- WASHINGTON (The Telegraph,
London; Reuters) -- The Bush Administration and the House of Saud are being
thrown back into each other's arms by the crisis in Iraq and the attacks
on Westerners in Saudi Arabia.
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- A few months ago the weekend's violence in Saudi Arabia
would have unleashed a torrent of US criticism about the Saudi royal family's
coddling of extremists and failure to take terrorism seriously.
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- Now, one anxious question drowns out all others: will
this affect the price of oil?
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- Barely a year ago, hawks in Washington were triumphantly
predicting an end to decades of US dependence on Saudi Arabia.
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- Now it is an election year, and voters are fuming as
petrol prices pass $US2 ($2.79) a gallon. Democrats have been trying to
aim voters' fury at President George Bush. He needs Saudi Arabia to pump
more oil to try to keep fuel prices down.
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- Meanwhile, senior US and Saudi officials say they are
co-operating in the intelligence war against al-Qaeda.
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- Bob Woodward, the doyen of Washington reporters, recently
said that Saudi rulers had pledged to raise oil production by several million
barrels a day in time for the presidential election in November. Although
the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, denied a
secret deal to help Mr Bush, he said keeping prices low in an election
year was not unusual.
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- "President Clinton asked us to keep the prices down
in the year 2000," he said last month. "In fact, I can go back
to 1979: President Carter asked us to keep the prices down to avoid the
malaise."
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- Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman at the Saudi embassy in Washington,
sought to play down the weekend attacks. "The oilfields are farther
north. They're much more protected," he said in a television interview.
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- Martin Indyk, a former US assistant secretary of state
for the Near East and twice ambassador to Israel, sees the rapprochement
with Riyadh as a return to realism. It ends what he calls the "fantasy"
advocated by Washington hawks that a liberated Iraq would provide a flood
of cheap oil, which would allow the US to put the Saudis in their place,
once and for all.
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- "A facile assumption was made that we simply didn't
need the Saudis for oil any more," Dr Indyk said. "Then there
was the reality. We discovered that Iraqi oil wasn't going to come on stream
for at least five years, if that.
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- "We rely on Saudi Arabia as a swing producer to
moderate oil prices. The reality overtook the ideology, and now we obviously
need them to pump more. Therefore, we're proceeding on a hope and a prayer
that the Saudi Government can get this under control."
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- On Monday the Kuwaiti Government announced that it had
raised its crude oil production recently by 150,000 barrels a day from
a spare output capacity of about 200,000.
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- Kuwait, which has a 10th of global crude reserves, can
reach a production ceiling of about 2.45 million barrels a day, its energy
minister, Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahd al-Sabah said.
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- Kuwait has a quota of just over 1.8 million barrels a
day, but, like other members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, it is pumping flat out in an effort to cool high petroleum prices
threatening to derail global economic growth.
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- Copyright © 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/01/1086058854142.html
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