The Saudis

By Michael Elliott Monday, Apr. 29, 2002
    • They spent five hours together, and President Bush gave Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah a pickup-truck tour of his Texas ranch. At the end of the visit, Bush avowed that the two leaders had forged a "strong, personal bond." But the Crown Prince and the President were unable to agree to a joint statement at Crawford, Texas, last week, which gave the long and complex U.S.-Saudi relationship another twist.

    The two nations share little in terms of core values such as democracy, equal rights and religious freedom. But conventional wisdom holds that Washington needs Riyadh on its side for two reasons: an uninterrupted supply of oil and access to Saudi military bases should the U.S. decide to attack Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Last week a "person close to the Crown Prince" told the New York Times there was talk within the Saudi royal family of using the "oil weapon" against the U.S. and of asking Americans to leave their Saudi bases. After the Crawford meeting, a Saudi foreign policy adviser said that "we will not use oil as a weapon," while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told TIME that the future of U.S. bases was not even discussed. Still, the question is now on the table: Could the U.S. dispense with Saudi oil and military bases?


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    More than half of all America's oil is now imported, and of that, something less than a fifth comes from Saudi Arabia. A complete shutdown of exports would, of course, hurt the U.S. economy, but it would hurt the Saudi one--which needs strong growth to satisfy a booming population--even more. "We haven't heard the word embargo for a long time," says Daniel Yergin, of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Most exporters are interested in stability. They don't want to shrink their own markets." The Saudis could conceivably decide that they would no longer use their excess capacity--as they do now--to smooth out market volatilities. Partly because of uncertainty as to Saudi intentions, the benchmark price of crude oil rose 34%, to $26.64 per bbl., from February to late April. Still, it remains far below its average price in 2000. (Crude oil today is, in real terms, barely half the price it was at the time of the first oil shock in 1973.)

    Although Washington can be relatively relaxed on the oil issue, the use of Saudi bases is another matter. The U.S. has significant operations at the Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh, where a superhigh-tech Combined Air Operations Center is situated. The Pentagon is beefing up its presence elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula--in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and especially Qatar, where a second CAOC is hastily being built. But if the Saudis do not want America to attack Saddam from their territory, the region's smaller states are apt to balk as well. "If the Saudis are not doing it," says a U.S. official in the region, "it won't be easy for the others."

    Could the U.S. take down Saddam without any bases at all in the Gulf region? In theory, yes, using Turkey as a staging ground or employing aircraft carriers and long-range bombers alone. But so far, Istanbul is uncommitted, and keeping large numbers of planes in the air for long distances or landing them on ships puts them at risks that the Pentagon would rather avoid. President Bush must be hoping the Crown Prince enjoyed that pickup ride.