Sleeping With The Devil (35 page)

    • Operate all installations without the owner’s assistance.

    • Guarantee safe overseas passage for supplies and petroleum
products.

    

    Achieving American objectives, the Research Service summarized, would
require two to four military divisions, maybe sixty thousand troops, “tied down for a
protracted period of time.” To keep the oil fields running, “drafting U.S. civilian workers to
supplant foreign counterparts might be mandatory.” Because “U.S. parachute assault forces are
too few to cover all objectives quickly [and] amphibious forces are too slow,” skilled
localized sabotage teams could be expected to “wreak havoc” before invasion forces were in
place. “In short, success would largely depend on two prerequisites: slight damage to key
installations [and] Soviet abstinence from armed intervention.”

    Even if we confine a takeover to Saudi Arabia, we couldn’t count on it
going smoothly. Whether the House of Sa’ud were still in power or had been supplanted by some
sort of Wahhabi putsch, we would still have to contend with all those weapons Washington sold
the Saudis, and all those fighter pilots and infantry officers trained by American military
personnel and private contractors to use the planes and other weapons. Happily, the U.S. has an
adequate base of operations in Qatar. Additionally, U.S.-trained Saudi forces would realize the
futility of resisting, in part because they know that however many planes and missile launchers
they have, the U.S. has the next generation in far greater numbers. Also, corruption in the
kingdom is so thorough that spare parts for its planes and tanks would quickly be truly spare
and sparse.

    Sure, terrorism would likely increase, locally and globally. Al Qaeda,
the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, you name it - none is going down without a fight. Even if the
Saudis aren’t widely loved in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is still my friend.
Vilified for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. would take an even worse beating in international
public-opinion polls. We would have to run roughshod over international organizations and our
own long-standing principles, although the newly promulgated “doctrine of preemptive warfare”
would certainly provide cover. But would all that be worse than standing idly by as the House
of Sa’ud collapsed and the world’s largest known oil reserves fell into the hands of Muslim
Brotherhood-inspired fundamentalists dedicated to jihad against Israel and the West? I don’t
think so. Some things are more calamitous than others, and if the Bush-Cheney administration
knows anything well, it ought to be how to rebuild and run an oil field.

    THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE feasibility study on seizing Arab
oil fields has mostly disappeared from history, in part because it’s embarrassing for Congress
to be identified with such schemes and in part because the study is almost embarrassingly naive
at times. (“The resultant survey covers the immediate future only, through the 1970s,” the
authors write. “Thereafter, new United States and allied sources of energy could make armed
intervention against petroleum producers an irrelevant act.” Right.) But the magazine article
on which the CRS study builds - Robert W. Tucker’s “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,”
from the January 1975 issue of
Commentary
- has been nibbling at the dreams of
out-of-the-box Washington thinkers for more than a quarter century. Unlike the CRS bureaucrats,
Tucker doesn’t beat around the bush. He wants to seize the Saudi oil fields, straight and
simple:

    

    Since it is impossible to intervene everywhere, the feasibility of
intervention depends upon whether there is a relatively restricted area which, if effectively
controlled, contains a sufficient portion of present world oil production and proven reserves
to provide reasonable assurance that its control may be used to break the present price
structure by breaking the core of the cartel politically and economically. [Remember: This was
1975.]

    The one area that would appear to satisfy these requirements extends
from Kuwait down along the coastal region of Saudi Arabia to Qatar. It is this mostly shallow
coastal strip less than 400 miles in length that provides 40 per cent of present OPEC
production and that has by far the world’s largest proven reserves (over 50 per cent of total
OPEC reserves and 40 per cent of world reserves). Since it has no substantial centers of
population and is without trees, its effective control does not bear even remote comparison
with the experience of Vietnam.

    

    There is a second factor to consider: the Shi’a-Sunni split in Islam.
The Saudi Shi’a in the Eastern Province, the majority of workers in Aramco, are ripe for a
revolution. They are a poor, oppressed minority, not allowed to express their faith, forbidden
from holding any important government position or serving in the military. From time to time,
they’re subject to Wahhabi pogroms. If they’re lucky enough to own any property, it’s liable to
be seized by the Al Sa’ud. Until U.S. and British forces started rolling into Iraq in March
2003, I would have bet that if we had offered the Shi’a a deal to rule the Eastern Province -
the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry - they would have instantly agreed. Now, I’ve got
plenty of doubts. Iraq’s Shi’a didn’t exactly welcome their “liberators” with open arms as the
script called for. But the war still goes on as I write. Maybe by the time it ends, America
won’t seem so arrogant to the Arab world, so intolerant of any world view but its own. That’s a
steep learning curve, but winning over the Shi’a would be worth the effort.

    The idea is not as far-fetched as it seems. Already the Pentagon has
made an alliance with Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and a Shi’a, to set up
a government in a post-Saddam Baghdad. Even if he were to take power, Chalabi isn’t likely to
last long. He left Iraq in 1958, still a child, and has spent his adulthood in the West. He has
no political base in Iraq. Few Iraqis know his name. Also, in 1989 he was convicted in Jordan
of defrauding his own bank. If we’re ready to consider a Shi’a with all that baggage, couldn’t
we consider a Saudi Shi’a for the same role?

