Now for the really, Really, REALLY bad news.

Benjamin C. Works

I’m not ready for $100 a barrel oil prices, are you? That would be more than a four-fold increase from prices now bouncing around $22 a barrel. But Osama bin Laden is on the verge of being able to overthrow the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, particularly, the Saudi Royal Family and gaining control over the world’s most important oil fields. –Dow 3000?

That’s why this Afghan crisis has a lot of us squirming nervously in our sideline seats while the Bush Administration tries to sort it all out and surmount the present crisis. Osama and company has posed to the civilized world through the Al-Qaeda network, a monumental crisis: which could topple the Saudi Royal Family in a sudden fundamentalist uprising inside the Kingdom. Either Taliban goes down like a row of dominoes or the Royals collapse like a house of cards.

It is clear that Osama has drawn substantial financial support from some members of the Royal family (hoping to bribe him) and from other Saudi tycoons (who generally despise the Royal family for its cynical corruption). The Royals thought they were paying “baksheesh” or “Dane Geld.” But as Kipling observed, “That if once you have paid him the Dane Geld, You never get rid of the Dane.”

For years the US has turned its back on evidence of Saudi corruption, unless it affected US interests, but that must begin to reverse for the future stability of the international trading economy. Saudi Arabia is now vulnerable to an anti-Royal coup that can only be hostile to the US for propping up the regime for so long.

The US has only two options: discretely demand that the Royals reform themselves, while protecting them during a “transition;” and, make provision for other sources of oil that can balance supply if a revolutionary regime tries to upset the world economy. Those alternative supplies exist in the Caspian region, Iraq, Iran and in our own Alaskan and offshore fields.

This is what makes the Bush-Putin cordiality and their implicit agreement to jointly support developing the resources of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and the rest, vastly more interesting than the Clinton Administration tugs-of-war over pipeline routes.

The difficulties in fostering self-reform are that such reform is almost impossible unless a stern hand is put on the Throne. Second, Crown Prince Abdullah, one of the few who supports self-reform, loathes the United States and would impose a draconian Wahabi order in the realm.

And that crisis could take two parts: a sabotage campaign against the oil fields and an uprising in Mecca and Medina during the Pilgrimage (Hadj) of Ramadan, the Muslim Holy month, which begins in mid-November. Imagine pilgrims raising the cry of Jihad in the Holy Precincts and the convulsions which would follow that.

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