by Peter Maass
But there isn’t even enough oil.
It sounds ironic or impossible, but Saudi Arabia, which has far more oil than any other nation and tends to be regarded as an expanse of wall-to-wall multimillionaires, does not have enough oil to make everyone rich, even when prices are high.
The crucial thing is not how many barrels of oil a country sells every day, but how many it sells per capita. For example, Kuwait’s exports are one-fifth Saudi Arabia’s but Kuwait’s population is ten times smaller. On a daily basis, Kuwait produces more than a barrel a day of oil per person, whereas Saudi Arabia produces just about half a barrel. By this measure, Saudi Arabia is not even among the top five petrostates. The monarchies of Kuwait and Brunei can squander as much money as humanly possible—weddings can include almonds that are coated in gold flakes—and still there will be enough money for their nonroyal compatriots to live an easy life. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenues. are sufficient to enable the royal family to build vast palaces for themselves and impressive highways for the masses, and to tax no one, and to offer education and health care subsidies, but insufficient to underwrite a consistent level of high comfort for all. In the early 1980s, per capita income reached $28,000, which ranked Saudis quite high in the world at the time, but it soon collapsed, along with oil prices, to one-quarter of what it had been—one of the most precipitous drops in national income in the twentieth century. It shot up again in the 2008 boom that pushed oil to nearly $150 a barrel, but then it dropped again as oil prices did. It was a roller coaster.
In a way, the grandness of the country’s infrastructure was akin to the boast of a con man. King Fahd International Airport encompassed some three hundred square miles (though most of it was unused desert), had its own desalination plant, a mosque for two thousand worshippers and greenhouses. It was the largest airport in the world by surface area and, in fact, was larger than the country of Bahrain. Yet KFIA’s main terminal was probably the emptiest airport in the world. A Saudi friend who met me there one day pointed out its wasted opulence as we walked through a vast air-conditioned garage that was all but devoid of cars. His laughter echoed off the walls, which had been built, like the rest of the multibillion-dollar airport, by Bechtel. These edifices reminded me of a complaint I’d heard from a dissatisfied prince in Riyadh who’d pushed for economic reforms that had not been adopted. “They are not nation building,” he’d said of his own family. “They are building buildings.” And when oil prices dropped in 2008, even the building of buildings came to a near halt.
Had oil done much good for the country? It might have been a strange question, but I tried it out on Bassim Alim, a lawyer in Jeddah who’d signed a controversial petition for greater openness in the kingdom and who was defending several colleagues thrown into jail for demanding more democracy. Alim wasn’t a critic of the liberal, whiskey-sipping variety. Educated at Harvard, he wanted Islam at the center of Saudi life. In his view, that didn’t mean the country had to deprive itself of political or economic pluralism.
We met at Casper & Gambini’s, a café with the feel of a Manhattan restaurant, minus the alcohol. The decor was urban chic, with silver air ducts, polished wood, exposed brick and electronic music that emitted a sophisticated vibe. The place was filled with stylish young men and women. Because this was Saudi Arabia, where unmarried men and women are forbidden from mixing, the men sat downstairs and the women were upstairs, where there was a separate entrance. They could not see each other, but text messages of flirtation whizzed between them; occasionally there would be a round of laughs at a nearby table as one of the youths passed around his cell phone to show the latest missive he had sent or received.
“Oil has done nothing for this country that we couldn’t have done without oil,” Alim said. “I don’t believe that in this region there is a nation that received all this wealth and squandered and looted it the way it has been done in Saudi Arabia. Cairo has an underground transport system and fourteen different universities. Cairo is poor, it is struggling, but it has a well-developed media and academic structure. There are political parties, though Mubarak is an asshole. There are protests, and society is vibrant.”
Steak sandwiches were brought to our table by a Lebanese waiter. (Saudis would not take such jobs.) I was thinking to myself that if Egypt was enviable, something was badly amiss. Alim explained that his jailed colleagues had not gotten into trouble for signing a give-us-the-head-of-the-king document; their petition merely asked for greater popular participation in the affairs of government. The king had a Consultative Assembly, the Majlis, whose members were appointed and infrequently summoned. Token municipal elections had been held, but the winners had almost no power. The king decided how much money would be allotted to each ministry, and outsiders were not allowed to look into allegations of waste or abuse. “No one can dare ask the government for accountability,” Alim said. “Where is this money going?”
We finished our meal at around eleven in the evening, when the night was still young. The rhythm of life in Saudi Arabia was as particular as its demographics: 75 percent of the population was under the age of thirty. Because so many young men didn’t have jobs or put in just a few hours at work that meant little to them, and because the heat discouraged daytime socializing, the night was when Saudi Arabia came alive. As Alim and I left Casper & Gambini’s, the young men around us, dressed in jeans and crisply ironed shirts, continued their texting activities.
These men’s disassociation hardly took the form of jihad; if they died young, it would be from another form of self-harm. Addled on illicit drugs or simply bored, young Saudis were among the world’s most dangerous drivers; more than 80 percent of the deaths in state hospitals were due to road accidents. All of a sudden, without its blinker flashing, a car would swerve in front of me or overtake me on the right-hand side, using the shoulder of the road. Youths, indulging in a practice known as “drifting,” gathered on lightly used roads and spun their cars into sideways skids at high speeds, sometimes with fatal outcomes. I was not surprised to see a YouTube video showing a car on a Saudi highway with its doors open and several youths holding on to them, with nothing more than sandals on their feet, surfing along the pavement.
