The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The Passover bombing at Netanya and several other bushwhackings during and directly after the Arab League Summit prove, among other things, that Islamic heads of state have no ability to control the intifada that is inexorably building into a jihad. They couldn't control the violence during the few hours when you'd think they would have wanted the world's undivided attention, that is, when Saudi Prince Abdullah pitched his peace plan on TV. Yasser Arafat couldn't control Palestinian bombers or gun squads during the hours he offered a cease fire -- at least six more Israeli civilians were killed. Israel is no longer under any obligation to pretend that its adversaries are interested in talking about peace.

Israel will now mount a massive operation to enter the Palestinian towns, territories, and camps, capture the arsenals of small arms, and round up the personnel who are itching to use them. Meanwhile, Arafat will not only be isolated in the basement of his shattered compound, but he will be made personally, physically, extremely uncomfortable while he remains alive.

We've got to wonder whether the other states in the neighborhood will stand still while the Israelis systematically disarm and round-up the local jihadistas on the grand scale. Will the angry multitudes of Islam pressure their leaders into reckless action? The bottom line is that Israel possesses an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons, so a concerted gang-up by legitimate armies seems unlikely to me. It's possible, though, that Syria might be enlisted as a proxy, at least in the short-term, to begin some formal hostilities against Israel; not enough to invite an overwhelming counterstrike, but enough to create a distraction. If radical Islam possesses any weapons of mass destruction, the days ahead would be the time we might expect to see them put to use inside Israel, and most likely in the form of something carried into a strategic location by a suicide bomber, not a rocket fired from outside. How permeable are Israel's borders? It is well-defended but it is not a fortress. Would-be martyrs of many nationalities can probably enter at will. Were Sadaam Hussein were to attempt any mischief, Israel will counterstrike as harshly as possible. The US will be unable to restrain Prime Minister Sharon -- indeed, in the event it could be in America's interest to allow Israel a free hand against Iraq. But it would be in Sadaam's interest to lay low a while longer because of the following.

If Israel is successful at disarming the intifada / jihad and taking its most active players into custody, then it is conceivable to me that the Saudis will then be pressured into finally using their oil weapon against the US -- withholding the roughly 18 percent of our total oil imports. Unless they are in a coma, US strategists must have been anticipating just such a hairy situation in which America's addictive dependence on Arabian oil would be cut off. Lately there has been an idea floated in such establishment forums as The New York Times that Russia is ready to pick up the oil export slack when our relations with Saudi Arabia crap out. Personally, it seems rather insane to me that the US would prefer to be dependent on a nation with whom, until a few years ago, we were locked in a half-century life-or-death power struggle.
Tacticians at the Pentagon, State Department, and NSC must realize that sooner or later the US will have to go through an oil supply wringer. I don't believe the line that says that the Saudis would never give up the revenue they enjoy from us. They can probably make up much of it with sales to China in the immediate future. And anyway, the jihad sentiment may simply force them to stop selling us oil, whether the princes and sheiks like it or not. If they didn't talk about this in the back rooms of the Arab League summit, then these guys are truly ninnies.

The American public will probably flip out if we suffer oil market disruptions on the order of what happened in 1973. We are more vulnerable by orders of magnitude than we were then, and especially more car-dependent. The parts of the nation most infatuated with the suburban lifestyle will get creamed economically by a cutoff of Arabian oil. It happens that these places are the most heavily Republican, too. So much for self-satisfied complacency with the status quo. Imagine Houston and Atlanta without cheap air-conditioning, let alone gas for the SUV.

The next question, of course, is what might we do about it? I doubt that even the craziest three-star cowboy general in the US armed forces believes that we could defend the surface infrastructure of the Arabian oil fields, so forget about occupying that sand dune. We'll probably have to lump it, limp along, see how we enjoy our new dependence on Vladimir Putin, and scheme to get our mitts on the oil around the Caspian Sea -- a project which, I hasten to add, we will never succeed at over the long term, since this is some of the most contested real estate in the world, and the contestants are all muslims of one sort or another.

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