BIKE: Oil: Preaching to the Choir

[Patrick Goetz]

OK, I'll expend a second post today reposting an editorial from the New 
York Times:

http://nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01sat2.html

Editorial: The Saudi Syndrome
January 1, 2005

The next time you consider the purchase of a family car
that matches satisfying heft with infinitesimal mileage per
gallon, you might want to think about where some of that
gas money will ultimately be going. Part of the price of
every extra gallon helps, albeit indirectly, to finance
mosques and religious schools all over the world that
spread a fanatical variant of Islam that sees legitimacy in
terrorist attacks. This financing, amounting to billions of
dollars a year, comes from the government and private
charities of Saudi Arabia, a country that is now taking in
roughly $80 billion a year from oil exports.

Saudi Arabia is the source of only 15 percent of America's
imported oil. But since oil is an interchangeable commodity
in world markets, every barrel America imports, even if it
comes from Venezuela, Nigeria or Mexico, helps push up the
prices received by Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil
exporter. America now imports well over half of the oil it
consumes, and more than half of United States consumption
is in the form of motor vehicle fuels. Thanks to America's
gas guzzlers, China's booming factories and other thirsty
consuming nations, this has been an extremely profitable
year for oil exporting countries. Overall global demand is
at record levels, and OPEC's production recently reached
its highest since 1979. Even with the latest slippage in
oil prices, Saudi Arabia's low production costs allow it to
reap a hefty markup on every barrel sold.

The Saudi government, itself under assault from Al Qaeda,
is not in the business of directly financing terrorism, and
since 9/11 it has responded to American pressure to control
the flow of charitable funds to active terrorist groups.
But what it still pays for, and what the religious
charities its citizens are obliged to contribute to pay
for, is a worldwide network of mosques, schools and Islamic
centers that proselytize the belligerent and intolerant
Wahhabi variant of Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia.
As a result of this oil-financed largess, the teachings of
more tolerant and humane Muslim leaders are losing ground
in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan. Wahhabi mosques
that glorify armed jihad have also made alarming gains
among the Muslim populations of Europe and the United
States.

For years, Saudi Arabian oil money bankrolled the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan and provided financial support to
Pakistan's government. It was Saudi aid that allowed
Pakistan to defy international sanctions imposed over its
nuclear bomb testing. Without Saudi money there is some
question whether chronically impoverished Pakistan could
have ever afforded to develop nuclear weapons and the
crucial bomb-related technologies that its scientists
passed on to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other
countries as well.

There is no sinister Saudi conspiracy at work here. This is
just what anyone should expect to happen when mind-boggling
sums of oil money flow into an absolute monarchy that bases
its legitimacy on puritanical militant Islam and offers no
pretense of political accountability or transparent
accounting. The more copiously that oil money flows, the
less pressure a divided Saudi royal family feels to
undertake the kind of difficult political and economic
reforms that might conceivably break the nexus between oil
and terror.

The Saudi syndrome is not the only reason Americans need to
get much more serious about energy conservation. But it is
a powerfully compelling one.