Saudis to US: “Stay in Iraq or Lose Our Oil”

Posted by Mick Arran in News and articles

Greg Palast is reporting on his website that a primary reason for Bush’s blind insistence on more troops for Iraq is the pressure he’s getting from the Saudis.

Here’s my question: Who asked the waiter to deliver this dish? Who asked for the 21,000 soldiers?
We know the US military didn’t ask for the 21,000 troops. (Outgoing commander General George Casey called for a troop reduction.)

We know the Iraqi government didn’t ask for the 21,000 troops. (Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is reportedly unhappy about a visible increase in foreign occupiers).

So who wants the occupation to continue? The answer is in Riyadh. When the King of Saudi Arabia hauled Dick Cheney before his throne on Thanksgiving weekend, the keeper of America’s oil laid down the law to Veep: the US will not withdraw from Iraq.

According to Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi who signals to the US government the commands and diktats of the House of Saud, the Saudis are concerned that a US pull-out will leave their Sunni brothers in Iraq to be slaughtered by Shia militias. More important, the Saudis will not tolerate a Shia-majority government in Iraq controlled by the Shia mullahs of Iran. A Shia combine would threaten Saudi Arabia’s hegemony in the OPEC oil cartel.

In other words, it’s about the oil. (emphasis in the original)

Just like we always knew it was. It has been about the oil from the very beginning, and despite all the noise about Bush’s Bubble, a Neocon Nirvana, Our Dear Leader’s Legacy, and Daddy-Dissing, it’s still about the oil.

I wonder how the right wing feels about US policy being determined by a foreign govt – and an Arab govt, at that? I wonder how The Decider feels about having decisions of US foreign policy dictated by Riyadh instead of in his talks with God? I wonder how Americans would feel if they knew their president was defying them because the House of Saud told him to?

Here’s a little of what Palast thinks Bush should have said in his speech last week:

Let’s imagine that somehow we could rip away the strings that allow Cheney and Rove and Abdullah to control our puppet president and he somehow, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly grew a brain. His speech last night would have sounded like this:

“My fellow Americans. Iraq is going to hell in a handbag. So the whole shebang doesn’t collapse into mayhem and madness, we need to send in 21,000 more troops. So I’ve just wired King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and told him to send them.”

“My missive to the monarch reads: Dear Abdullah. It’s time your 16,000 princelings got out of their Rolls Royces and formed the core of an Islamic Peacekeeping Force to prevent mass murder in Iraq. The American people are tired of you using the 82d Airborne as your private mercenary army. It seems like the Saudi military’s marching song is, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”

It’s an idea. It’s not like the Saudis can’t afford an army of their own, but why should they lay out the money when Bush is willing to give them ours?

IAC, it raises another question: How much did the Saudis have to do with Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place?

It’s undeniable at this point (except by Kool-Ade-drinking rightie bloggers) that the whole Bush song-and-dance for months before the invasion was a sideshow. He’d already decided to invade and was only looking for the right excuse. Why was he so intent on removing Saddam no matter what?
We know from the briefing papers that were leaked of his meeting with Tony Blair before the war began that he was perfectly aware there were no WMD’s in Iraq and never had been. That was merely the excuse his staff, mainly Cheney and Rove, had agreed gave them the best chance of justifying the invasion.
We know that they were so determined to invade that Cheney cherry-picked intelligence that supported their pre-determined course of action and threw everything else out. They didn’t bother even to check if the information was accurate, they just funneled it straight to the top (Seymour Hersh called it “stovepiping”).
We know that Poppy Bush is “Counselor” to the Saudi Royal Family and that the Carlyle Group, whose board Poppy is on as a Director, handles all the Saudis’ financing and brokers any deals they make in the West.

Yes, there were the PNAC papers urging the removal of Saddam that go back to at least 1998 when they tried to convince President Clinton to do it. They wrote, in part:

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

***

Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

Sound familiar?

And it’s also true that this letter was signed by people who became closely associated with both the Bush Administration and its Iraq policies – John Bolton, Jeremy Kagan (who dreamed up the “surge”), Bill Kristol (who used The Weekly Standard to sell the war), Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle, among others, some of them also connected with the Carlyle Group. But that just begs the question. Why were the members of PNAC so hot under the collar about Saddam?

Most of the theories are psychological in nature – they were trying to find a way for America to redeem its failure in Viet Nam; L’il Bush wanted to show up Daddy by doing what Big Bush wouldn’t do; they wanted to pretend it was 1941 and they were fighting the Axis Powers (the phrase “axis of evil” was no accident). All of that is or may be true, but what if there was a more practical reason?

What if the Saudis said, “Do it or we’ll join with our Arab brothers and cut off your oil supply”?

I wonder.