Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
The oil rags are soaked in many things, including blood. So how can men in key positions create wealth from nothing?
Ask Prince Bandar, who has just thrown his toys out of the pram, screaming that because of dithering over Syria and Iran, he now wants Saudi Arabia to ‘cut off’ diplomatic relations with the US…
OIL AND BANDAR BIN SULTAN
Saudi histrionics and princely rage didn’t resolve the US to go bomb Syria, but certainly did work on France, where government-friendly media wheeled out the Syria bombing maps and models for days and days after the US had already cowed and bowed to Russian reason, but Saudi royals can (almost) always count on high oil prices.
Saudi oil revenues accounting for 92% of government income were around $330 billion in 2012 according to the US EIA. As we know, the word “government” in Saudi Arabia means the royal clique and the 4800 princes dreaming of their 48-72 virgins to come in the Afterlife.
For the past 10 years oil is kept high by Wall Street’s mightiest (we mean Goldman Sachs) and the so-called market maker banks with the fattest fingers in the oil market pie – JP Morgan, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale. When oil prices are high Saudi Arabia can count on a hearing.
So if oil prices fall this is very bad news for Saudi fantasy schemes to dominate the Sunni Muslim world. And much further afield – inch’allah – according to the antique plans hatched by US president Eisenhower, his vice president Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John F. Dulles, and other rightly named “players” following the 1957 state visit of King Saud to Washington.
Brother of Dulles, Allen Welsh Dulles, then head of the CIA had cooked up simply the wackiest plot anybody could imagine. King Saud, with US firepower, was to become the Islamic Pope ruling all Muslim lands but Saud turned down the plan. He only wanted to rule all of the Middle East. As I cover in another story ( http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article42271.html ) the Dulles team of great strategists wanted to find an Islamic Billy Graham to move things along.
The Islamic Pope idea, even if wacky, likely still circulates in the small head of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and a few of his US friends, some of them rather influential, but recent weeks have tested the great Saudi plan for an all-new Muslim Caliphate with a Saudi king playing Islamic pope. Oil prices have to stay high to help the strange plan caressed by Saudi Dr Strangelove aka Bandar bin Sultan.
Some investigative journalists like Glenn Greenwald say that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was or still is more than somewhat friendly with outright extremists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Former NATO supreme chief General Wesley Clark, in an October 2007 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco described the aspirations of a “coup” being plotted by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and what he said were “a half dozen other collaborators from the Project for the New American Century” in late September 2001, just weeks after 9/11
They had said ”We are going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years – we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
TOAST WITHOUT HIGH OIL PRICES
Paying for all this craziness isn’t easy without Saudi revenues swollen by overpriced oil, in fact without it the plan is toast for war-crazy US neocon dreamers and their Saudi friends. Maybe the plan is also toast with high oil prices – because creating a Saudi Islamic pope to rule his war-made Caliphate stretching all across the Sunni Muslim majority countries of the region will surely and certainly need nuclear weapons.
Without overpriced oil, paying for the war is going to be a lot more than the US or downsized Little France can afford. Even supplying a few aged airborne refuelling planes to Friendly France, to refuel its fighter planes for Mali war operations – fighting Saudi-paid Islamic militants – the US had demanded payment of $50 000-per-hour for each KC135 tanker plane. Otherwise no airborne refuelling. John Kerry backed off when the price tag was revealed in the French press.
On October 21 however, a strange thing happened – the New York Nymex market price for oil actually dipped below $100 a barrel. For Bandar and his Islamic boy soldiers in Syria shooting up the local populace this is really bad news. Bandar’s friends, most notably a Jewish-owned, Israeli-friendly and run Goldman Sachs and the bankster crowd which controls and fixes oil prices round the clock will have to act if prices slip into those dismal double-digit numbers. Bandar needs triple-digit priced oil!
When oil prices are high enough all kinds of persons, like Mr B. Obama will be anxious to hear what Bandar wants – and can pay for. When the oil price drops they care less about him than they care about Paul Anka recordings from the 78 rpm bakelite disk era. If the oil price drops enough, they won’t answer his phone call, even on their clunky presidential Blackberry.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Four-Star General and CENTCOM commander John Abizaid, key war architect John Bolton, Bush-era speechwriter David Frum, Senator John McCain, former Fed boss Alan Greenspan and many others have said the Iraq war was about oil.
They didn’t add the most important bit. Keeping oil prices high. Al Qaeda is another US-Saudi invention that only works wonders if oil prices stay high.
When oil prices drop to their right level, which is maybe $75 a barrel, Bandar the Islamic Dr Strangelove’s wacky plan for a Saudi “pope” ruling all of the Middle East, and beyond, can be placed straight back in the trash can from which it came from.
READ MORE SAUDI NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Saudi Files