On Saturday morning, a sickly black sun rose in the oil fields of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Khurais and Abqaiq oil refineries were set ablaze before dawn. Bombed to infernos by drone strikes, an act claimed by the Shia Houthi rebels in war torn Yemen.
Before the final tally has been counted, reports suggest that half of the Kingdom’s oil barrel production capacity has been hamstrung by the strikes. Which corresponds to some five percent of world oil consumption. The Houthi’s, Yemen rebels that provoked a Saudi intervention force in 2015, motivate the strike with Saudi’s involvement in the conflict.
The world is rattling as its favourite fuel narcotic supply has been damaged. Nations are scrambling to shore up an oil surplus in the face of shortages to come. And you know what? It’s about fucking time. About time that someone lit a fuse to the fossil fuel supply of the world. About time that someone bloodied the nose of the Saudi hegemony. About time that someone put a dent in the global economic status quo.
How could I say such a thing? How could I ever endorse such an attack? Do I support insurgency and terrorism? No, I’ll tell you why I don’t have a single tear to shed in the wake of this incineration.
Firstly; It makes it painfully clear that even a rag-tag rebel army can apply more surgical precision in its military strikes than the US-Saudi coalition has bothered to for the past four years. The drones didn’t wipe out some remote village. The drones didn’t commit to some ethnic genocide. They struck at the economic backbone of an aggressor state. Good shot, Houthis!
Which brings us to my second point; Saudi Arabia is an aggressor state that went into a Yemenite civil affair. Just another pawn in the great chess-game between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Another contest in a thousand year old religious schism turned proxy war. Even a senior CIA officer, in an interview with the Washington Post, threw his hands in the air and said that the Saudi only have themselves to blame (in true American egocentric fashion):
”Five years of coddling a reckless thug (MBS) by two administrations (Obama and Trump both) has produced the worst humanitarian disaster in our time in Yemen and now a threat to the world’s energy security. It’s time for America to say (MBS) must go!”
Thirdly, the Saudis are painting this destruction of their poison-factories as a terrorist attack. To incite outrage. To garner support. To avoid and deflect owning their own complicity in making enemies of their neighbourhood. If you physically invade and bomb another country, how can it possibly be considered terrorism when that country starts fighting back? You might argue that Aramco, the Saudi oil company that runs and owns the facilities, is a private company. Not military. But you’d be arguing out your ass, since Aramco is still run by the State and is bankrolling the Saudi genocidal war effort. Saudi Arabia declared war against the Houthis four years ago. But ever when a little guy hits above its weight, the complacent reigning champs cry bloody terrorism. Regardless whether they terrorized first. For what’s a little guy to do against such nonchalant bullying? Of course they need to hit the bully where it hurts. And if anything hurts MBS and his rotten Kingdom along with its rotten allies, it’s their precious rot: Their oil.
And finally, this precious, precious oil. A drug that global economies have proven woefully unable to wean themselves off. A resource we’ve all concluded will be the bane of us all, that we yet can’t stop using. While we criminalize the usage of heroin and cocaine, humanity has become too dependent on oil to voluntarily stop our reliance on it. So maybe a forceful solution is long overdue. And even though the Houthis may not care about environmental conservation as much as they care about sucker-punching the megalomaniacal Kingdom, the results are all the same. An example that those that value habitat sustainability over plastic and fuel could look up to. A day where the great gouges in the earth were seared shut. At least for a little while.
/Sebastian Lindberg 16/9-2019
WastedWords 