Amsterdan

Why al Qaida need not come here

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are given to a frequent mantra that if we don’t fight them “over there” in Iraq, the Islamic terrorists will come to America and fight us here. There are at least a dozen logic flaws, misunderstandings of history, culture and geography and several cruel ironies bundled into this statement. But none of them is the real reason why this is a flawed foundation for the initial action in Iraq.

The simple fact is that - except for an occasional terrorist plot in the U.S. for PR purposes - al Qaida doesn’t need to bring the fight to our shores, for the same reason that if I worked in a supermarket, I would not choose to walk across town to buy milk at a 7-11.

Iraq and Afghanistan are the supermarkets of terrorism – the latter courtesy of the Taliban and the former courtesy of the Wolfowitzian neocons. Working in those local terrorism supermarkets, al Qaida can not only recruit more boxboys among the regional population and readily attack US and NATO forces sent to the region, but they have access to the Achilles heel of the West: cheap oil.

By accelerating civil disorder and economic conflagration in Iraq and soon in Saudi Arabia, al Qaida is setting the stage to disrupt oil supplies and drive up the price of crude in dramatic measure.

We saw the world price of crude oil double in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War OPEC Oil Embargo. On October 19, 1973, the official price of Saudi Light was roughly $5 a barrel; within a few weeks it jumped to $12 a barrel. It rose dramatically again following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 from about $15 a barrel to nearly $40 a barrel ($70 in 2006 prices) at the height of the Iraq-Iran War in 1981.

World oil was about $25 a barrel on September 11, 2001. Today it fluctuates between $60 and $80. Doubling, tripling, as a consequence of four planes crashing.

Following an eventual withdrawal of US Forces from Iraq, should the region explode as predicted, the disruption could easily double or triple the price of oil again, this time to $160 or even $250 a barrel. At that point no Western economy can absorb the increase without massive economic and social disruption. Daily life as we know it will change drastically. The resultant depression will do to the US, European and Japanese economies what 9/11 did not: bring them to their knees.

However incidental or complicit al Qaida’s role in this, its initial aims will have been realized. There will be celebration in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And no al Qaida member need have crossed the US-Mexican border to achieve it.

Labels: al Qaida, Bush, Cheney, Iraq, oil, Saudi Arabia

posted by DanZ @ 6:12 PM