It’s not the oil, stupid

These are tough times to be a Middle Eastern despot, so perhaps it is understandable if a few of them feel a little paranoid right now. Iraq is under foreign occupation, Iran is in open revolt, and Saudi Arabia is apparently under attack from British bootleggers who look surprisingly like friends of Osama bin Laden. Under the circumstances, even the most pampered autocrat might be forgiven for feeling a little anxious. But what is really troubling many in the Arab world is not so much the threat of internal opposition – they have ways of dealing with that – but fear of America, and specifically fear of what America plans to do with Iraq’s oil. Few in the Middle East are in any doubt about what America has in mind: it wants to use Iraqi oil as a stick with which to beat recalcitrant Arab regimes and as a means of undermining Opec.