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Arabia, the Gulf and the West

economic combine, in my judgement, is not military threat, embargo or political
manipulation. Rather, it is to be found in conservation at home, diversification of
sources and the development of substitutes.

Senator Charles H. Percy was another who was horrified by Kissinger’s veiled
allusion to a resort to arms, which had been voiced when Percy also was on his

travels in the Middle East, necessitating some rapid invention on his part to
explain it away to his various interlocutors. He was as opposed as Mansfield

and McGovern to military action. ‘Is it practical?’ he asked his fellow senators
rhetorically, at a sitting of McGovern’s sub-committee in June 1976. ‘Set aside

the moral aspect, which I don’t think I can. Is it really a feasible, practical thing
for us to use force or imply that force will be used in an oil-producing country?’

There were certainly a number of interested parties in Washington in 1975
and 1976 who were concerned to prove that a military seizure of any of the
Middle-Eastern oilfields was a Herculean enterprise, doomed by its very

nature to produce a Pyrrhic victory. A fair summary of the principal tenets of
this school of thought is provided by a study entitled ‘Oil Fields as Military

Objectives’, which was prepared by the Congressional Research Service of the
Library of Congress in August 1975 for the House Committee on International
Relations. The study runs to over a hundred pages and is decked out with all

manner of impressive devices to lend it authority: some 200 footnotes; statisu-
cal tables of oil production, distribution and consumption; maps, appendices
and comparisons of military strength; glossaries of oil industry and military

terminology; and extracts from the United States Constitution, treaues wit
foreign powers and assorted United Nations charters and resolutions. e
authors range far and wide in their search for apposite historica , ega

military precedents, delving into the arcana of international law, consutut
restraints and public opinion (‘public opinion once again could be expecte

provide key input to any “go-no go” decision’), invoking sue
parallels as the invasion of Normandy in 1944, the Arab Revolt 0 *9 -ca|
*
the War of 1812, and illustrating their discourse with signi cant is

quotations (e.g. ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’). rs select
As a case study to test the feasibility of a military operation t e aut o
what they call the ‘Saudi core’, i.e. that area of Hasa whichicon
*
Abqaiq, Ghawar, Dammam, Qatif and Berri (off-shore) e s. $
the climate, vegetation and terrain (‘the stony soil around a ran w^at

cushion, but would suit seasoned [paratroopers’), and then raw up^
consider to be the essential components of an invasion force. 0 ^^ghts

discerned through the fog of jargon in which they clo e t -ons on
(‘deliberations in the clutch would be conditioned by strong wouid be
both sides. Money elements in the decisionmaking matrix • $.tuatjonSj
magnified’; ‘nevertheless, U.S. posture, tailored to fit spf^ould require,

would display peculiarities’), the occupation of the Sau core
in their view: