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The Crisis Over The Attack On Saudi Oil Infrastructure Is Over – We Now Wait For the Next One
The crisis about the Yemeni drone and cruise missile attack on two Saudi oil installations is for now over.
The Saudis and the U.S. accuse Iran of being behind the "act of war" as Secretary of State Pompeo called it. The Saudis have bombed Yemen with U.S. made bombs since 2015. One wonders how Pompeo is calling that.
The Yemeni forces aligned with the Houthi Ansarallah do not deny that their drones and cruise missiles are copies of Iranian designs. But they insist that they are built in Yemen and fired from there.
President Trump will not launch a military attack against Iran. Neither will the Saudis or anyone else. Iran has deterred them by explaining that any attack on Iran will be responded to by waging all out war against the U.S. and its 'allies' around the Persian Gulf.
Trump sent Pompeo to Saudi Arabia to hold hands with the Saudi gangster family who call themselves royals. Pompeo of course tried to sell them more weapons. On his flight back he had an uncharacteristically dovish Q & A with reporters. Pompeo said:
I was here in an act of diplomacy. While the foreign minister of Iran is threatening all-out war and to fight to the last American, we’re here to build out a coalition aimed at achieving peace and a peaceful resolution to this. That’s my mission set, what President Trump certainly wants me to work to achieve, and I hope that the Islamic Republic of Iran sees it the same way. There’s no evidence of that from his statement, but I hope that that’s the case.
The crisis is over and we are back to waiting for the next round. A few days or weeks from now we will see another round of attacks on oil assets on the western side of the Persian Gulf. Iran, with the help of its friends, can play this game again and again and it will do so until the U.S. gives up and lifts the sanctions against that country.
The Houthi will continue to attack the Saudis until they end their war on Yemen and pay reparations.
As long as no U.S. forces get killed the U.S. will not hit back because Trump wants to be reelected. An all out war around the Persian Gulf would drive energy prices into the stratosphere and slump the global economy. His voters would not like that.
In our earlier pieces on the Abqaiq attack we said that the attacked crude oil stabilization plant in Abquaq had no air defense. Some diligent researchers have since found that there was a previously unknown Patriot air-defense unit in the area which was itself protected by several short range air-defense cannons:
Michael Duitsman @DuitsyWasHere – 7:02 UTC · Sep 18, 2019
On paper, the point air defenses at the Abqaiq oil processing facility are rather formidable… by 1995 standards, at least.
A battery of Shahine SAMs (French system from the early 1980's)
3 or 4 anti-aircraft gun sections, each with 2 twin 35mm cannons and a fire control unit
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But one Patriot system covers only 120° of the horizon. The attacking drones came from a western directions while Saudi Arabia's enemies are to its east and south. The older Patriot 2 version the Saudis have is also not of much use against low flying drones and cruise missiles.
There is also the oddity that the Patriot unit's radar system was shut off.
Putin is a Virus @PutinIsAVirus – 4:53 UTC · Sep 19, 2019
No patriot radars have been active in recent months (at least not consistently) in the vicinity of the plant, not in the short range required to detect low flying cruise missiles or drones. Closest installation is in Barhain.
(using Sentinel 1 CSAR sat for detection)
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Satellites with synthetic-aperture radar can 'see' the radar of Patriot and other air-defense system. None was detected around Abqaiq.
The explanation for that is likely rather trivial. Colonel Pat Lang was stationed in Saudi Arabia as a military liaison officer. As he recently remarked:
Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar soon to prove they are responsible.
Abqaiq was attacked on the night of Friday to Saturday. That is the weekend in Saudi Arabia.
