TIME Magazine: Do We Need The Saudis?

Here is the link to very interesting article in TIME magazine (4 pages--click "More" at the bottom of each page).


http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,331980-4,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,331980-1,00.html


If you clicked on the other link it took you to page 4 instead of page 1.

"Billions of dollars from wealthy Saudis have funded anti-American and anti-Israel terrorist groups and helped establish radical schools worldwide that foment Islamic militancy, including the madrasahs in Pakistan that produced the Taliban. Americans hardly expect that kind of treatment from their worst enemies—let alone their oldest strategic partner in the Arab world, which has relied on U.S. soldiers for more than a decade to protect it against Iraq's Saddam Hussein..."


"They need us more than we need them," says a U.S. diplomat in the region. "It's not a country that can defend its interests without a formidable ally. And the Saudis don't have an alternative to us."


We should tell them to get their act together, or get our troops out of there. We do not need to support a regime that supports our enemies.


We also need to develop alternative energy sources to end our dependence on other countries for good.

The only problem with that may be that if the House of Saud falls to the common people of Saudi Arabia, the new government will undoubtedly be far more anti-US than the current regime. After all, they have been indoctrinated in Wahhabism for quite some time now, and are also poorer than they used to be.

The idea that the Saudis need us more than we need them is preposterous.


The Saudis effectively set the price of oil. They can overproduce and drive the price so low that it is not profitable for more than a few countries to also produce oil. This is the nature of our "dependency" on foriegn oil (it has nothing to do with how much physical oil we import formthe middle east or produce domestically).


As long as the Saudis can do this, the whole world is "dependent" on them. If we want to be able to ignore the Saudis we need to 1) pump up the production in the former Soviet Union which means giving Russian a large path to tread on (whcih we have not done, prefering, for example, to push a possibly unprofitable pipeline project for Caspian Sea oil rather than allow the Russian to control it), 2) focus and invest in non-oil resources (again, this has been dismal).


Regards,


Paul Talbot