Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

New Oil Crisis and Turkey



SAMI USLU
08.12.2004 Thursday


In today's world, $17 out of every $100 earned is from oil.


Even this statistical information alone is enough to emphasize the global importance of the above-mentioned product. In other words, oil plays a big role in the world gross domestic product (GDP). But the distribution of oil revenues among countries is extremely unbalanced, since it is the basic source of income for some countries, and the primary source of expenditure for others.

Up till the early 1970s, the price of crude oil was low. Rich countries, especially the United States, purchased that cheap material from Arab countries, and then sold it at exorbitant prices to the world, including the Arabs, as petroleum derivative products. Although Britain and America made the biggest profits thanks to Arab oil, they did not hesitate to support Israel against Saudi Arabia. Hence the Saudis, who could not put up with this injustice, initiated lobbying activities along with other Arab countries and they began to support the idea of implementing an oil embargo against Israel and its citizens. The shah of Iran also agreed to this, and speaking to the New York Times, said : "Of course, we have to increase oil prices ten-fold. Because the oil you buy cheaply from us, you sell it back to us at cutthroat prices under the name of petro-chemicals."

Henceforth, oil embargo was on the way. The Arab-Israeli war was only a pretext. In the three previous Arab-Israeli conflicts, the United States had openly supported Israel. When the 1973 war started, Saudi King Faisal warned the U.S. that it would shut the oil pipelines if America became involved in the war. However, the [Richard] Nixon administration did not care about the threat. Then Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab countries stopped oil sales to countries that supported Israel after U.S. tanks and aircraft were deployed in Israel. The price of crude oil that was $3.10 per barrel, all of a sudden jumped to $11.65.

The 1973-74 oil crisis was recorded as the most striking event in the world's political and economic history. For the first time ever, a group of Third World countries challenged their superiors by controlling their own fate. All right, what kind of precautions did the Western world take against this right reaction?

Arabs amassed $800 billion in a short period of time from quadrupled prices. On the other hand, poor oil importing countries experienced huge deficits. Since Arab countries lacked the banking and financial systems to deal with this kind of a situation, the big banks in Europe and America handled the issue. These institutions gave the Arab petro-dollars as loans to developing countries, including Turkey, as well as to Latin American nations. Moreover, this process played an important role in the birth and progress of the banking industry beyond national boundaries. In other words, the Western world overcame the shock and succeeded in turning the Arab embargo into its own favor.

As for the political and military dimensions of the matter… According to documents disclosed to the public, the Nixon administration had planned to occupy the oil reservoirs during the crisis. The documents indicated that the U.S refrained from doing so only after the possibility of an intervention in Iraq. In other words, it is so very obvious how long the United States has been planning to occupy Iraq.


In today's situation, where a new oil crisis is being expected, the U.S. and Britain have settled in the region; on the other side, Israel is committing more acts of violence and behaving more audaciously than ever before. Therefore, what is Turkey's role here? Turkey, which is powerful, reasonable and stable, stands as a unique deterrent force against such a trio.

August 11, 2004



08.12.2004


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