King Fahd rarely speaks. He is 82 years old and suffered a severe stroke in late 1995 that has left him incapacitated ever since.
Many presidents, kings, and emperors have lacked capacity, of course. Many have been mentally impaired, delusional, unreasonable or merely profoundly stupid. The world would not be a worse place if they spoke less often...but Fahd's condition is the sort that would normally disqualify even a Republican from elective office.
"The King," reports an article by Seymour Hersch in The New Yorker, "with round-the-clock medical treatment, is able to sit in a chair and open his eyes, but is usually unable to recognize even his oldest friends."
Fahd is being kept alive and on the throne so that Prince Abdullah does not get the job. There is a delicate balance in Saudi Arabia...between oil revenue and Muslim fundamentalism. And Abdullah, 75, is a man with fundamentalist tendencies who doesn't mind throwing his weight around. The royal family is hoping that Fahd can continue breathing until Abdullah is out of the way.
We turn our eyes towards the desert this morning, dear reader. We recall that it was WWI that brought down the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs - the three great royal families of Europe. We have a hunch that the war on terrorism will bring down the house of Saud.
The fall of the European dynasties left an empty space - an opening for terrorists in Russia and Germany. The Bolsheviks quickly moved into the void left by the Tsar in Russia. And Hitler's Nazis soon squatted the vacant lodgings left by the Kaiser in Germany. Both succeeded by being more ruthless and single-minded than their opponents...murdering and bullying the social democrats out of the way.
If something similar were to happen in Saudi Arabia, no matter what befalls him personally, Osama bin Laden's trap will have served its purpose.
Even small, inept groups of terrorists can have huge, long-lasting effects on the world. Thirty years before the Bolsheviks, Russian terrorists killed Tsar Alexander II, in 1881. Alexander II was a reformer. It was he who had freed the serfs. Yet, the terrorists who tossed the bomb "got what they wanted," writes Gary North, "the ruthless oppression of Alexander III. He stamped out terrorist groups with a vengeance. Six years later, there was an attempt on his life. The government hanged the six conspirators. One of them was Lenin's older brother. This led to the overthrow of Czarist Russia thirty years later. The tactic worked. It just took time."
Saudi Arabia, writes Christopher Byron in an MSNBC article, "teeters at the edge of economic and political chaos, imperiling the economic and geopolitical interests of not just the U.S., but of the entire world."
"Saudi Arabia, which is roughly one-fifth the size of the U.S., sits atop 25% of all known oil reserves on Earth," Byron explains. "It is currently pumping roughly 9.2 million barrels of crude per day, which account for about 10% of all oil consumed on the planet every day.
"It isn't an overstatement to say that the economic fate of the world revolves around the reliable and unimpeded flow of oil from the fields of Saudi Arabia. Indeed, that has been the case for more than 40 years."
If Saudi oil were suddenly taken off the world market, the world price of oil would soar - probably to $100 a barrel or more. The entire world economy - already barely growing - would be struck with a long, deep recession.
And it wouldn't be difficult for terrorists to shut off Saudi oil. Gary North cites a confidential study showing just how remarkably vulnerable the Saudi oilfields are. Yet, instead of going after an easy target close to home...the terrorists of September 11 chose a harder one far away. Why? Probably because some of the oil revenue ends up in the terrorists' hands.
There are about 6,000 Saudi princes, scattered all over the world, who have a keen interest in making sure the oil revenues continue to flow. Over the years, they've become as expert as the U.S. Corps of Engineers at diverting little streams of income in their directions. Thus do their corrupt viaducts of cash transport billions and billions of dollars worth of oil revenue flow out of the Saudi sands to various fancy apartments in L.A., Mayfair, Manhattan and the avenue Foch...as well as to caves in Afghanistan...
Abdullah could be the Alexander II of Saudi Arabia, threatening reform. But things may have already gone too far for reform. Revolution is in the air.
Living standards in the kingdom are going down. Per capital GDP peaked out at $28,600 in 1981. Today, the figure is less than $7,000.
Much of the reason for this remarkable decline is a huge increase in population. Most of the country is barren, but its people are among the most fertile on earth. "Nearly half the country's population is younger than 15," reports Christopher Byron. "Public health services are poor, with the result that the nation's infant mortality rate of 51 deaths per 1,000 live births is not much better than Iraq's - 60 per 1,000 - and close to five times that of Kuwait."
According to a NY Times report, continues Byron, "all public high schools in Saudi Arabia teach mandatory classes in anti-Christian, anti-Western religious fundamentalism, with nearly 30% of all class time devoted to such instruction."
"It is compulsory for the Muslims to be loyal to each other," the Times' piece quotes a textbook, "and consider the infidels their enemy."
"Not surprisingly," Byron concludes, "the country has become a breeding ground for terrorists. An estimated 50,000 boys leave high school every year only to find it impossible to land jobs. They become easy recruits for Osama bin Laden's Saudi-dominated al-Qaida network."
Sooner, rather than later, the Tsar of Arabie will sink into the sand. Then, many of these idealists may make their way back to the Saudi sands from whence they came and find themselves in control of much of the world's oil. Plus, they would come into possession of what Byron calls "a huge arsenal of some of the most advanced military weaponry in the world..."
"In the years since Desert Storm," Byron explains, "Washington and its NATO allies have armed Saudi Arabia with a staggering array of ultra-advanced weaponry," including hundreds of fighter planes and helicopters... and thousands of tanks, missiles and other hardware.
But that is a story for another day...
Your correspondent...
Bill Bonner
Original file name: Tsar of Arabie - converted on Thursday, 20 December 2001, 03:31
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