The [impending] Fall of the House of Saud, from Frontpage magazine

[unixronin]

An analysis of the world's dependence upon Saudi Arabia's oil reserves and, more specifically, its reserve production capacity; and of exactly how much our friend the House of Saud is, and how much it isn't.  Go read.

Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil.  The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount.  This is the fulcrum on which the global economy teeters, and the House of Saud knows what the West is only beginning to learn: that it presides over a kingdom dangerously at war with itself.  In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated--that, in short, the country needs a radical "purification."

We can try to wish this away all we want.  But the reality is getting harder and harder to ignore. Per capita income in Saudi Arabia fell from $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001.  The country's birth rate has soared, becoming one of the highest in the world.  Its police force is corrupt, and the rule of law is a sham.  Saudi Arabia almost certainly leads the world in public beheadings, the venue for which is often a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square.  Illegal arms routinely flow into and out of the country.  Taking into account its murky "off-budget" defense spending, Saudi Arabia may spend more per capita on defense than any other country in the world (some estimates put the figure at 50 percent of its total revenues), and the House of Saud believes this is necessary for its personal protection.  The regime is threatened by increasingly hostile neighbors--and by determined enemies within the country's borders.  Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia call openly for a jihad against the West--a designation that clearly includes the royal family itself--in terms as vitriolic as anything heard in Iran at the height of the Islamic revolution there.  The kingdom's mosque schools have become a breeding ground for militant Islam.  Recent attacks in Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kenya, and the United States, not to mention those against U.S. military personnel within Saudi Arabia, all point back to these schools--and to the House of Saud itself, which, terrified at the prospect of a militant uprising against it, shovels protection money at the fundamentalists and tries to divert their attention abroad.

Recent examples of Saudi support for the fundamentalists abound.  In 1997 a high-ranking member of the royal family coordinated a $100 million aid package for the Taliban.  In Los Angeles two of the 9/11 hijackers met with a Saudi working for a company contracted to the Ministry of Defense.  A raid on the Hamburg apartment of a suspected accomplice of the hijackers turned up the business card of a Saudi diplomat attached to the religious-affairs section of the embassy in Berlin.  Most of the more than 650 al Qaeda prisoners being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba--"the worst of the worst," according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--are rumored to be Saudis.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I've been saying for a couple years now that we need to get the hell out of the Middle East altogether, with troops, bucks, and everything else. With no bling-bling to fuel their terrorism, they'll be reduced to petty squabbles... and watching us give them the digitus impudicus on sattelite.

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

One problem with that. We're not the only country buying oil from Saudi Arabia. If we stop buying oil from them, other countries still will and we'll be out a major source of energy. Yes, someday hopefully that source will be rendered superfluous, but not anytime soon.

Unless of course we take some short term action like drilling for oil in our own territories and/or expanding our use of nuclear power. And even I will admit that a nice side-effect of the war in Iraq is that we will hopefully (depending on how elections go) have at least a quasi-friendly government in charge of an oil-producing Middle East country that we can buy oil from at a fair price.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Nice in the short run. Ultimately destructive in more than one way in the long run.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Changing World Technologies, thermal depolymerization, $10/barrel grade 2 crude, bye-bye land fills, hallo recycling.

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've definitely heard of this. technoshaman is very big on this technology. I agree it has potential, but it's still an emerging technology and there's no guarantee that it will solve the problems. I'm no expert, but here's a post from someone who is somewhat skeptical (http://dogslife.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_dogslife_archive.html#200195649). In addition, Steven den Beste, has his own take on the subject (http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/04/Oilfromgarbage.shtml). Read also the other articles he has written about alternative energy technologies which he links to in this one.

It's promising but I doubt it's the magic bullet that will end our dependency on foreign oil. Every little bit helps, though.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

OK, yes, I've read den Beste's take. I think he must be pretty desperate if he's stooping to arguments based on the reporter's descriptive license and exact choice of words. I see an awful lot of "likely" and "probable" in this, and frankly, it has the feel to me of skepticism without knowledge.

Sure, maybe it won't work out. But fer crissake, give them a chance. The one absolutely surefire certain way to ensure that it doesn't work is to not try it. By all accounts, their pilot plant works, and indications are that just maybe the oil companies take their first production plant in Carthage seriously enough to pay the contractor to sabotage it. (It's hard to find another plausible explanation for 70% -- yes, seventy percent -- of all the welding in the plant being bad, short of incompetence so staggering the contractor wouldn't be able to stay in business.)

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

Oh, by all means give it a chance. The technology works; they've proven it to my satisfaction. I'm just saying don't assume that it's going to solve all our energy needs. It's certainly going to help, but just how much is yet to be seen. If we bet the house on it and it doesn't pay off, we're screwed. Best to hedge our bet.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not assuming that at all, if for no other reason that I fully expect American power consumption to increase essentially without limit to eventually consume the available supply, however large the available supply. But I do think it can get us to a point where a sudden cessation of the flow of Middle East oil would be merely majorly inconvenient, rather than outright catastrophic as it would be now.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I agree, and have for some time. The Saudis' burn rate is staggering .... I have trouble imagining one person spending five million dollars a day. Surely most of that has to be casino losses.