ANALYSIS: Seize Saudi Arabia before Iraq?
By STEVE SAILER
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 7 -- Many American pundits and politicians have called for
expanding the war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan, to include conquering
other Islamic regimes and remaking them into modern capitalist democracies.
Yet, few have detailed what would be required to make feasible the long-term
American hegemony over the Middle East that they pine for.

Imperialism is a serious business requiring a serious foundation. If these
plans to conquer and rebuild Iraq and other rogues states, however, are not
to prove wholly quixotic, it may well be that the U.S. would have to first
lay the groundwork by seizing control of Saudi Arabia and its oil wealth. If
America is not willing to take that step, then it should reassess just how
committed it is to broadening the war and afterwards overseeing the region.

Many on the Right and the Center have called for invading other countries
besides Afghanistan. Back on Sept. 13, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz spoke of "ending states who sponsor terrorism."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has repeatedly beaten the drums for
expanding the war. In its Oct. 6 edition, British historian Paul Johnson
(author of "Modern Times") came up with a half dozen countries that might
need some conquering. "America and its allies may find themselves,
temporarily at least, not just occupying with troops but administering
obdurate terrorist states. These may eventually include not only Afghanistan
but Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Iran and Syria."

The focus of the hawks, however, has largely narrowed to Saddam Hussein's
Iraq.

Unfortunately, there has been little realistic discussion of what might be
the necessary preliminary steps for conquering Iraq.

That country, so flat and empty in the South, is of course ideal for a
high-speed attack by what's left of America's main battle tank divisions.
Yet, while Iraq's Army has never fully recovered from its defeat in the Gulf
War, it is still an order of magnitude larger than the Taliban's. The task of
storming Saddam's capital of Baghdad is hardly a trivial matter.

Leading war historian John Keegan has said, "Capital cities, with their maze
of streets, dense complexes of stoutly constructed public buildings,
labyrinths of sewers, tunnels and underground communications, storehouses of
fuel and food, are military positions as strong as any an army can construct
for the defense of frontiers."

The most fundamental requirement for the assault would be securing a base in
a neighboring country from which to launch a land invasion of Iraq. There is
an old saying in military circles: "Armchair generals study strategy and
tactics, real generals study logistics."

In Afghanistan, America's lack of nearby land bases kept its weekly number of
air sorties at levels that were seen daily during the Gulf War of 1991 or the
bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999. Much of the moaning about the "lack of
progress" during the first six weeksof the war on the Taliban simply
reflected America's weak logistical position in that remote region. In
contrast, in the Gulf War, the U.S. used a leisurely five and half months to
build up a lavishly armed half million soldier army in Saudi Arabia before
attempting to retake Kuwait.

Air power alone is no more likely to bring Iraq to unconditional surrender
than it did during Desert Storm. Ground forces are necessary to root out
enemy troops and occupy their land.

Further, compared to Afghanistan, there is little armed resistance in central
Iraq. Saddam's vicious network of informers and secret policemen are much
more effective the Taliban at discouraging the kind of defections that
undermined the Afghan regime. So, as in 1991, a full scale invasion seems
required.

How would the U.S. get into Iraq today? Iraq's coastline is tiny (less than
40 miles long) and thus easy to fortify. The U.S. considered a Marine landing
in 1991, but rejected it as too risky.

Helicopters could move lightly armed troops into Iraq, but not the kind of
heavy armored divisions that cut the Iraqi frontline troops to shreds in 1991.

So, that leaves a land invasion.

While Saddam is hated by most of his neighbors, few are terribly trusting
friends of the U.S.

Both Iran and Syria have long seen themselves as enemies of America. Their
regimes would almost certainly assume that to allow the U.S. to marshal an
enormous army on their territories would be to sign their own death warrants.

Jordan, which has a short border with Iraq, has long been something of an
American ally (although it sided with Saddam during the Gulf War), but the
U.S. has been careful to not ask all that much of it.

Kuwait is, by Arab standards, friendly toward the nation that liberated it a
decade ago. But it has only 150 miles of border with Iraq, providing little
room for the war of maneuver that America's armored divisions would want to
fight. Further, it clearly prefers its lucrative status quo to another war.

Then there is Turkey, which has a little over 200 miles of border with Iraq,
but all in the mountainous north. Tanks are much more vulnerable on mountain
roads that can be mined or defended by small units with anti-tank weapons. In
contrast, M1A1 tanks have little to fear in the open desert where they can
simply roar around defenders at 50 miles per hour, as they did during Desert
Storm's famous "Left Hook" around Iraqi troops dug-in on the featureless
wasteland that is Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia.

