Page 420 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The (Sting’ 417

was becoming increasingly prone, of attributing Western modes of thought to

Eastern minds. Thus the same editorial went on: ‘One reason for believing that
the new policy is based on long-term thinking is the fact that many of the
OPEC countries have no immediate use for the revenues that they will now
earn.’ Apparently it did not occur to the Financial Times, a newspaper devoted
to the study of finance and economics, that money is power. Or that the

Middle-Eastern oil states had a very good use to which to put their surplus
funds, viz. to manipulate the economies of Western Europe and Japan and
thereby influence their governments to do their political bidding. In any case,
how often has the accumulation of substantial, or even vast, wealth inhibited
individuals, corporations or governments from endeavouring to acquire yet
greater riches? Certainly the shah, who had been the guiding spirit behind the

redoubling of oil prices, had need of every dollar he could get to accomplish his
grand designs. Hence his bizarre suggestion that the price of oil be determined
by reference to the cost of its extraction from other mineral or natural sources.
One wonders how he might have reacted to a counter-suggestion that the price
of Western manufactures, and more particularly the advanced weaponry and

aircraft he delighted in, should be equated to what they would cost if they were
to be produced in Persia by the Persians themselves.
While the price increases of October 1973 had raised the estimated annual
revenue, at 1972 levels of production, of OPEC’s members to $30,000 million
(it had been $7,000 million in 1970), those of December 1973 would, it was
reckoned, net them an annual income of $80,000 million, or over eleven times

what it had been three years earlier. Still OPEC was not satisfied, and when the
organization held its first meeting of 1974 at Geneva on 7-9 January the
delegates’ first item of business - after congratulating themselves on the
success of their spectacular ‘sting’ - was to see whether oil prices could not be

raised even higher by the use of the Geneva agreement of June 1973, whereby
the oil companies had undertaken to adjust posted prices monthly in accor­
dance with fluctuations in the international value of the US dollar. Jamshid
Amuzegar made his customary speech about the current strength of the dollar
actually calling for a reduction in prices, then quickly passed on to the more
pleasurable duty of declaring that any such reduction was rendered impossible
by the rising cost of imported goods from the industrial countries. In his

opinion the December oil-price increase was no more than ‘adequate’, and the
rest of the delegates gravely agreed with him. They decided that there should
e no downward adjustment of oil prices to compensate for the current value of
1 e dollar, and that future price movements would depend upon the measures
taken by the industrial nations to prevent the cost of their exports from rising.

e latter condition was pretty cool, seeing that the fourfold increase in oil
prices since October was bound to have an inflationary effect upon the
economies of the oil-consuming countries.
A further decision of the conference was to abandon the principle adopted at