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M E R I D I A N M A G A Z I N E

The Terrorist Attacks We Paid For
by Jack Anderson

There is an irony in this war that is being waged against us, and it is that we paid for it.

It is OPEC money that has been going to the Taliban and other terrorist groups. Saudi Arabia has probably been the principal financial backer of the Taliban.

As reported in the past, the first objective of terrorist attacks on the United States was to overthrow the free enterprise system. The ultimate objective of the masterminds behind the planning was to substitute a system of cartels.

The Arab oil sheikdoms have already achieved the impossible through the oil cartel which has systematically looted the great industrial powers. This is the first time in human history that the weak nations of the earth have collected booty from the powerful ones. How did this upside down, inside-out, arrangement come about? It’s a story that should be told at this time because the stakes are enormously high.

If the terror attacks had succeeded in destroying the free enterprise system, the United States would be displaced as the world’s economic leader by a coalition of Arab states. I suggest that we, too, should set goals in the more likely event that we will win. And the first goal ought to be the destructionnay, the demolition, of the oil cartel.

There is no respectable reason for the Arab oil domination that took full shape undeterred during Richard Nixon’s presidency. There was no causal chain unwinding out of nature’s limits, or the imperatives of economics, or the attritions of history, or even the whorl of conspiracy, which could account for the over-the-moon leap in oil prices. There was no pattern of necessity at all but rather a jumble of politicians’ blunders, negligences and timidities.

Whether or not the oil-endowed nations were getting less than they deserved for oil, they ardently believed that to be the case. During the 1950's and 60's, the isolated efforts of individual states to enforce their will on the multi-national oil industry had failed repeatedly because of too much oil in too many hands. Each failure raised anew the question that led to the spawning of OPEC: why don’t the oil-blessed states pack together to reduce production, to create a scarcity that would enable extortion and prevent the oil industry from playing off one of them against the other? This is exactly what they proceeded to do after Henry Kissinger gave the signal at a private meeting with the then Shah of Iran.

Then President Nixon, accompanied by Kissinger stopped in Tehran on the way home from a summit meeting in Moscow. They asked the Shah to defend American interests in the Persian Gulf at a time when the United States was preoccupied with Vietnam. The Shah agreed to accept this responsibility, provided that he had access to the weapons that he thought he needed. They agreed to give him a blank check; he could have anything he needed. Then the question came up of who should pay for them; The Shah argued, not without logic, that since he was going to use the weapons to defend American interests, the United States should give him the weapons. President Nixon made it clear that this would never get past Congress and the American public.

I’m told that it was Kissinger who then suggested that the Shah simply raise oil pricesraise them high enough that he could then pay for the weapons out of their profits. I spoke to Kissinger who specifically denied this, but I believe my confidential sources because what happened after the Nixon-Kissinger visit was a jump in oil prices stimulated entirely by the Shah. The price of oil soared from $1.30 a barrel to $44 a barrel. Then Saudi Arabia, fearful of the Washington reaction, pushed the prices down to around $24 a barrel.

This was still an almighty gouging that became the greatest transfer of wealth in history from one group of nations to another. Diplomats, intelligence operatives and their superiors in Washington and London were wont to view these goings-on through rose-tinted lenses which softened data that would otherwise add up to the need for hard decisions. They were accustomed to Arab bravado, which seldom resulted in action. So they shrugged off the oil price explosion as a mere product of rhetoric that would pass away. The story of Nixon’s handling of the oil explosion was a discontinuity between what was known and what was done.

Back when Richard Nixon was still in office, I charged that the real scandal of his administration was not Watergate but oilgate. The refusal to combat the price gouging has cost this nation billions and has left us vulnerable to an Arab offensive paid for by our own dollars. Let us not go home after the war is over and lose the peace again.

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