Saudi Terror Plot Averted
State Dept.: Terrorism up 30%
Condi Rice wanted to delay the news, but it has broken on two fronts.
Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy report that the annual State Department on terrorism will report a nearly 30% rise over the previous year, most of it accounted for by attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In other words Cheney has it exactly backwards. The US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is feeding terrorism, not preventing or lessening it. "They" won't follow us home if we leave. But they might if we don't.
As if to put an exclamation point on the State Department report, the Saudis were constrained to arrest some 172 persons involved in al-Qaeda terror cells in the Kingdom, who were planning to hijack planes and fly them into the Saudi oil fields. If they targeted the oil facilities cleverly, the terrorists could have taken 10% of the world petroleum supply off the market, at least for a while.
Saudi Arabia pumps roughly 8.56 million barrels a day of the some 86 million barrels a day of oil that are pumped in the whole world. You take any substantial amount of that off the market even for a month, and it would have a major negative impact on world energy supplies and prices.
Labels: al-Qaeda
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/28/2007 12:31:00 AM
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6 Comments:
I think you're right. If we disengage from Iraq, the guerrillas won't follow us home. That idea is ludicrous. What they may do is turn up the heat on Israel, and Israel may fear that the same strategy, weapons and tactics the guerrillas are using in Iraq will work in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon. I suspect the Bush administration and their neocon allies fully expect to be defeated politically in Iraq. What they and the military would like to do before that happens is demonstrate that they have a strategy, weapons and tactics that can contain the insurgency, or, best case, deal it a devastating and highly visible blow. I've always felt that the last years we spent in Vietnam were spent demonstrating to the Soviets that our military could dominate any battlefield, even if we couldn't defeat a nationalist movement. When their turn came, the Soviets demonstrated exactly the opposite in Afghanistan. Now it's our turn again, and my guess is our concern for the safety of Israel will hold us in Iraq until our military can demonstrate that the Sunni insurgency can't prevail by terror and force of arms alone. I think we are trying to force the insurgency to grow a political arm and come to the bargaining table to get us out of there.
Mr Cole, what do you make of that number 86 million barrels a day? Doesn't it seem like anybody, even an idiot, could hear the problem in that number? The Saudies are supposed to have a lot of oil, yet the world uses every day almost 10 times as much as the Saudies procuce. Maybe we should 86 some of the oil production. Thinking does not seem to be worth much. Maybe doing without will help.
1) Cheney has it backwards all right!
Did it occur to any of the great thinkers in DC that the same amount of money used to terrorize the Iraqi people, if used to purchase generators, fuel, food, raw materials, etc, might have prevented the insurgency? Might now lessen the killing?
We have war in Iraq because the White House Iraq Group wanted to inflict pain on the people of Iraq.
George W. Bush is fascinated with his role as Cammander in Chief much like small boys play with toy soldiers in their sandbox. Toy soldeirs feel no pain, people do.
2) Bill Moyers is back. His reports on the media hype before the war and the people who kept their heads (Josh Marshall and Jon Stewart) are both must-see TV events.
3) Now, Tenant raises the issue of White House warmongering as substitute for intelligence. If only he had used the photo op when he received the medal of Freedom (ha!) to call attention to the war crime in progress.
4) Dennis Kucinich wants to impeach Dick Cheney. Hopefully, Ms. Pelosi will allow this to occur. First impeachment, then extradition to Europe. Ha!
5) Curiously, the warmongering right is feeding on its own. Eg. Veteran care, inflation, destruction of the Constitution. Has all the feel of a "false-flag" operation. In this case, the false flag would be the "conservative" part of "neo-conservative."
william glad, that was the French strategy behind their fortifying Dien Bien Phu--in order to bolster their own status at the Peace Table by going out with a win. Of course they underestimated the Viet Minh. The French were half right, in that Dien Bien Phu turned out to be a trap, but for the French.
Prof. Cole: I'm glad that you're demolishing the arguments for staying because "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here."
I think that the next tactic of the war-mongers (I think I've heard it previewed somewhere) will be to argue that the actual act of withdrawal would be a "retreat-under-fire" sort of disaster that would endanger many non-fighting unit troops who normally don't face the Iraqi street, all during a chaotic rush for the exit. Basically, maybe they'll concede, yes, getting out is a good idea but--it would be a "disaster" for the Iraqis, and the troops, somehow so we should but we can't...or something like that. Now for me a little logistics snag here and there is worth it to get the US forces out of the country, but what would you say to those who always look for the latest justification to stay in Iraq and may seize on the potentially deadly exit as their newest talking point?
Taking 10Mbd offline would spike oil prices enough to push us into a recession in a big hurry. With the systemic weakness in the rest of the economy (housing sector, autos, etc, etc) and a good chance that we'll have a recession in the next year or two anyway, a really massive oil shock would be exremely bad. I think we are very vulnerable right now to a Perfect Storm if the economy gets hit with a really major shock like this and another Great Depression. And while I'd like to see us wake up and get off of oil and off of hydrocarbons and onto renawables, I don't think that a sudden earthquake is the way to do it. There's too much of a risk of human suffering and misery and political polarization which makes us look back on the Bush Administration with nostalgia.
I think its very naive to assume that people would react to an oil/energy crisis and depression with sudden clarity of purpose and optimism to fix the problems that got us into the mess. I would expect many people to simply get even more fearful and reactionary.
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