Subject: Oil and War, Again...

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 9 Sep 1996 11:07:34 -0400

>From  The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday Sept 8, 1996...

AMERICA'S DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL IS GROWING

By Bob Fernandez

...So dependent is the United States on foreign oil that it is often
willing to use its military might, as it did last week, to forstall
any perceived threat to the flow...

This year, 48% of the oil consumed in the United States will be imported--
which is about the same level as the time of the oil crisis in 1979--and
by the year 2000 the foreign share is expected to be 55%. Oil industry
experts say the nation has diversified its oil sources in the past decade
by buying from countries outside the OPEC oil cartel; they say there is
little chance of an oil crisis.

But the trends show that the nation will be more urgently aware of oil
interests in the coming years...

"We'll never escape the Middle East," says energy analyst Mary Novak
with the Wefa Group in Eddystone. "We're in a no-win situation."

The two missile attacks in southern Iraq last week underscored the fact that
the nation is again addicted to Persian Gulf oil. Defense Secretary William 
Perry conceded that the cruise missile attacks were justified by the "clear
and present danger" to the flow of Arabian oil posed by the regime of
Saddam Hussein.

Initially, the Clinton administration cited Hussein's attacks on rebellious
Kurds in northern Iraq as justification for intervention. In his nationwide
address Tuesday, President Clinton pointed out that the United States had
warned Hussein of severe consequences if he attacked Kurds in the northern
city of Irbil....

It was left to Perry, in an unusually candid admission, to specify oil as
the primary motivation: "Our national interests are not tied to which party
prevails in this conflict in northern Iraq. But we do have vital national
security interests in maintaining security and stability in the region...
and protection of the flow of oil."

It was significant the the United States did not attack Northern Iraq, where
Iraq troops were massed against the Kurds. The cruise missiles struck in the
south, near the strategic oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Despite America's diversification of oil sources, it is believed that a
collapse of oil shipments from Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer,
would severly harm the nation's economy with an oil-price spike...

In the last several years, the nation's consumption of oil has increased
by about 1 million barrels a day...

Nick

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From: [email-masked] (John Shotton)
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 09:56:59 +0000

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Nick Pine) wrote:

big snip

> Nick

Harm which nations economy, USA's or Saudi Arabia's?

I suspect that although it may harm the USA economy, it would destroy the
Saudi economy.

>From  what I read the Gulf states are none too flush with cash these days,
and have populations which have come to have high expectations. Witness
the inability of OPEC to enforce the quota system to keep prices high,
i.e. each country sells more than its quota to try and get more income.

-- 
John Shotton