With these friends, no enemies needed

The next time you wrap your hand around a gasoline pump nozzle and watch the dollar-ticker race faster than Big Brown, console yourself with this thought: the top princes of Saudi Arabia’s royal family are each paid some $100 million a year, just the tip of the pyramid of American payments for imported oil. And there are literally thousands of Saudi princes. The Saudi’s King Fahd “married one hundred women. His palace cost $3 billion,” according to Craig Unger in his best-selling House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribner, 2004) page 87. “He regularly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars a night gambling and once, in 1962, dropped nearly $8 million in one night in Monte Carlo.” “In the eighties, Fahd and his entourage spent up to $5 million a day on visits to the palace in Marbella, Spain,” Unger reports. On one private holiday, the Saudi chief’s fleet included five Boeing 747s, 200 tons of luggage and 25 Rolls Royces. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee-presumptive, was on target when said recently that America’s $400 billion a year payments for imported oil surely create lucrative opportunities for anti-Western terrorism. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi-born, and many other prominent terrorist leaders derive from the fanatical Saudi Wahhabist sect. It’s no secret U.S. oil remittances are channeled by Saudis into America-hating madrassahs to bend the minds of Arab youth toward violent jihad. Fast-forward to 2008, when the Saudis are projected to reap $260 billion in oil profits. That figures out to $29.6 million an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While American motorists are increasingly squeezed by soaring fuel prices, the Saudis have seen their petro-profits leap six-fold over the average for the 1990s. President George W Bush, whose father, Herbert Walker Bush, was carefully cultivated by the Saudi royal family, went to Riyadh last week and politely asked King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz to increase oil production as a way of helping curb world — and American — fuel prices. Friend to friend, how about a little help? No way, the Saudis frankly answered. Earlier in May they boosted production 300,000 barrels a day, a trivial contribution in the face of a global demand of 88 million barrels a day. Oil analysts say the moderate increase in output will have little if any impact on U.S. pump prices. Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi, stunningly tone-deaf to American anger, observed that oil “supply and demand are in balance today,” according to the AP’s Terence Hunt reporting from Riyadh. Like wealthy condo-dwellers walking past homeless panhandlers on Nashville’s Church Street, the Saudi royals stiffly ignore the suffering of their American friends. Congressional hearings this week in which the top execs of America’s five largest oil companies faced a barrage of hostile questions were little more than political theater. Posturing politicians heap shame on the domestic petroleum industry — which for the last couple of years has pocketed the biggest profits in in the history of the universe — while continuing to take their greasy dollars in the form of campaign contributions. Saudi petro-greed is certainly a big part of our pain at the pumps. All the more reason we can’t allow our politicians to be absent from the debate and the hard work of finding real solutions to our energy crisis. Bill Zechman was a chemist at the University of Tennessee Space Institute’s energy research laboratories until 1981, when the U.S. Department of Energy began cancelling support for such projects. He may be reached at [email protected].