Who Needs Whom?
by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON--The emergency meeting this Thursday of President George W. Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah aims to heal recently inflicted wounds to the long-standing U.S.-Saudi partnership. But, like all marriages of convenience, the loveless union between the United States and Saudi Arabia has always been based more on common interests (oil) than on common values.

Sept. 11 exposed the depths of this dysfunctional relationship. Saudi Arabia, Americans were shocked to learn, had been cheating all along. Worse, it was funding its infidelities with U.S. dollars. As gas-guzzling Americans pumped more money than any other nation into the oil kingdom, the royal family was pumping millions into radical religious schools at home and abroad, globalizing its strict 18th century Wahhabi brand of Islam. From these hotbeds of hate graduated Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers.

The U.S. forces deployed 12 years ago to protect and stabilize Islam's holy land have achieved just the opposite, undermining public support for the very regime they were sent to protect and inspiring bin Laden's jihad against America.

Abdullah wrote to Bush last summer, "a time comes when peoples and nations part." It was time, he added, "for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests."

Now the Saudis say the United States needs them. But, truth be told, the United States today is less, not more, dependent on Saudi oil.

The country that provides America with more oil than any other (40 percent of the crude that Americans use) is the United States - which imports twice as much oil from its Western Hemisphere neighbors as it does from the Gulf.

The United States needs oil, but not from Saudi Arabia.

In February, Russia edged out Saudi Arabia to become the world's biggest producer of crude. The largest oil field discovered in 30 years is off the coast of Kazakhstan; some analysts are calling it a second Kuwait. The Caspian basin is believed to hold the world's third-largest reserves (perhaps up to 200 billion barrels), behind only the Gulf and Siberia. South America and West Africa together are believed to hold an additional 100 billion barrels.

To be sure, with one-quarter of the world's oil reserves and an excess capacity of 3 million barrels a day, only Saudi Arabia can moderate the markets with a turn of the spigot, as it did after Iraq's recent decision to suspend exports. Nevertheless, the Saudis need the United States as much as it needs them.

In Saudi Arabia, oil is the only game, accounting for more than 90 percent of exports and 80 percent of government revenue. As oil prices have plunged in recent years, the national debt has soared. Per capita GDP has plummeted from $28,000 in 1981 to less than $7,000 today. With dwindling receipts, the House of Saud cannot afford the generous welfare state with which it bought the loyalty of its people.

This is why the oiligarchies of the Gulf are not responding to Saddam Hussein's call to withhold oil, as a weapon against the United States and Israel. If they don't sell it, others will.

These petro-princes remember that their boldest attempt at using oil as a weapon, the embargo of the 1970s, failed in its main mission of forcing Israel from the Palestinian territories. Even today, half or more of Iraqi oil ends up in the United States.

Nor is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries the superpower it was two decades ago. Witness the cartel's pathetic attempt at cajoling Russia, not an OPEC member, into significant production cuts to prop up prices.

Americans worried about rising oil prices need not fear a Saudi Arabia scorned. It is time for the United States to walk out on Saudi oil.

This article also appeared in the Los Angeles Times 4/19/02 titled "Not Wedded to Saudi Oil".

The writer is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security. The views he expresses are his own.