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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (119137)	11/12/2003 11:58:19 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi frankw1900; Re: "A possibility, as I see it is that at some point, in a Saudi version of MAD, someone will torch the oil fields (or try to) and an alliance of Gulf States, Iraq, the US, and Shiites from the oil field area will take over the oil fields and the flow of money to the Wahabbists will stop." This is the same dreamy fantasy of easy oil production that led Bush into Iraq. You might consider the simple and obvious fact that oil production is the largest employer of the population of Saudi Arabia, and that a lot of the population is therefore concentrated near various oil facilities. And, you guessed it, if we try to pump oil out of Saudi Arabia, the local population will shoot the crapola out of us and sabotage the oil industry. -- Carl P.S. And no, I'm not guessing.

To: frankw1900 who wrote (119137)	11/13/2003 2:57:44 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<an alliance of Gulf States, Iraq, the US, and Shiites from the oil field area will take over the oil fields> Your unstated assumptions: 1. The U.S. Army is a Universal Tool that can do anything, fix any problem. 2. The U.S. has the ability to win a guerrila war against a hostile Islamist-led population. Children believe things will happen because they want it to happen. This is called Magical Thinking. It's what you're doing. Here is the only way we can hold any Middle East oil field: 1. conquer it, using only our own soldiers. 2. expel the entire native population. 3. create a wide free-fire zone on all borders of our new colony. 4. keep all nuclear weapons permanently out of the hands of all muslim nations. If they get nukes, and we are occupying their homeland, they will use them against us, sooner or later, and keep using them until we leave. The only one of these that is plausible is #1. Ethnic cleansing has not been done by the U.S. government since we finished killing our Native Americans, we have become too civilized to do it any more, so #2 and #3 aren't an option. We've already failed at #4. This alone makes the whole project un-feasible. Even taking seriously about occupying the Saudi oil fields, will prompt the Saudis to get nukes, as a deterrent. You're a dreamer.