The Riyadh Crisis - Part II
The Day of Widows and subsequent collapse of the Saudi establishment seemingly overnight caught the world entirely by surprise, and on its own did as much as heavy pressure from the United States on Tel-Aviv to end the Fifth Arab-Israeli War. With Syria having been defeated decisively on the Golan but it being clear Israel had neither the international support nor the domestic will to besiege and take Beirut on their own, the conflict in Lebanon began to wind down rapidly over the course of July and August and quickly devolved into a proxy war between Israel's preferred Maronite faction under the Gemayels and their uneasy Shia allies, against the Sunnis and a minority faction of Maronites backed by Damascus. Gemayel would be elected President of Lebanon just months later, and his six years in power would only deepen and exacerbate the country's bloodshed and sectarian hatreds, but gave Israel their "man" in Beirut, or what was left of it, and in many ways this accomplished the Peres Cabinet's strategic goals, at least for the time being.
The Riyadh Crisis presented the Carey administration, NATO, and the Politburo with their second major international crisis of the past eight months. While Saudi Arabia's share of global oil production had more than halved with the exponential growth of North Sea fields and the ability of the United States to transport via Alaska, and Antonov's rationalizations had improved Soviet export facilities and capacity, it was still a hugely important swing producer and was the symbolic leader of OPEC. Combined with a dropoff in Kuwaiti production that was exacerbated by a major stock market crash in that country in May 1982 that helped push much of the region into recession, oil production from OPEC was suddenly not a given, and global prices jumped 15% in the course of a few days and would peak at 26% above crisis prices in late July (and 34% above pre-Osirak prices), before gradually declining back to their previous January low by the end of the year. This was not the oil shock of 1973 or 1979, but it rattled economies around the world, with developing countries slipping into or deeper into recessions and the United States seeing a sharp drop in output for the third quarter of 1982 after two quarters of otherwise strong economic growth unseen for years.
It was not just the heightened price of oil, which improved and diversified production in 1982 was better able to absorb and offset, that made what was going on in Saudi Arabia a potentially devastating crisis, however. Saudi Arabia's legitimacy was founded in its "custodianship" of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hejaz region, and though the clerics were now turning on the Ikhwan after the Day of Widows, the blow to Saudi "invincibility" could not be undone. As Sabri's Arabian Republic was founded in the East under the air cover of the air force and army, it was an open question what, exactly, would come next, and a massive civil war in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world gave everyone a great deal of fear.
Of everyone in Carey's orbit, Askew surprised him by giving the most hawkish advice. He proposed immediately recognizing the Sabri government, parking an aircraft carrier or two in the Persian Gulf, and in tandem with the substantive Iranian Air Force essentially declaring to the world that the Hormuz would stay open and the Saudi oil continuing to flow. Jackson was open to the idea but cautioned against doing so unilaterally, instead proposing that the United States assemble a coalition "aimed at the securing of peace in Arabia" and which would have at the tip of its spear actual Arab powers. Katzenbach, on the other hand, leaned the other way - the further the United States could be from such a coalition the better, what with its support of Israel already alienating many Arab powers (Saddam in particular, to say nothing of the erratic Gaddafi) and that a US-led intervention in "the holy lands of Islam" would be perceived enormously poorly. Carey's concerns were more general than that, though he would admit later he saw what the generally pro-Israeli Katzenbach was getting at. He was skeptical that the American public was open to an open-ended intervention far away in the aftermath of Vietnam and Panama, and more broadly, he did not want to make it a core American policy that they would unilaterally intervene in oil producing states to "support the flow." The United States Navy did, indeed, serve an important purpose in keeping global trade lanes open, but that did not mean that its purpose was to support a particular oil price and volume, and the potential after-effects of this becoming a "Carey Doctrine" was enough to dissuade Carey from the action of passing through the Hormuz. Nonetheless, the USS
Nimitz was moved off the coast of Oman, and the
Eisenhower into the Red Sea, ostensibly to help evacuate American Aramco workers if need be.
Carey's hesitation to jump in with an all-out intervention was not shared across the board; European leaders, in particular Denis Healey, had their own ideas. Lacking the United States' ample natural resources - Texas' oilfields, for instance - the idea of Saudi oilfields getting seized by a radical Ikhwani regime or heavily damaged in a long-lasting civil war terrified European capitals. Healey was a fairly interventionist, old-fashioned Cold War social democrat in his approach and during the spring and summer of 1982 had become convinced that one could draw a direct line between the collapse of British influence in the Persian Gulf in 1971 and the chaos that had unfolded across the Arab World since then, starting with the Yom Kippur War and continuing on with the oil embargo. While British defense spending in the early 1980s was low and there were concerns about the ability of the Royal Navy to project power overseas
[1], he was nonetheless determined to see Britain retake part of her mantle of European leadership - and global relevance alongside the United States within the Western powers - and in the Arabian Revolution saw the perfect opportunity. Unlike the United States, the British
would head for the Hormuz, and he quickly persuaded France's Giscard and Italy's Spadolini to follow close behind as part of a task force to "preserve the stability of the Arabian Peninsula and prevent a terrible war."
Of course, all of these moves were dependent on one factor above all, and that was Iranian cooperation, which came handily and was coordinated largely through London's relationship with Nader Jahanbani, the close advisor to the young Shah Reza and a British-trained fighter pilot now head of the Iranian Air Force. Jahanbani, a political moderate who had neither interfered in the SAVAK's crackdown of 1979-80 nor the liberalizing hour of 1981, was mostly responsible for making the Iranian Air Force among the best in the world, both in terms of equipment and of the skill of her pilots, and Tehran quickly announced an operation that would be nicknamed "Sky Shield" - that Iran would support Sabri and his Arabian Republic from the air, creating a "shield" of planes when combined with the HMS
Ark Royal and her Anglo-Franco-Italian task force off the east coast of Qatar as well as Sabri's majority of the small Saudi Air Force.
As July advanced, then, it was clear that the West had totally and utterly abandoned the House of Saud, either explicitly (in the case of Europe and their Iranian allies) or implicitly through their silence (the United States). This left a gaping power vacuum in the center of the country, as the Saudi Arabian National Guard and King Ahmed Rahman angrily started looking for allies to retake their oil-rich east that now, out of nowhere, enjoyed Western protection as a dissident republic provided the oil kept flowing. There were pragmatic reasons for Riyadh, still suffering street battles and bombings almost daily, to want to take out Sabri quickly even with the "Sky Shield" in place - if the Arabian Republic could survive, then the whole territorial integrity of the Saudi state was in question, and there were more than a few parties on her perimeter who might have ideas about what could come next if the whole thing collapsed.
On July 27, Abdul Rahman elected to roll the dice, just as Western diplomats were ironing out the details in Arab capitals over what was to come next to "stabilize" the situation. The SANG and units of the Royal Saudi Army still loyal to him set out from Riyadh eastwards to capture or sabotage the oilfields, and show the West the price of betrayal...
[1] This being the Falklands-era RN, after all