Oil’s Role in Persian Gulf Crisis
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The bloodless way out of the Persian Gulf crisis is not to pay Arab nations to send troops to Saudi Arabia or to exhort Saudi Arabia to pay for troops, but to refuse to defend Saudi Arabian oil unless the Saudis and other Arab oil-producing nations, excluding Iraq, pledge to lower the price per barrel of oil, until Iraq can no longer finance its military complex.
If the oil-producing states in the Mideast want defense, let them subsidize it with reduced oil prices. The threat of war increases with each rise in prices; the rise in oil prices results when the oil industry fears the outbreak of war. This creates a negative spiral towards war. We must break it by demanding lower oil prices.
The Persian Gulf crisis is not about the rape of Kuwait. We do not send troops to defend Lithuania against Soviet occupation. It is about oil, world share markets and our global industrial base.
JEAN ROSENFELD
Tarzana
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