Page 494 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Gazelles and Lions
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manipulating oil supplies and prices, lest they thereby impair the West’s ability
to shield the Middle East against the designs of the Soviet Union. (A corollary
to the doctrine is the necessity for the West to remove the irritation caused by

the Arab-Israeli conflict by securing from Israel the political and territorial
concessions which the Arabs desire.)
None of these arguments will stand up to close examination. Talk of Arab or
Persian self-interest, and of common purpose with the West, must of necessity

be conjectural. It is based, not upon an intimate knowledge of what is discussed
and decided in the innermost councils of the Saudi ruling house, or the Libyan

junta, or the shaikhly families of the lesser Gulf states, but upon divination and
surmise. It presupposes the existence among Arabs, Persians and Westerners
of a similarity of moral outlook, ethical values, political beliefs, modes of
thought and ideas of international law which has no foundation in reality. It

ignores the nature of the regimes, whether conservative or radical, in power in
the Arab countries, and it glosses over those aspects of the Arab character
which habitually impel these regimes to wilful and erratic behaviour. To argue
that Persia and the Arab oil-producing states will tread the path of prudence

and moderation in the knowledge that, if they weaken the West through the
interruption of oil supplies and the imposition of excessively high oil prices,
they are only exposing themselves to eventual Russian domination, is to credit
these states with a preference for rational and responsible conduct for which

their history (or even the record of the past decade) affords no substantial
evidence. The Middle-Eastern members of OPEC, by their intemperate
behaviour since 1970, have simply played the Russians’ game for them,

sometimes in ways which they may not have foreseen. When North Vietnam
launched what was to prove to be her final offensive against the Saigon regime
in January 1975, the resistance of the South Vietnamese forces to the invasion

was severely hampered, not only by the refusal of the United States Congress to
sanction the dispatch of arms to South Vietnam but also by the serious shortage
0 petrol for the South Vietnamese army and air force, a shortage which was a

irect consequence of the quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC twelve months
earJ^er 3nd t^le further price rise of November 1974 engineered by Ahmad Zaki
a amani. It is highly doubtful whether the fall of Saigon to the communists in

1 was a cause for celebration in Riyad.
e plain fact is that the Russians are now well established in the Middle
ast and they are there by Arab invitation. It is immaterial that they have been
e Pe on their way by the Arab-Israeli dispute: if Israel had never existed,

^tne pretext or other would have been found by the Arabs to bring the Soviet
^nion as a political force into the Middle East. For the animosity borne by the
soone01 world for the Christian West is of such intensity that it was bound

friend’ °F *° cause t^ie Arab maxim of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my
is m h° °perate t0 embrace the West’s most powerful and malevolent foe. It
Uc the same with the Persian Shia. Fear of Russia failed to inhibit the