Career CIA analyst lays it out, concluding that SA faces collapse.

Recall Wolfowitz said the real reason for Iraq was to get US out of SA.

Seen in this light, Iraq is clearly a war for oil; other factors pale.
It's not just greed for Iraqi oil or profits, but cold imperial policy.

One implication is that the debacle in Iraq will have to get many times
worse before the US would even consider withdrawal.
___________________________________________________________
http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/fallhouseofsaud.html

The fall of the House of Saud.

       By Robert Baer
       The Atlantic Monthly
       May 2003

EXCERPTS: See link above for full text.

The most vulnerable point and the most spectacular target in the Saudi
oil system is the Abqaiq complex--the world's largest oil-processing
facility, which sits about twenty-four miles inland from the northern
end of the Gulf of Bahrain. All petroleum originating in the south is
pumped to Abqaiq for processing. For the first two months after a
moderate to severe attack on Abqaiq, production there would slow from an
average of 6.8 million barrels a day to one million barrels, a loss
equivalent to one third of America's daily consumption of crude oil. For
seven months following the attack, daily production would remain as much
as four million barrels below normal--a reduction roughly equal to what
all of the OPEC partners were able to effect during their 1973 embargo.
....
Saudi Arabia has the world's only important surplus production
capacity--two million barrels a day. This keeps the world market liquid.
Not only that, but because the Saudis more or less determine the price
of oil globally by deciding how much oil to produce, even countries that
don't buy Saudi oil would be vulnerable if the flow of that oil were
disrupted.
....
Less than twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, the Saudis decided to send nine million barrels of oil
to the United States over the next two weeks. The result was that the
United States experienced only a slight inflation spike in the wake of
the most devastating terrorist attack in history. Had that same surplus
capacity been taken out of play with twenty pounds of Semtex, all bets
would have been off. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can support
the domestic market for only about seventy days. And if Saudi Arabia's
contribution to the world's oil supply were cut off, crude petroleum
could quite realistically rise from around $40 a barrel today to as much
as $150 a barrel. It wouldn't take long for other economic and social
calamities to follow.
....
USA Today reported last summer that nearly four out of five hits on a
clandestine al Qaeda Web site came from inside Saudi Arabia...
a recent report commissioned by the UN Security Council indicated that
Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to al Qaeda over the past
decade.

Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of
the world's oil. The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls
more than a third of that amount. This is the fulcrum on which the
global economy teeters, and the House of Saud knows what the West is
only beginning to learn: that it presides over a kingdom dangerously at
war with itself. In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that
oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the
general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's
leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and
elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated--that,
in short, the country needs a radical "purification."

We can try to wish this away all we want. But the reality is
getting harder and harder to ignore. Per capita income in Saudi Arabia
fell from $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001. The country's birth rate
has soared, becoming one of the highest in the world. Its police force
is corrupt, and the rule of law is a sham. Saudi Arabia almost certainly
leads the world in public beheadings, the venue for which is often a
Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square. Illegal arms routinely
flow into and out of the country. Taking into account its murky
"off-budget" defense spending, Saudi Arabia may spend more per capita on
defense than any other country in the world (some estimates put the
figure at 50 percent of its total revenues), and the House of Saud
believes this is necessary for its personal protection. The regime is
threatened by increasingly hostile neighbors--and by determined enemies
within the country's borders. Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia
call openly for a jihad against the West--a designation that clearly
includes the royal family itself--in terms as vitriolic as anything
heard in Iran at the height of the Islamic revolution there. The
kingdom's mosque schools have become a breeding ground for militant
Islam. Recent attacks in Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kenya, and the United
States, not to mention those against U.S. military personnel within
Saudi Arabia, all point back to these schools--and to the House of Saud
itself, which, terrified at the prospect of a militant uprising against
it, shovels protection money at the fundamentalists and tries to divert
their attention abroad.
....
If I had to pick a single moment when the House of Saud truly began to
fall apart, it would be when Abdul Aziz ibn Saud's son Fahd, who has
been king since 1982, suffered a near fatal stroke, in 1995. As soon as
the royal family heard about Fahd's stroke, it went on high alert. From
all over Riyadh came the thump-thump of helicopters and the sirens of
convoys converging on the hospital where Fahd had been taken.

