Page 495 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

492 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

outburst of anti-Western and Shii fundamentalist sentiment in Persia at the

close of 1978, which led to the drastic reduction and eventual curtailment of the

country’s oil production, all the previous assurances of the shah’s government
notwithstanding. That outburst also exposed the irrelevance of another argu­
ment with which the West is accustomed to comfort itself, viz. the supposed

incompatibility, philosophical as well as spiritual, between Islam and Marx­
ism. The achievement of some kind of notional synthesis between Islam and
Marxism is not an essential prelude to the undermining of Western interests in

the Middle East: simply by indulging in vindictive acts against the West as they
have been doing for years, the Arabs and Persians have served the Russians’
purposes only too well.

All that the constant reiteration of the doctrine of common interest achieves
is to convince the Middle-Eastern oil-producing states that the West needs
them as much as (or even more than) they need the West, thereby confirming

them in their hauteur and their illusions of power. These illusions are bound to
lead these states sooner or later to threaten the West with further oil embar­
goes, boycotts or other sanctions. The secretary-general of OAPEC, the Arab

oil organization, more or less gave notice of this intention in June 1976 when he
upbraided the head of the United States federal energy administration, Frank
G. Zarb, during a visit by the latter to Kuwait, for having instituted an

oil-stockpiling programme. Such a move, so the OAPEC secretary-general
claimed, could only lead to a ‘confrontation’ with the Arab oil states. Zarb
replied that if OAPEC undertook not to use oil again as a political weapon but
simply to treat it as an item of commerce, the United States would be prepared

to re-examine her stockpiling measures. The OAPEC secretary-general made
no response to the offer, nor has any response been forthcoming from OAPEC

since then.
A similar malignity informs the outlook of OPEC. The behaviour of that
organization over the past decade — its unilateral abrogation of agreements, its
‘whip-sawing’ tactics over prices, its arbitrary revocation of concessions and

compulsory nationalization of oil company assets — has revealed its contempt
for international law, indeed, for the whole concept of an international order
based upon legal principles arrived at after long and arduous experience, n

place of international law as a system for regulating the affairs of nations
has tried to substitute a set of notions, made familiar by their constantltera5\
by Afro-Asian states, about historical injustice, inalienable rights (especi

over natural resources) and the need for the West to atone for its past cr
against the peoples of Asia and Africa by paying them vast repara

Leaving aside the questionable validity of these propositions, it is pa en
they are the product of the intellectual and emotional fashions o our* onabie
times change, and circumstances with them, undermining e em« sothat

precepts of the day together with the situations which gave rise ’ d anj
what seems grounded in certainty today will seem hope es