Page 501 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

498
Arabia, the Gulf and the West

thA e-t rln? fr?m a mass of mangled pipes and Shattered machinery indicated
i e ot what had once been the world’s greatest oil industry. The loquacious

James Akins, ever alert for a chance to preach the doctrine of Western
ependence upon Arab goodwill, found it impossible to hold his tongue, as he
might reasonably have been expected to do in his capacity as American

ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Instead, he let fall a few ill-chosen words in public
about the iniquity of contemplating the use of force, an indulgence which

earned him a prompt recall from his post and subsequently led to his resigna­
tion from the foreign service.
The most sensible comment on the subject from a public figure in the United

States was that made by Senator William Fulbright eighteen months earlier, in
November 1973, when he observed drily: ‘The Arab oil producers are militar­

ily insignificant - gazelles ... in a world of lions.’ As such, he went on, ‘they
should take account of the pressures and temptations to which the powerful
industrial nations would be subjected if their economies should be threatened

by severe and protracted energy crises’. What, in other words, we are speaking
of here is not states of even the military capacity of Egypt or Syria, but of Saudi

Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. The ability of these states to defend
themselves is minimal, which is why their governments have taken refuge in
extravagant threats to destroy their oilfields and installations in advance of
Western military intervention. Whether they would actually do so, their

braggadocio notwithstanding, is another question. (Whether they have the
technical competence to sabotage the fields thoroughly is also problematical.)

Without their oil these states are nothing, as they well realize - though it must
be said of them, also, that they have a remarkable penchant for cutting off their
noses to spite their faces. As for the tremulous predictions of the ferocity of the
Russian reaction to a Western occupation of the Gulf oilfields, all that need be

said of them is that the nature of that reaction is unforeseeable, probably even
to the Russians themselves and certainly to the tribe of Western augurs

confidently prophesying what it will be. . . ArT1prican
The poverty of resource and invention underlying the reigning

consensus of opinion on the subject of continued Western access to t fS
oil is almost as depressing as the infirmity of spirit which in orms 1 ' . efl

now the people of the United States, like those of Western urope,> . -on
led to believe that the only choice open to them lies between a oci e a^on of
to the dictates of the Middle-Eastern oil states and the outright occup

the Gulf oilfields. On the contrary, it is well within the power an a~ -n
United States, Western Europe and Japan, should the u 01 prjce

interrupt the flow of oil to the industrial world or engineer an0 coinpel
‘sting’, to bring such economic pressure to bear upon these sta
them to desist forthwith. If the Arabs of the Gulf think they ^a e them by

to ransom by suspending oil supplies, the West can as rea 1 |jves worth
withholding almost every single item they require to ma e