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Addicted to Oil
"A dependence thatâs so strong itâs almost like a narcotic. You donât question the pusher." It may sound like the language of drug addiction, but in fact Robert Baer, a former CIA agent in the Middle East, is describing American dependence on Saudi Arabia and its oil. In "The Fall of the House of Saud" (May Atlantic), Baer details the United Statesâs absolute reliance on oil from a country that is deeply, dangerously unstable.The history of U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia goes back nearly to that nationâs birth. In 1933, a year after the kingdom was declared, the first American oil concession was granted. Over time, U.S. interest in Saudi oil evolved into a company called Aramco, which controlled all of the oil in Saudi Arabiaâ25 percent of the worldâs total. Aramco was a private company held by four large U.S. oil companies, with immense influence on the U.S. government. (It is now wholly owned by the Saudi government.) Moreover, the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia extends beyond this private interestâas early as 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt asserted that protecting the kingdom, and its oil, was of vital economic importance to the United States as a whole. The precedent of maintaining a friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia, for both public and private reasons, has remained unchanged in the intervening years. The United Statesâ policies on Saudi Arabia, Baer argues, are built upon the delusion that Saudi Arabia is stableâthat both the country and the flow of its most precious commodity can continue on indefinitely. Sustaining that delusion is the immense amount of money (estimated at $19.3 billion in 2000) exchanged between the two partners: the U.S. buys oil and sells weapons, Saudi Arabia buys weapons and sells oil. Oil and the defense contracts underpinning its protection bind these two countries together in such a way that when Saudi Arabia fallsâa fate Baer feels is absolutely certainâthe U.S. falls too. Perhaps not all the way down, but, if we donât curtail our dependence, he argues, a failure in Saudi Arabia could have catastrophic consequences for the United States. Our relationship, however, continues unabatedâeven as the corrupt royal family bleeds the Saudi treasury, Wahhabist extremism heats up, and Saudi Arabian citizens kill American citizens in acts of terror. Baer maintains that we must look at Saudi Arabia with a more objective lens and examine the foundations of that country, since they are, in some sense, the foundations of our own. Read the entire interview, itâs fascinating. Posted by: Bent Pyramid 2003-07-11 |
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