The 9 May edition of the London Review of Books has an extremely interesting review of what looks like an extremely interesting book. The book is
AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain by David Wearing
The review is by Tom Stevenson.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n09/tom-stevenson/what-are-we-there-for
If Wearing and Stevenson are right, it provides background on the power politics of the Gulf that many here surely would find indispensable to understanding of the game there. THe basic info concerns actual functioning of the UK’s and the USA’s owning of the Gulf. It may be that the recent drone attacks have upended the importance of the Gulf Monopoly board as discussed by Stevenson and Wearing. However, I suspect not.
Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall, but it may be available somewhere else.
Here are a few grafs (not the beginning grafs):
“An agreement signed by British representatives and the Omani sultan in 1798 made Oman the British Empire’s first satrapy in the Middle East (it was also Britain’s last colonial possession in the Gulf). The East India Company had in 1763 established a trading post in Bushehr, now in Iran, from which the empire’s growing Gulf business was managed. In 1819, to subdue the coastal Arab sheikhdoms and establish a protectorate over the Trucial States – now the United Arab Emirates – the British navy bombarded and laid siege to Ras al-Khaimah. By 1917, Britain had established dependencies in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq and parts of Iran. Thousands died during Ibn Saud’s conquest of the central Arabian peninsula in the first decades of the 20th century; he received a monthly stipend from the British government throughout. When the new Saudi regime was threatened by a rebellion in 1929, British troops helped put down the mutineers. Britain bankrolled the Saudi monarchy (after 1943 with the help of the US) until the oil industry ended the need for subsidies.
The Suez crisis is generally treated as the decisive moment in the transition from British to US dominance in the region, but David Wearing shows that, in spite of Suez and other setbacks for Britain on the periphery (the 1958 coup in Iraq, the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s), British influence in fact increased in the core Gulf states over the next 15 years, with successful palace coups backed by the British government in Saudi Arabia in 1964 and Sharjah, one of the Trucial States, in 1965. Qatar, the Trucial States and Oman remained British protectorates, their currencies pegged to sterling. Wearing makes a strong case that it was the cost of the military ‘protection’ of the Gulf that forced the end of Britain’s formal empire there in 1971, and the beginning of US hegemony.
Before withdrawing from its dependencies, the British government placed retired military officers as advisers to Gulf monarchs it had for the most part installed in order to protect ‘oil and other interests’ and a ‘very profitable market in military equipment’, in the words of the then foreign secretary, Michael Stewart. Even now, a striking number of Middle East rulers are graduates of Sandhurst, including the kings of Bahrain and Jordan, the sultan of Oman, the emir of Dubai, the emir and crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the emir of Qatar, and the late emir of Kuwait. Most Saudi leaders are educated in the US but the former heads of the Saudi National Guard and the General Intelligence Service, as well as members of the Allegiance Council and a former defence minister, also attended Sandhurst. A skeleton British military presence remained behind in the Gulf. In 2016, Theresa May pledged to increase Britain’s military commitments there, ‘with more British warships, aircraft and personnel deployed on operations than in any other part of the world’. In April last year, the Royal Navy reopened HMS Jufair in Bahrain – the base had been taken over by the US after Bahrain became independent in 1971. Another naval base is set to open in Oman later this year.
Britain’s residual influence in Saudi Arabia meant that during the oil crises of the 1970s the kingdom secretly broke its own embargo to supply Britain. Saudi Arabia also continued to pump much of the massive surplus generated by oil sales into British financial institutions. It finances around a fifth of the UK current account deficit. A ten-person team in Whitehall, known as Project Falcon, manages the UAE’s investments in Britain. During the financial crisis in 2008, Gordon Brown appealed to the Gulf to provide private bailouts for British banks. In a deal subject to a current Serious Fraud Office investigation, Barclays received £4.6 billion from Qatar and £3.5 billion from the UAE, helping it to avoid nationalisation. Qatar’s investments in the UK are many and conspicuous: Harrods, the Shard, the London Stock Exchange, Heathrow Airport. Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s portfolios of UK bonds and equities are exceeded only by their US investments.”
Posted by: Really?? | Sep 20 2019 18:51 utc | 165
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