Turkey is formally an American ally, committed by Article Five of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization to come to America's aid in the fight against
Osama bin Laden. Indeed, it has publicly announced it will be sending a few
score troops to Afghanistan. During Desert Storm, the U.S. was allowed to use
its Incirlik airbase within Turkey.

The diplomatic questions involving Turkey, however, are inordinately complex.
Many Turks believe they were cheated out of the Northern Iraqi oil-producing
region of Mosul in the carving up of the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire after
WWI. The Turkish Prime Minister briefly raised the question of taking back
Northern Iraq in 1995.

Would Turkey go along with an American invasion of Iraq? Possibly, but its
price might be high. For example, it might want the whole of Northern Iraq.

What Turkey did not want in 1991 and does not want in 2001 is
self-determination within Iraq.

That's because, besides the Iraqi Arabs and the Turks, there is one more
nation that believes itself entitled to the mountains and oil fields of
Northern Iraq: the stateless Kurds. There are some 22 million Kurds, most
living in the mountains near Turkey's borders with Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
They are often said to be the largest ethnic group in the world without their
own state, although that seems debatable. (African-Americans, for example,
are more numerous, and India is full of larger ethnic groups).

Turkey definitely does not want an oil-rich Kurdish state with its own army
on Turkey's southeastern border. The Kurdish rebellion against Turkey in the
last decade cost 37,000 lives, according to the Turkish government.

Would the Kurds, who have known an uncertain and shifting degree of autonomy
within Iraq since the Gulf War, welcome or attack invaders coming from
Turkey? It's hard to say. Kurdish politics is volatile, with Kurdish factions
occasionally aligning with Iraq, Turkey, or Iran in order to wage war against
other Kurdish parties.

Still, it could well be that to bring Turkey into the war, the U.S. would
have to betray the Kurds. America has largely been untouched by Kurdish
terrorism, but selling out the Kurds could make another dangerous enemy.

So, there is only one ideal launching pad for an invasion of Iraq. It's the
same one as in 1991: Saudi Arabia.

To protect that kingdom from Iraq, we keep 5,000 troops there. Plus, we have
pre-established bases in Saudi Arabia ready to accommodate far more soldiers.

There is only one little problem. Saudi Arabia would almost certainly refuse
America permission to use its soil to launch an invasion, just as the royal
family has not allowed the U.S. Air Force to attack Afghanistan from U.S.
airfields in the kingdom. (The Saudis were one of only three countries to
recognize the Taliban regime.)

The Gulf Arabs have many reasons to prefer the current accomodation to war
with Iraq. When Saddam grabbed Kuwait in 1990, the Saud family, well aware
that their princes are trained more for lives of luxury than military
leadership, initially assumed it would pay off Saddam rather than fight.

Further, the Saudis and other Sunni Muslim Gulf Arabs still fear that the
collapse of central government in Iraq could unleash chaos that could sweep
them away too. Just as the Turks dread an independent Kurdistan growing out
of the ruins of Iraq, the Sunnis fear a Shi'ite state aligned with Iran
emerging in the oilfields of Southern Iraq.

Muhammad Bin-Rashid al-Maktum, the defense minister of the United Arab
Emirates warned in 2000, "The brothers in Kuwait should understand that they
would be facing very serious issues if Iraq is partitioned, for this
situation would lead to instability in the region, especially in Kuwait." He
added, "All of us in the Gulf region should reject such a trend. … It is in
the interest of Kuwait and in our interest to keep Iraq united."

Besides, the strongly Islamic Crown Prince Abdullah, the effective ruler of
the kingdom since King Fahd's stroke, simply does not like America very much.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his being dependent on America's military
might to defend his vast oil riches, he has been distancing his regime from
Washington. He seems to fear Saddam less than his own subjects, whose Islamic
fervor has grown as their per capita income has plummeted.

Finally, the Saudis likely consider it a bad precedent for America to seize
and govern and occupy an Arab oil state. After all, Iraq is more difficult to
conquer, harder to rule (it endured 22 revolutions or coups from 1920 to
1979), and less endowed with oil than Saudi Arabia itself.

America's respect for the property rights of the Gulf Arabs, who never knew
their was oil beneath their feet until the American oil companies arrived,
must seem quite suspicious to the Arab mind. Respect for other people's
possessions is not a quality celebrated by desert nomads, such as the founder
of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud. The 19th Century German explorer Heinrich Barth
aptly noted that the three traditional qualities of the Arab are valor,
hospitality, and thievishness.

