/tag/saudi%20arabia

4 quotes tagged 'saudi arabia'

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (2008)

With oil at $200 a barrel OPEC could potentially buy Bank of America in one month's worth of production, Apple in a week, and all of General Motors in just two days. Up to now, Persian Gulf-based sovereign wealth funds have played a very healthy, stabilizing role in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis. But it is hard to imagine over time that their economic clout will not get translated politically. After all, that's what America and Britain did when they had financial clout: They used their money to advance their national interests abroad.\n\n 'So what am I saying? That we need to bankrupt all these oil producers? No, I don't want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Egypt or Syria or Russia or Indonesia. That would only cause a different kind of destabilization, born of impoverishment. Besides, the price of oil is not going to drop to zero any time soon, even if we all drive plug-in hybrids. We will need petroleum-based products - from plastics to fertilizers - for as far into the future as anyone can see. But the world will be a better place politically if we can invent plentiful renewable energy sources that eventually reduce global demand for oil to the point where even oil-rich states will have to diversify their economies and put their people to work in more innovative ways.

'If not for the West's oil money, most Gulf states would not have had the wealth that allowed them to invest so much in arms procurement and sponsor terrorist organizations,' argued the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, noting that Saudi Arabia's oil revenues make up 90-95 percent of total Saudi export earning and 70-80 percent of state revenues.

Not content to cleanse its own country of the least degree of religious freedom, the Saudi Government set out to evangelize the Islamic world, using the billions of riyals at its disposal through the religious tax -zakat - to construct hundreds of mosques and colleges and thousands of religious schools around the globe, staffed Wahhabi Imams and teachers. Eventually, Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim populations, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.

Our oil addiction is not just changing the climate system; it is also changing the international system in four fundamental ways. First and most imporant, through our energy purchases we are helping to strengthen the most inolerant, antimodern, anti-Western, anti-women's rights , and antipluralistic strain of Islam - the strain propagated by Saudi Arabia.\n\n 'Second, our oil addiction is helping to finance a reversal of the democratic trends in Russia, Latin America, and elsewhere that were set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism. I call this phenomenon 'the First Law of Petropolitics': As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down; and as the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.\n\n 'Third, our growing dependence on oil is fueling an ugly global energy scramble that brings out the worst in nations, wheter it is Washinton biting its tongue about the repression of women and the lack of religious freedom inside Saudi Arabia, or China going into partnership with a muderous African dictatorship in oil-rich Sudan.\n\n 'Finally, through our energy purchases we are funding both sides of the war on terror. That is not an exaggeration. To the extent that our energy purchases enrich conservative, Islamic governments in the Persian Gulf and to the extent that these governments share their windfalls with charities, mosques, religious schools, and individuals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait, and around the Muslim world, and to the extent that these charities, mosques, and individuals donate some of this wealth to anti-American terrorist groups, suicide bombers, and preachers, we are financing our enemies' armies as well as our own. We are financing the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps with our tax dollars, and we are indirectly financing, with our energy purchases, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.