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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (123049)	1/11/2004 10:05:42 PM
From: broadstbull	Respond to of 281500

Good post

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (123049)	1/11/2004 11:32:42 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

Exactly. Everything said about WMD and then democracy in Iraq, is just PR they thought up to fool the bag-holders, tax-payers, and cannon fodder.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (123049)	1/12/2004 8:17:11 AM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 281500

Trying to assassinate Bush's Dad may well have meant Bush had it in for Saddam ever since 1993. Understandable. And one more good reason to remove Saddam, as if there weren't plenty of others.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (123049)	1/12/2004 11:13:17 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

When Saddam took the bait and invaded Kuwait Folklore that needs to be debunked, but I won't do it since it takes too much time and I don't have it right now. You'll just have to trust me on this. vbg. I suppose the reason he didn't leave Kuwait when he saw the enormous armies surrounding him is that he was still taking the bait?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (123049)	1/12/2004 6:33:05 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 281500

When Saddam took the bait and invaded Kuwait and sanctions were whacked on and oil prices rose and oil industry profits entered the golden age of the 1990s thanks to the cheapest competitor being kept off the market [an excellent strategy for maintaining profits, though of course completely illegal if such a thing was done within the USA] he was a marked man. Mq., I'm surprised you've written this. As was explained here iicas.org in excruciatingly lucid detail, Saudi Arabia's policy has been to retain the price of oil within a band that suits its foreign policy interests. It uses its influence over OPEC by turning on the oil spigot and forcing other producers to cut their production in order to keep the price from going too low. Similarly, it has the ability to turn on the spigot to "full flow" in order to keep the price from becoming too high. The goal, naturally, is to keep the price within a range that is sufficiently attractive to buyers so as to keep them from becoming too aggressive about alternative sources of energy. The strategy has worked well. As noted in the linked Morse article: Saudi Arabia has triggered its spare capacity twice in recent history, once when prices were especially low. Both cases demonstrated that the kingdom will accept those low prices so long as it suffers less than its targets do. In 1985, Saudi Arabia successfully waged a price war designed to force other oil producers to stop "free riding" on Saudi oil policy. That policy meant that those states had to cooperate with the kingdom by reining in production enough to allow Saudi Arabia to produce the minimum level that it targeted. Oil prices fell by more than half within a few months, and Saudi Arabia immediately regained the market share it had lost in the preceding four years, mainly to non-OPEC countries. In other words, Iraqi oil was subject to Saudi Arabia's excess capacity weapon. Iraqi oil has never been a threat to the Saudis nor has it been a threat to oil industry profits. So long as the Saudis can control worldwide price of oil through fine-tuning their production, no one country's oil or lack of it, including Iraq's, presents a problem. The point of the article is that the Russians have the potential to effectively challenge the Saudis, but this is neither here nor there with respect to the historical point you made.