Page 409 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

406 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Algiers at the end of November 1973 (which will be described shortly), he
stated: ‘In response to a decision of the O AU Ministerial Council held in Addis
Ababa on November 21 and attended by 42 African countries, the Arab
Summit Conference decided also to impose an oil embargo against Portugal,
South Africa and Rhodesia.’ This act alone revealed that the political purposes

of the embargo had gone well beyond the exercise of ‘flexible persuasion’ to
bring pressure upon Israel in the Palestinian interest; and it is significant that
Shihata makes no attempt in his article to justify it.
The failure of the United States to arraign the Arab oil-producing countries
in the United Nations or elsewhere on charges of violating resolutions of that

body to which they themselves had subscribed is perhaps more understand­
able, if no less reprehensible. For one thing, the United States had herself
resorted to economic coercion against other states - notably, in recent times,
Cuba and North Vietnam - and she was, therefore, vulnerable to taunts of tu
quoque. For another, she was intimately involved in the efforts to resolve the
Arab-Israeli conflict and consequently had to tread a careful diplomatic path.

Yet again, the United States, with her own substantial oil production, was
better situated than any of the other Western industrial nations to withstand an
interruption of oil supplies from the Arab Middle East. For all this, however,
the fact remained that the embargo imposed by Saudi Arabia was a contraven­
tion of the provisions of the Saudi-American commercial treaty of 1933, which
stipulated that both parties should accord each other most-favoured-nation

treatment in matters of trade, that is to say, neither party could impose
discriminatory regulations or tariffs upon the other. The oil embargo, which
was not applied to Britain, France, Spain or a number of other countries, was a
discriminatory measure, yet the United States government took no legal action
to contest it.
According to testimony given to the Senate sub-committee on multinational

corporations two years later by James Akins, the American ambassador to
Saudi Arabia in 1973, it was not until the embargo had been in operation for
some months that the United States government contemplated taking a sterner
line with the Saudis over its removal. Akins was instructed by the State
Department (apparently in late February or early March 1974) t0 deliver an

‘ultimatum’ to the Saudi government, the nature of which he refrained from
disclosing to the sub-committee. He thought it, however, ‘inept and stupid ,
and told the State Department so at the time. He also took it upon himself to
divulge his instructions unofficially to the Saudi deputy foreign minister,
Omar Saqqaf, whose reaction to them, said Akins, ‘was very strong and ven
negative’. Akins reported in this sense to the State Department, and the ups 01
was that the ultimatum was withdrawn, ‘a very conciliatory message was

substituted for it and the embargo was lifted within two weeks. Omar aqqa
had in the meantime (he later told Akins) shown the original instructions to
Faisal, who had responded to them by saying that if the ultimatum a