The Time when US almost invaded Saudi Arabia

Abunwasi · 2016-04-18T09:41:18+00:00

The last months of 1973 were a desperate time. The Arab oil-producing states had embargoed the United States in October, ostensibly in retaliation for U.S. military aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. By the time the embargo ended in March 1974, the damage had been done. World oil prices had quadrupled, triggering years of recession and inflation. No American who lived through the seventies will ever forget the long lines at gas stations that flew red or green flags to signal whether they had fuel in their pumps. With today’s oil market glutted and gas prices plummeting, it’s hard to remember thatthere was a time when Americans could only buy gas on certain days, depending on whether their license plates had odd or even numbers. The world had been turned upside down. From being mere resource producers at the mercy of Western states and big oil companies, the oil-rich nations became global kingpins overnight, flush with so much cash that they could barely spend it all, and armed with the most expensive weapons, which they barely knew how to use. The world trembled before the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Like the rest of the world, the United States tamely paid the inflated oil prices. But rather than forking over the money, what if America had chosen to take the oil by force? In 2004, declassified British government documents revealed that the United States had considered a military seizure of Middle Eastern oil. Though no explicit military plan was mentioned, the documents do show that British leaders were worriedby a conversation between U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and Lord Cromer, the British ambassador to the United States. Schlesinger told Cromerthat “it was no longer obvious to him that the US could not use force. An interesting outcome of the Middle East crisis was that the notion of the industrialized nations being continuously submitted to whims of the under-populated under-developed countries, particularly of the Middle East, might well change public perceptions about the use of the power that was available to the U.S. and the Alliance.” British Prime Minister Edward Heath was worried enough by Schlesinger’s tough talk, as well as hints of military action from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, to order a British intelligence estimate of U.S. intentions. The report concluded that the United States “might consider it could not tolerate a situation in which the US and its allies were at the mercy of a small group of unreasonable countries. We believe the American preference would be for a rapid operation conducted by themselves to seize oilfields. The force required for the initial operation would be of the order of two brigades, one for Saudi operation, one for Kuwait and possibly a third for Abu Dhabi. “The build-up would require the presence of a substantial US naval force in the Indian Ocean, considerably more than the present force. After the initial assaults. . . two [extra] divisions could be flown in from the USA.” Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee calculatedthat seizing oil fields totaling twenty-eight billion tons in reserves would have been sufficient to supply the United States and its allies. However, the report warned that “the American occupation would need to last 10 years as the West developed alternative energy sources, and would result in the ‘total alienation’ of the Arabs and much of the rest of the Third World.” British analysts also worried about the Soviet reaction, though they concluded that Moscow would be more likely to respond with propaganda than force. America could have seized the oil fields with little problem. With the U.S. military now out of Vietnam, a couple of divisions could have been spared for the Middle East while still maintaining a force to guard against Soviet attack in Europe. In 1973, the Saudis lacked all those high-tech American and European weapons, such as F-15s and AWACS, that the oil windfall would buy them a few years later. Even now, there are grave doubts about the ability of the Saudi military to use sophisticated arms. As for Kuwait’s military, it couldn’t stop Saddam Hussein in 1990, and wouldn’t have stopped the U.S. Marines in 1973. Had this been the British Empire in the nineteenth century, or Teddy Roosevelt’s "gunboat diplomacy," force would almost certainly have been used. But in the end, the United States and the world did nothing but pay more at the pump (those who want to see how a military operation might have fared are advised to find a copy of the1975 paper war gameOil War). The fact was that the oil embargo came at the worse possible time. U.S. oil production had been declining since 1970, inflation was soaring, President Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal, America had just withdrawn from Vietnam, the U.S. military was in a shambles and the last thing the American public wanted was another war.

Thread starter Abunwasi
Start date Apr 18, 2016

Abunwasi

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The Time when US almost invaded Saudi Arabia

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