Among the first to arrive were Jawhara al-Ibrahim, Fahd's fourth
and favorite wife, and their spoiled, megalomaniac twenty-nine-year-old
son Abdul Aziz--or "Azouzi" ("Dearie"), as Fahd called him. Anyone who
knew how Fahd's court ran knew the extent to which Fahd had come to
depend on Jawhara, who helped him with everything from remembering his
medicine to handling intricate problems of foreign policy. If a prince
wanted a matter immediately brought to Fahd's attention, he called
Jawhara. As for Abdul Aziz, he was the youngest of Fahd's children and
the apple of his father's eye. Fahd indulged him in everything. Stories
circulated widely about Abdul Aziz's riding a Harley-Davidson inside his
father's palace, chasing servants and smashing furniture. Most of the
royal family found the king's indulgence strange. Abdul Aziz was pimply,
craven, a bit slow. Apparently, though, he was regarded as the king's
good-luck charm. Fahd's favorite soothsayer had once told him that as
long as Abdul Aziz was by his side, the king would have a long,
fulfilling life. So Fahd did not complain when Abdul Aziz spent $4.6
billion on a sprawling palace and theme park outside Riyadh, because
Abdul Aziz was "interested" in history. The property includes a scale
model of old Mecca, with actors attending mosque and chanting prayers
twenty-four hours a day, and also replicas of the Alhambra, Medina, and
half a dozen other Islamic landmarks.
....
All the while, throughout the 1990s, the royal family kept growing and
growing. A prince might sire forty to seventy children during a lifetime
of healthy copulation; however, the resources to support the growing
population of the entitled were shrinking, not just in relative terms
but in absolute ones. Young royals were pushing up from below, chafing
at leaders who were slipping into their late seventies and eighties. The
incapacitated King Fahd will turn eighty this year; Crown Prince
Abdullah will turn seventy-nine. Many of the most active court
intriguers are also in their seventies.

The House of Saud currently has some 30,000 members. The number
will be 60,000 in a generation, maybe much higher. According to reliable
sources, anecdotal evidence, and the Saudi gossip machine, the royal
family is obsessed with gambling, alcohol prostitution, and parties. And
the commissions and other outlays to fund their vices are constant. What
would the price of oil have to be in 2025 to support even the most basic
privileges--for example, free air travel anywhere in the world on
Saudia, the Saudi national airline--that the Saudi royals have come to
enjoy? Once the family numbers 60,000, or 100,000, will there even be a
spare seat for a mere commoner who wants to fly out of Riyadh or Jidda?
Reformers among the royal family talk about cutting back the perks, but
that's a hard package to sell.

Saudi Arabia operates the world's most advanced welfare state, a
kind of anti-Marxian non-workers paradise. Saudis get free health care
and interest-free home and business loans. College education is free
within the kingdom, and heavily subsidized for those who study abroad.
In one of the world's driest spots water is almost free. Electricity,
domestic air travel, gasoline, and telephone service are available at
far below cost. Many of the kingdom's best and brightest--the most
well-educated and in theory, the best prepared for the work world--have
little motivation to do any work at all. About a quarter of Saudi
Arabia's population, and more than a third of all residents aged fifteen
to sixty-four, are foreign nationals, allowed into the kingdom to do the
dirty work in the oil fields and to provide domestic help, but also to
program the computers and manage the refineries. Seventy percent of all
jobs in Saudi Arabia--and close to 90 percent of all private-sector
jobs--are filled by foreigners.
....
Washington's answer for Saudi Arabia--apart from repeating that
nothing is wrong--is to suggest that a little democracy will cure
everything. Talk the royal family into ceding at least part of its
authority; support the reform-minded princes; set up a model parliament;
co-opt the firebrands with a cabinet position or two, a minor political
party, and some outright bribery; send Jimmy Carter in to monitor the
first election; and in a few generations Riyadh will be Ankara, maybe
even London. The governmental mechanism may be faulty, the Washington
view maintains, but the people who administer the government are for the
most part committed to rooting out corruption, rounding up terrorists,
and recognizing the right of the people to self-government.

It's utter nonsense, of course. If an election were held in Saudi
Arabia today, if anyone who wanted to could run for the office of
president, and if people could vote their hearts without fear of having
their heads cut off afterward in Chop-Chop Square, Osama bin Laden would
be elected in a landslide--not because the Saudi people want to wash
their hands in the blood of the dead of September 11, but simply because
bin Laden has dared to do what even the mighty United States of America
won't do: stand up to the thieves who rule the country.

       * Saudi Arabia controls the largest share of the world's oil and
serves as the market regulator for the global petroleum industry.

       * No country consumes more oil, and is more dependent on Saudi
oil, than the United States.

       * The United States and the rest of the industrialized world are
therefore absolutely dependent on Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and will
be for decades to come.

       * If the Saudi oil spigot is shut off, by terrorism or by
political revolution, the effect on the global economy, and particularly
on the economy of the United States, will be devastating.

       * Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, criminal,
dysfunctional, and out-of-touch royal family that is hated by the people
it rules and by the nations that surround its kingdom.
.

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