    If you carry the logic forward, it would be possible to extend an arc
of moderate Shi’a governments from Tehran to Kuwait to Bahrain to the Eastern Provinces, all
countries with a substantial Shi’a population. Before September 11, any talk about nation
building on this scale would get you ejected from any serious policy discussion in Washington.
Now we’re faced with the House of Sa’ud’s dissolution, and we may have no other choice. An
invasion and a revolution might be the only things that can save the industrial West from a
prolonged, wrenching depression.

    Was it all inevitable? No, which brings me to the final thing I want to
say in this book. Washington made us lie down with the devil. It made the bed, pulled back the
covers, and invited the devil in. We whispered in his ear and told him we loved him. When
things went a little wrong, Washington held his hand and said it was all right. And all that
time we had our eye on his bulging wallet, lit by the moonlight on the dresser.

    

    

    
The following items may be used as a guide to search for
information in this eBook.

    

    
Note: Arabic names with the prefix al- or bin are alphabetized by
their main element.

    

    ‘Abassi, Hashim

    ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz (Saudi prince).
See
Azouzi

    ‘Abd-al-Salam, Mansur

    ‘Abd-al-Wahhab, Muhammad ibn

    ‘Abdallah (Saudi crown prince)

    reform potential and

    U.S. presidents and

    ‘Abdallah ibn Ibrahim ibn Saif

    Abqaiq oil complex

    Acheson, Dean

    Aerospace Engineering Design

    Afghanistan

    CIA and

    bin Laden bases

    Muslim Brothers in

    Saudi Arabia and

    Soviet invasion of

    
See also
Taliban

    Ahmar, ‘Abdallah al-

    Airbus

    Air Cess

    Alaskan oil, xxiv

    Alawites

    Aleppo attack (1979)

    Algeria

    Aliyev, Heydar

    Al Sa’ud.
See
House of Sa’ud

    Amerada Hess

    American University (Beirut)

    American University (D.C.)

    Amnesty International

    Amoco

    Amoudi, Muhammad Husayn al-

    Angola

    anthrax, weaponized

    Arab-Israeli wars

    Arafat, Yasir

    Aramco

    Armacost, Michael

    arms dealing

    Khashoggi and

    Lebanese and

    Russians and

    Saudi purchases

    
See also
defense industry, U.S.

    Arms Export Control Act, U.S.

    Asad, Bashar al-

    Asad, Hafiz al-

    Ashcroft, John

    Asad, Rifa’t al-

    Atlantic Richfield/ARCO

    Atta, Muhammad

    Autumn Leaves arrests (1988)

    Azerbaijan

    Azhar, al- (Cairo university)

    Azouzi (Saudi prince)

    greed/bid for power by

    militant Islam and

    ‘Azzam, ‘Abdallah (“Amir of Jihad”)

    

    Bahrain

    Baker, James

    Bandar bin Sultan (Saudi prince; U.S. ambassador)

    background/personality of

    Saudi money flow and

    Washington connections

    wife’s Islamic charity gifts

    Banna, Hassan al-

    Barger, Thomas C.

    Basmachi revolt

    Basra

    Bawazir, Tahir

    Bayyumi, Omar

    BCCI scandal

    BDM International

    Bedouin

    Begin, Menachem

    Beirut

    Bell, J. Bowyer

    Bentsen, Lloyd

    Beschloss, Afsaneh

    Beschloss, Michael

    Bill (CIA officer)

    bin Laden.
See
Laden, Osama bin

    Boeing McDonnell Douglas

    Bojinka plot

    Bosnia

    Bout, Victor

    BP Amoco

    Brady, Nicholas

    Bridas

    British Aerospace

    Brown, Ron

    Brzezinski, Zbigniew

    Buckley, Bill

    budget deficit, U.S.

    Burayk, Sa’d al-

    Burma

    Bush, Barbara

    Bush, George H. W.

    Bandar friendship

    Carlyle Group and

    Bush, George W.

    ‘Abdallah and

    oil interests and

    

    Cambridge Energy Research

    Capitol Trust Bank

    Carlucci, Frank

    Carlyle Group

    Carlyle Partners II fund

    Carter, Jimmy

    Casey, William

    Caspian Sea oil

    Caterair

    Central Asia

    militant Islamics

    oil resources

    
See also specific countries

    Centre Islamique (Geneva)

    Chalabi, Ahmad

    Chechnya

    Cheney, Dick

    Cheney, Lynne

    Chevron

    Chowan College (Murfreesboro, N.C.)

    Christopher, Warren

    Churchill, Winston

    CIA

    Afghanistan and

    arms dealers and

    Central Eurasian Division

    cold war focus

    Counter-Terrorism Center

    lack of Middle East sources

    Lebanon and

    militant Islam and

    Muslim Brotherhood and

    Saudi policy

    Syria and

    Citicorp

    Clinton, Bill

    Bandar and

    Boeing-Saudia deal and

    Bosnia policy

    Iraq policy

    Qatar and

    cold war

    Muslim Brothers and

    Saudia Araia and

    Syria and

    
Cole
, U.S.S., bombing

    Congressional Research Service

    Cordesman, Anthony

    Cutler, Walter

    

    Dalkimoni, Muhammad Hafiz