Working Together
Thursday, October 18th, 2001How Vulnerable are the Saudi’s Oil Fields?
Seymour M. Hersh
THE NEW YORKER
“The American military response has triggered alarm in the international oil community and among intelligence officials who have been briefed on a still secret C.I.A. study, put together in the mid-eighties, of the vulnerability of the Saudi fields to terrorist attack. The report was “so sensitive,” a former C.I.A. officer told me, “that it was put on typed paper,” and not into the agency’s computer system, meaning that distribution was limited to a select few. According to someone who saw the report, it concluded that with only a small amount of explosives terrorists could take the oil fields off line for two years.
“The concerns, both in America and in Saudi Arabia, about the security of the fields have become more urgent than ever since September 11th. A former high-level intelligence official depicted the Saudi rulers as nervously “sitting on a keg of dynamite”–that is, the oil reserves. “They’re petrified that somebody’s going to light the fuse.”
“The United States is hostage to the stability of the Saudi system,” a prominent Middle Eastern oil man, who did not wish to be cited by name, told me in a recent interview. “It’s time to start facing the truth. The war was declared by bin Laden, but there are thousands of bin Ladens. They are setting the game–the agenda. It’s a new form of war. This fabulous military machine you have is completely useless.” The oil man, who has worked closely with the Saudi leadership for three decades, added, “People like me have been deceiving you. We talk about how you don’t understand Islam, but it’s a vanilla analysis. We try to please you, but we’ve been aggrieved for years.”
The Saudi regime “will explode in time,” he said. “It has been playing a delicate game.” As for the terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks, he said, “Now they decide the timing. If they do a similar operation in Saudi Arabia, the price of oil will go up to one hundred dollars a barrel”–more than four times what it is today.
The Morgenthau Proposal
a thread from the
Alas Babylon Yahoo Group
Paul starts the thread: Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of Treasury under Franklin Roosevelt, was a modern prophet. He came out with an idea whose wisdom is sorely missed by today’s Politically Correct morons. Basically, Morgenthau proposed to de-industralize Germany after WWII and reduce the people to a pastoral existence.
That would have prevented adding 50 million plus German consumers and 150 million plus Eastern European consumers from depleting the world’s oil, but this plan of great foresight was abandoned when FDR died on April 1945.
I also think Marshall Plan was a huge mistake, in retrospect. A fatal mistake for the part of Western Civilization. While adding relatively little to the advancement of Western Civilization, Europe did consume a lot and imported legions of bipeds.
And Europe also gave a lot of money to ‘humanitarian’ (Read: “biped-feeding”) aid, significantly increasing the number of bipeds. United States had a chokehold on the world economy from 1945 to about 1955, which it foolishly gave away. In retrospect, Europe and Japan should not have been rebuilt by the US. It would have been much better for these nations to remain in third-world living conditions, consuming much less.
Morgenthau was up to something, I must say.If he had his way, the world wouldn’t be facing a dieoff now. Maybe in 200 years, but not now. Citizens of France and Germany would have roughly the same standard of living as citizens of Russia now. A Soviet domination of the world might not have been a bad idea, in retrospect. After all USSR did kill off millions of bipeds.
Paul
But Paul……..
Your ‘elite’ was only thinking of themselves…as they usually do. According to Noam Chomsky in his book “What Uncle Sam Really Wants”:
“Postwar planners like George Kennan realized right off that it was going to be vital for the health of the US corporations that the other Western industrial societies reconstruct from wartime damage so they could import US manufactured goods and provide investment opportunities. (I’m counting Japan as part of the West, following the South African convention of treating Japanese as “honorary whites.”) But it was crucial that these societies reconstruct in a very specific way. The traditional right-wing order had to be restored, with business dominant, labor split and weakened, and the burden of reconstruction placed squarely on the shoulders of the working classes and the poor.
The major thing that stood in the way of this was the antifascist resistance, so we suppressed it all over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its place. Sometimes that required extreme violence, but other times it was done by softer measures, like subverting elections and withholding desperately needed food…..”
So, as you can see, all those bipeds were actually needed. You wouldn’t expect your elite to get in there and actually clear up the rubble, now would you? They might get dirty!
Lise
John jumps in: … and not to be missed is the fact that under Marshall Plan post war reconstruction, the energy base changed in Europe from coal to oil (by then coming on stream with an extraordinary margin) from the Middle East.
The major beneficiaries of this change in the energy base were the Seven Sisters (the Majors) who between them had monolpoly control over ME oil production.
Big Oil with its monopoly power was the major player (as it is now) standing to benefit from the course of world events – which it has in large measure, shaped.
Now that we are headed from oil being an abundant resource (the production of which needed to be controlled to maintain price) to a scarce resource, profits for those Big Oil companies and other entities that can appropriate resverves and distribution systems (eg pipelines from the Caspian that might just happen to pass through Afghanistan) seem to be assured. How high will oil prices go– and profits with them?
The unappreciated problem: Oil Price spikes since the 1940′s have always been followed by recession.
The only way out of our current horrendous predicament is:abject and total humiliation of the Big Oil cabal that has taken control of the US government. And that is under way through actions that are of its own making.
Peace