Building democracy in Iraq would be an expensive and lengthy process, if it
is at all possible. Indeed, if the U.S. truly wants to rebuild the Middle
East along more satisfactory lines, the key is not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia,
and its attendant principalities such as the Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait.

Since Saudi Arabia is highly unlikely to volunteer itself as the base for the
invasion of Iraq, for America to conquer Iraq without profligate loss of
lives, the U.S. must first reduce Saudi Arabia to a puppet regime, either
through credible threats of war or through actual conquest.

A coup attempt against the Saud family or a terrorist attack on the Saudi oil
fields would provide America ample pretext for seizing the oil fields to
secure them from threats. And then, why give them back?

A puppet ruler for the oil regions might be found internally, such as Prince
Bandar, the wily and genial Saudi ambassador to Washington. Or a reliable
friend could be imported, such as the Sultan of Oman. The holy cities of
Mecca and Medina, far from the oil, could be left to the Saud family, or
handed back to Jordan's Hashemite dynasty, which ruled Mecca before being
driven out by Ibn Saud.

Assuming a long run price of $25 per barrel, the value of oil reserves in the
Arab Gulf states (not even including Iraq) is, speaking very roughly, at
least ten trillion dollars. (Iraq has a few trillion more.) That would take
something like a century to extract, providing an annual eleven or twelve
digit cash flow.

The vast oil wealth of the Gulf is currently a nuisance to the U.S. that
could be turned into an asset. The Gulf Arabs use their petrodollars to fund
mullahs around the world who preach the puritanical Wahabbi Islamic sect.
These preachers provide the religious basis for Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban, and are helping to spread Islamic fundamentalism among Muslims
everywhere. Saudis also pay protection money to bin Laden on the general
understanding that he use it to kill Americans rather than themselves.

Finally, the extravagant wealth and lurid corruption of the Gulf Arab elites
inflame resentment throughout the mostly impoverished Arab world. Because the
Gulf Arab rulers are too enfeebled by luxury to inculcate in their sons the
martial virtues necessary to defend themselves, the U.S. has had to take on
the job of providing them with police protection from stick-up artists like
Saddam. Illogical as it may be, poor Arabs blame America for the sins of
their own rulers.

Without oil money to invest in religious and political extremism and waste on
European chateaus, however, the Arab Middle East would be little more than
another violent and dysfunctional backwater like sub-Saharan Africa, which
the West finds easy to ignore.

Few of the grandiose plans for conquest and revitalization envisioned by new
American imperialists are likely to come to fruition, however, if Middle
Easterners can plausibly assume that U.S. voters will quickly tire of taking
up the new White Man's (or, perhaps, Multicultural Person's) Burden. Empires
quickly fall when the ruled sense that the rulers are eventually going to
pack up and go home.

The key to preserving a new American hegemony in the Arab lands would be to
make it a paying proposition. That's how the British held on to their Indian
empire for two centuries. They forced their Indian subjects to pay out of
their own pockets for the upkeep of the Indian Army that held them in
subjugation.

Similarly, Arab oil money could pay, say, $40 billion annually for American
military expenses in Arab lands. A similar amount would be left over for the
U.S. to dole out to Arabs each year. Some could go to productive investments
to lift poor Arabs out of misery. Money could also go to revamp and modernize
Islamic culture (such as by educating women), just as the Saudis had
subsidized their Wahabbi brand of Islam, turning it into a global pest.
Finally, some funds would go, in the time-honored Middle Eastern manner, as
outright bribes to preserve the peace.

The average Arab might well be better off under this scheme than the current
one in which Saddam, the multitudinous descendents of Ibn Saud, miscellaneous
Gulf princelings, and various cronies spend tens of billions on palaces and
the like.

By ruling the Gulf, the U.S. could also play a significant role in
manipulating the world price of oil, acting as a sort of Federal Reserve for
the global economy. When a major recession threatened, such as now, it could
jumpstart the world economy by cutting the price of oil to $6 per gallon.
When it needed to make money to fund Middle Eastern ventures, it could raise
the price during booms to, say, $30 per barrel.

Obviously, there are problems with such an audacious yet morally dubious
scheme. Would the U.S. voters want America to do what it blocked Saddam from
doing a decade ago?

If the U.S. doesn't have the stomach to to be ruthless enough to rule a
Middle Eastern empire, then perhaps it should try not to acquire one. At the
very least, before America starts down the path of conquering nations not
directly implicated in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it should publicly
discuss the long run implications.

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