Your Cooperation, or Else
Phase II of the war on terrorism begins with scaring the hell out of the Saudis.

November 27, 2001 10:30 p.m.

lite opinion is trotting out a seemingly compelling reason for not invading Iraq: We can't even if we wanted to. "Unlike the situation prior to Persian Gulf War," the New York Times wrote yesterday, "Washington cannot count on the use of staging bases in Saudi Arabia."

It certainly seems that Saudi Arabia would have to provide the starting point for any ground campaign, which would at the very least have to be an option open to us if an air/proxy war didn't produce results.

As Steve Sailer points out in an ingenious analysis for UPI, invading from Turkey into the Iraqi north would be difficult, given the mountainous terrain, and an amphibious landing would be risky. It is Saudi Arabia that offers the route into Iraq with the broad, flat desert terrain perfect for an American mechanized thrust.

But the Saudis say "no," so end of story, right?

It shouldn't be. This might be the occasion for the double-dealing Saudis to decide whether they are a U.S. friend or foe. If they insist on standing in the way of an American campaign against a regime that we determine is a threat to us, and to the region, we can begin to put the Saudis in the "foe" category — which will have a clarifying effect on our relations with them.

The clarification can start with the fact that Saudi Arabia is hardly even a country. It consists of essentially a few thousand princes sitting above a natural resource that they have had little or nothing to do with discovering or developing, and engaging in one business: price fixing.

It should be made clear that should they prevent our achieving what we consider an important national goal — toppling Saddam Hussein — we will lump them in with the international pariahs, ending all U.S. aid and working to isolate the retrograde regime there. (As for oil, the Saudis need to sell it just as much as we need to buy it, and even if they stop selling it to us, it will have to go somewhere in the world market, keeping the international price roughly the same.)

Would this provoke unrest in the fragile Saudi kingdom? Probably. Then things can get really interesting. Steve Sailer outlines one scenario:

A coup attempt against the Saud family or a terrorist attack on the Saudi oil fields would provide America with ample pretext for seizing the oil fields to secure them from threats. And then, why give them back? A puppet ruler for the oil regions might be found internally, such as Prince Bandar, the wily and genial Saudi ambassador to Washington. Or a reliable friend could be imported, such as the Sultan of Oman. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina, far from the oil, could be left to the Saud family, or handed back to Jordan's Hashemite dynasty, which ruled Mecca before being driven out by Ibn Saud. Assuming a long run price of $25 per barrel, the value of oil reserves in the Arab Gulf states (not even including Iraq) is, speaking very roughly, at least ten trillion dollars. (Iraq has a few trillion more.) That would take something like a century to extract, providing an annual eleven or twelve digit cash flow. The vast oil wealth of the Gulf is currently a nuisance to the U.S. that could be turned into an asset.

Sound outlandish? It certainly does now. But wars tend to get broader rather than more narrow, and to scramble the international order in ways that seemed impossible before they started.

Already, the logic of Bush's position on terrorism has pushed him into issuing an ultimatum to Iraq, and the logic of a confrontation with Iraq could well force a showdown with Saudi Arabia.

But before we begin planning on pumping Saudi oil ourselves, we should realize that the likely result of such a test of wills would be much simpler: an abject Saudi surrender.

The Saudis would be forced to make the same calculation as the suddenly pliable Pakistani President Musharraf: defying the U.S. at the risk of being thrown to the wolves, or going along to ensure his own survival and lots of money and praise.

In the end Musharraf feared the U.S. more than he did his domestic radicals. If the Saudis are made to feel the same fear, they will make the same choice. If they don't make the right choice, well, life suddenly won't be so comfortable anymore for all those Saudi princes.

Flight 93 Heroics
Check out the simply fantastic account of the heroic struggle aboard Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, in this week's Newsweek.