase their own oil exports, partly because Saudi Arabia could
not afford to sustain the financial losses which the embargo was causing. By the
close of 1967 Saudi Arabia’s oil production had risen by 9 per cent over the
preceding year. Thereafter the likelihood of another oil embargo was viewed in
the West with scepticism. The conventional wisdom was that expressed, for
example, in the Guardian in October 1967: ‘The quick resumption of oil
supplies after the June war has discredited the idea that oil - which the Arabs

cannot drink - is an effective weapon against the West.’ As late as January 1972
the Financial Times was still assuring its readers, ‘These moves [e.g. participa­
tion] need not necessarily disrupt either oil prices or oil flows - nor, indee ,
have the Gulf countries shown any sign they wish to do so.’
The subject was aired at intervals over the years, usually in the context 0 e

Arab-Israeli dispute, only to be lost to sight on each occasion in the dust an
smoke raised by one or other of the successive bouleversements which norma y
mark the progress of Arab politics. Early in i973 there was a renewal o,
rhetoric about the use of the ‘oil weapon’ in the event of a four *
between Israel and the Arab states, much of it issuing from Kuw .
January the Kuwaiti national assembly passed a resolution calhng upon the