THE OIL WEAPON.(Column)

On October 14, 1973, in one of the biggest tank battles in history, Israeli forces routed an invading Egyptian Army, destroying about two hundred and fifty tanks and losing just twenty-five. Two days later, the Israelis--who had been aided by an American airlift of military supplies--crossed over the Suez Canal and into Egypt. In retaliation, the Arab members of OPEC declared an oil embargo against the United States, ordering a series of production cutbacks and royalty increases that tripled the price of oil. Long gas lines became commonplace and the U.S. economy fell into a recession. In a nod to austerity, Richard Nixon decreed that the national Christmas tree would go unlit.

Thirty years later, we can't see past that darkened tree. The embargo, which lasted only a few months, still shapes the way we think about the politics and economics of oil. Ever since, the spectre of Arab countries using oil as a political weapon has haunted discussions of the Middle East and the global petroleum market, and has kept U.S. policymakers obsessed with "energy security" (which in practice has meant sucking up to the Saudis) and with "energy independence" from what has come to be known, in the Times and elsewhere, as "the axis of oil." Fear of the oil weapon leads commentators to fret over how the Arab states will react to President Bush's ambitious plans for the Middle East, even as it inspires some advocates of those plans to declare that they will bring, as Bush's former speechwriter David Frum put it in his recent memoir, "new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool of oil." In the popular imagination, oil remains what the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. called it in 1973: "high-octane political fuel."

If so, it's fuel that's hard to burn. For all the Arab scimitar-rattling and Western hand-wringing, in the past three decades oil has been a remarkably feckless weapon. The Saudis have used threats to try to shape U.S. foreign policy, but ever since the Iranian revolution they've been the ones who have consistently stepped up production to fill the shortfalls created by political turmoil elsewhere (as they are doing now, in response to the crisis in Venezuela). And although Iran's mullahs may think of the U.S. as the Great Satan, that hasn't kept them from selling billions of gallons of oil in the world market, thereby helping to keep American gas prices down. Even Saddam Hussein (with the exception of a fruitless embargo last April to protest Israel's Palestine policy) has kept pumping as much oil as he can, or, rather, as much as the U.N. will allow.

Such bounteousness has nothing to do with benevolence and everything to do with necessity. The oil states have accommodated themselves to the new world of oil, in which OPEC is less powerful and the Western economies are less vulnerable than they were in the nineteen-seventies. Thirty years ago, OPEC controlled fifty-five per cent ...