The post-September 11 anti-terrorist alliances being forged by the United States reveal the centrality and fragility of our relationships in the Middle East. U.S. and global energy security dictates that we maintain our ties to oil-producing countries in the Gulf, yet our alliances with the governments of these countries demonstrate that our relationships have no depth. In fact, because the United States has had little interaction with the people in these countries, we have not been sensitized to the domestic challenges they face.
Over the final quarter of the last century, the U.S. relationship with the Gulf countries was based on oil. If we could get easy access to a country's oil, we treated their governments deferentially. If oil was denied to us, we punished them. But we didn't try very hard to learn about the internal dynamics of these societies. Arabists were largely purged from our State Department and other government agencies. It is only now, in the midst of crisis, that the U.S. government is scrambling to reconstruct our expertise in this region and to hire Arabic and Farsi speakers for a broad range of jobs.
Prior to 1979, Iran produced close to 6 million barrels a day (mmb/d) and was an important source of oil for the United States. After the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 with the overthrow of U.S. ally Shah Reza Pahlavi, we tried briefly to establish relations with the new fundamentalist government. Unsuccessful in the effort, Washington was not unhappy to see Iraq invade Iran in 1980. During the eight-year war, Iran was our enemy so Iraq became our friend. The United States supported Baghdad with intelligence sharing and dual-use technology, as well as some help for its economy. Neither Iraq nor Iran achieved victory in the war, but both emerged with massive damage to their oil and gas fields and infrastructure. Iraq remained a friend of the United States, while a weakened Iran was seen as good for our interests. Both countries remain oil powerhouses in the Middle East.
In 1990-91, Iraq invaded another oil producer, Kuwait, and overnight Iraq became our enemy. This time, the United States intervened militarily to roll back Iraqi aggression and protect the oil fields of two Gulf allies: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraq lost the war against the United States, but won the peace; the war did not dislodge Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. Once our friend, Saddam is now considered to be one of our greatest enemies.
With major oil producers Iraq and Iran both written off as U.S. enemies post-1991, we needed to preserve other Gulf states as our allies and as secure, reliable oil suppliers. Throughout the rest of the 1990s, Washington spent large sums of money on military and diplomatic efforts to contain Saddam and also exerted considerable diplomatic effort to keep Iran isolated. These efforts were essential to protecting countries neighboring Iraq and Iran from aggression. Saddam's containment required U.S. troops on Saudi soil. Exactly 10 years later, the unfinished war with Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 1991 has been partially at the root of our tragedy in September 2001.
The U.S. military presence on Saudi soil is resented by certain groups in Saudi Arabia. This opened the United States up to terrorist attacks in 1995 and 1996, when U.S. military facilities and personnel suffered casualties in Riyadh and in al-Khobar. Nevertheless, we continue to view this military presence as essential to protecting our oil interests.
Much of the U.S. emphasis in the Middle East, other than our focus on the Arab-Israeli peace process, has been on building friendly relations with Arab allies – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to protect our access to their oil. These three countries, plus Iran and Iraq, own close to two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. Then the unthinkable happened on September 11, 2001. Among the hijackers of the planes that hit U.S. targets were 15 Saudis, 2 UAE nationals, one Egyptian and one Lebanese. This shattered U.S. confidence in our few remaining oil allies in the Gulf.
All this has now exposed the fact that U.S. relationships in the Gulf were never built on trying to form a deeper understanding of these societies and people. Thus, everything has always come as a major surprise, just as in Iran, where the overthrow of the shah in 1979 caught us unawares. Moreover, we continue to misread or ignore domestic influences and policy shifts in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, since 1995, a shift in approach toward the United States began when Crown Prince Abdullah increased his role in the day-to-day running of the government. Although this shift may not have any correlation to the attacks in that country on U.S. facilities and personnel, it did coincide with them. Crown Prince Abdullah began to change the relationship to one of less Saudi dependence on the United States and more focus on mutual benefit. The crown prince instituted domestic reforms to address corruption and began a dialogue with Western oil companies about investments. These were all steps in the right direction.
At the same time, in the period 1995-98, both Saudi Arabia and the United States were involved in lending some support to the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the part of the United States, it was in the form of encouragement for an American oil company to proceed with plans for oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. On the part of Saudi Arabia, it was in the form of providing direct financial aid to the Taliban as they went about securing control over Afghanistan. Private Saudi oil companies were also involved in various oil and gas pipeline schemes, including deals alongside the U.S. company pursuing outlets to Asia that would bypass Iran. It was in May 1996 that Osama Bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan. Having been stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994, he still maintained strong links back home, as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world, including in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. With the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the U.S.-supported Afghan pipeline projects were shelved, and Washington reverted to one major obsession in Afghanistan: bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice in the United States.
Since September 11, the future direction of the U.S.-Saudi relationship and perhaps all Gulf relationships has suddenly been thrown into question. What's more, we have been trying to come up with new oil partnerships and alliances.
The media in the United States appears ready to discard the Gulf as unreliable and unnecessary. Unless we control the oil fields, some of these press reports imply, why should we bother to deal with these countries? Furthermore, why not continue this war on terrorism by moving on from Afghanistan to Iraq? After all, Iraq holds a number of huge oil fields that would be of great benefit if only we had control. But let's wait a minute before we go too far with this.
The clear winner in this U.S. search for new oil partners appears to be Russia. Russia, with over 7 mmb/d of oil production and rising, and with 4.3 mmb/d of crude- and petroleum-products exports, is proving to be a strong contender to replace the Gulf as our trusted oil partner, at least in the hearts and minds of the U.S. political establishment. But Russia's 49 billion barrels (bn bbls) of proved oil reserves are no match for the Gulf. Saudi Arabia (260 bn bbls), Iraq (112 bn bbls), the UAE (98 bn bbls), Kuwait (96 bn bbls) and Iran (90 bn bbls) are all far more significant oil powerhouses than Russia. In addition, neither Russia nor the Caspian, the other region being touted as an oil solution, can provide us with the spare capacity that would be needed in the case of a supply disruption. Only Saudi Arabia can do that. Of course, one could argue, if the spare capacity we need is in Saudi Arabia but the disruption we fear also emanates from there, then what good will it do us?
The answer is simple but the solution is more complex. The United States, for better or worse, needs the Gulf countries for the smooth functioning of its economy. This can be seen as a marriage of convenience or a divorce that would be too expensive to undertake. The solution is to begin forming deeper relationships with these countries than those just based on oil. We are talking about some 120 million people who live in the Gulf countries (including Iran). And this does not count Egypt. The United States needs to develop a long-term strategy for the Gulf that involves working with both governments and people on the development of more open political and economic systems. We are a democratic country that must begin to pay attention to supporting other democracies and shaping other democracies. We also need to begin to find ways to listen to the people in other countries. A foreign policy based on oil takes a humanitarian toll. The United States experienced this toll dramatically on September 11.
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