(2 of 9)
Suddenly the Arabs, 100 million strong, backward and neglected and abused for centuries, have begun to realize the proportions of the strategic weapon they hold in their hands. They have long complained of the money that Israel has received from the U.S. and Western Europe. Now they are receiving another sort of bonanza—a hundred times over. Their oil wealth is in the process of changing their history, bringing them a power they have not known since the time of the Crusades—a power that could be used for peaceful development or for violence and revenge.
Parsifal. The recent thrust toward Arab control of Middle Eastern oil began in 1970, and the man who started it all was the new, young (then 28) and hotheaded ruler of Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had seized power in a military coup the year before. Spurred by the instincts of Arab nationalism and pride, he rejected the prevailing royalty rates and launched a bitter, ten-month campaign for a better deal. Because the industrial world's appetite for fuel was and is insatiable, he was able to force the oil companies to increase Libya's oil royalties by 120% within two years—from $1.1 billion, or about $1 per barrel, in 1969 to $2.07 billion, or $2.20 per barrel, in 1971. These rates will continue rising 10% a year until 1975. In the process, Gaddafi has been amassing the largest gold and hard-currency reserves in the Arab world today ($2.9 billion). That radically altered both the life of his desert nation and his own position in Islam.
The leadership of the 100 million Arabs is, in the famous words of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, "a role wandering aimlessly about in search of an actor to play it." Now that Nasser is dead, now that his successors are gray and conventional, it is the implausible figure of Muammar Gaddafi that has acquired the role of an Arab Parsifal. He is a mere 31 years old, handsome, devout, ardent, even fanatical. "The Arabs need to be told the facts," he is fond of saying. "The Arabs need someone to make them weep, not someone to make them laugh." Nasser once told the young Gaddafi: "You remind me of myself when I was your age." Gaddafi was profoundly moved. To be the new Nasser is his obsession—to succeed where Nasser failed.
When Muammar Gaddafi appears in public with older Arab leaders, it is he who draws the cheers. The most belligerent of the Arab leaders, Gaddafi is spending $200 million on a largely unnecessary air force of 114 French Mirage fighter-bombers, which inevitably stands as a threat to Israel, the frustrating obsession of the Arab world. Last week two of these planes inexplicably fired on an unarmed U.S. military-reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the Mediterranean, provoking the sharpest exchange between Washington and Tripoli since Gaddafi came to power. In other spending aimed against Israel, Gaddafi gives at least $125 million a year to Egypt, about $45 million to Syria and perhaps $20 million to Yasser Arafat's Al-Fatah and other Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas. (Sudan has officially accused Gaddafi of instigating the kidnap-murder of three U.S. and Belgian diplomats in Khartoum last month.)