Page 451 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

448 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

the West have been a source of stability if anything.’ However, he continued,
launching into his habitual minatory coda, this happy harmony of interests

would be destroyed if the West persisted with such expedients as the Inter­
national Energy Agency.

The very first result of the IEA oil-sharing plan, if implemented, would therefore be to
offset the efforts of Saudi Arabia which involve using oil in a gradual and constructive
manner, and to enable the other Arab producers to resort to much harsher measures
which will lead to grave consequences.

If the ultimate aim of the IEA was, as the Arab oil states suspected it was, ‘to

ensure that Arab oil can never again be used to further the Arab cause ... then
the IEA and the Arab world and perhaps the whole of the Western and
developing worlds will be set upon a collision course that can only lead to the

destruction of everybody’. Assuming once more the air of a man who brought
peace, not a sword, Yamani concluded:

I hope, as I suppose every person in his right senses would hope, that this will not be the
case and that the IE A will not be used as an instrument of confrontation.... The Arab
oil producers with their massive reserves are the true friends of the West. This is
something they have proved on almost every occasion in the past, even in their
differences with the West and in the way in which they enforced their embargo.

Yamani has been allowed to get away with this mixture of blague and

gasconade for so many years that he must long ago have concluded that the
West has taken leave of its senses. Not only are none of his protestations and
admonitions ever challenged but instead they are accorded the utmost respect

and credence. Thus, when he haughtily proclaimed in an interview on French
television at the end of May 1979, ‘You had a lesson in 1973 and you learned
nothing from it. Now there is another lesson, and you are trying to avoid the
meaning of this lesson in the West,’ his interviewer practically fell off his chair
in his eagerness to prostrate himself and to crave the oracle’s forgiveness. It is

the same with Yamani’s melodramatic performances as the incarnation of
sweet reason and gracious moderation at the conferences of OPEC. When, for
instance, at the Dauhah meeting in December 1976 he refused, amid scenes of

high emotion, to commit Saudi Arabia to the 10 per cent increase in oil prices
adopted by the majority of OPEC, the Western world rang with jubilant
encomiums to the new Horatius who had defied the fearsome ranks of Tuscany
and saved the treasuries of the West from spoliation. When the tumult ha
subsided it emerged that the 5 per cent increase with which Saudi Arabia an

the UAE had declared themselves satisfied worked out in practice at 7- P
cent, while the 10 per cent which the cads in OPEC had insisted upon won
reduced by market conditions to 8£ per cent. What is more, Saudi ra 1

Abu Dhabi greatly increased their oil production in the first six
t977, at the expense of their partners in OPEC, so as too f set theshgin ly lower
prices they were receiving for their oil. Then, on t Ju y 977>