I was more interested in finding a youth who could reveal the other, more violent side of alienation. Mohammed Ibrahim Abdul Aziz fit the bill.
When our paths crossed, Mohammed was twenty years old. A native of Dammam, in the country’s oil region, he seemed young for his age—sparse and silky facial hair gave him the look of a teenager. He had studied at King Saud University, an impressive institution from the outside only. The new campus, built in the 1980s, cost about $4 billion (adjusted for inflation, more than $8 billion today), but its Saudi and foreign professors were unknowns in the academic world. Mohammed, neither inspired by his teachers nor hopeful of getting a job if he completed his studies, dropped out and joined the generation of highway-surfing youths.
Like many young Saudis, Mohammed spent his spare time cruising the Internet, which, though censored by government filters, served as an outlet to most things illicit—from online chats with girls to, of course, jihad. When I asked which fundamentalist Web sites he visited, Mohammed couldn’t remember precisely, because there were so many, all easily available, extolling the glory of fighting for Islam in, for instance, the Palestinian territories against the Israelis and in Iraq against the American occupiers. It was the latter fight that drew Mohammed’s interest, after a fundamentalist friend suggested that he devote his life to the intensifying war against the infidels there.
I met Mohammed in Iraq in the spring of 2005. He had been captured a few days earlier by Iraqi security forces. As it turned out, Mohammed was a happy prisoner because his time in the insurgency had been unhappy; the jihad was not, he realized, all it was cracked up to be. Because he was captured about seventy-five miles north of Baghdad in Samarra, where I happened to be reporting a story, I was offered an opportunity to interview him. In the end, Mohammed provided a better
glimpse into the mind-set and future of his people and his homeland than the oft-quoted and always-followed oil minister I’d encountered in Washington. In sketching his life and his journey, Mohammed drew a portrait of how oil paid for and provided the inspiration for his violence.
Mohammed had seen better days. He was wearing a green shalwar kameez covered in mud, and his eyes were bloodshot. He had been interrogated almost nonstop by Iraqi and American soldiers and had willingly provided answers, according to Mohammed himself as well as his interrogators. A soiled bandage was wrapped around his head; he said he’d been injured when the car he was traveling in, with two members of his insurgent cell, was attacked by Iraqi soldiers. It was just as probable that he had been roughed up but did not want to say so. We talked in a small office in Samarra’s ad hoc detention center; a desk in our midst had bloodstains down its side. In normal times, the detention center was Samarra’s library, and a Koranic inscription over the entrance announced, “In the name of Allah the most gracious and merciful, Oh Lord, please fill me with knowledge.” Throughout my talk with Mohammed, audible from parts of the detention center I was not allowed to visit, prisoners screamed and retched.
The Saudi regime no longer abets its youths’ taking up arms against infidels, but Mohammed’s passage to Iraq was not so difficult. It began, he told me, with reading and listening on the Internet to sermons by fundamentalist imams. Many of Mohammed’s friends supported jihad, and one of them offered to put him in touch with someone who could facilitate a journey to Iraq. After a friend was killed in a car accident, Mohammed began thinking about the aimlessness of life in Saudi Arabia. He was like dry timber to a match; his life would gain meaning, he decided, through a martyr’s death in Iraq (though not by suicide bombing).
The facilitator gave Mohammed the phone number of a man in Damascus who would spirit him into Iraq. Mohammed memorized the phone number. Once in Damascus, he was instructed to take a bus to the border (he bought his own ticket). There, he met up with a smuggler who demanded $50 and took him into Iraq. After they crossed the border, local insurgents took his passport and the rest of his money, about $250.
Mohammed’s career as a holy warrior lasted a few weeks. He had no skills to offer the insurgency, because he had never fired a weapon or built a bomb, did not know his way around Iraq and could not even blend into a crowd, because his Saudi accent gave him away. When he realized that his insurgency cell was led by a man who seemed more interested in stealing cars than killing Americans, he wanted out. His capture came as a relief, which is why he had not been tortured to the edge of death—he was more than happy to tell everything he knew.
“I made a mistake,” Mohammed said. “I just hope I will be allowed to go back to Riyadh. I want to leave.”
He would not be going home soon. An American military adviser dressed in jeans, a former special forces officer, was monitoring my talk with Mohammed. The American had a pistol strapped to his thigh. The interpreter, with a pistol on his hip, was an overweight Iraqi police official. The Saudi, the American and the Iraqi in this room were in a deep mess, as were their homelands. There were many reasons, and the core one was evoked when Mohammed ventured a guess as to why Iraq had been invaded.
“The Americans want to control Iraq’s resources,” he said. “They came here for oil.”
One day, Vladimir Putin visits a gas station in Chelsea.
No, this is not a setup for a joke.
The station is at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan, where it draws a steady flow of yellow taxis. On September 26, 2003, this intersection attracted instead a fleet of black SUVs with tinted windows, out of which emerged Secret Service agents in dark suits whose semicovert earpieces suggested an event of unusual significance. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was being held at the just-renovated station, and the VIPs included Senator Charles Schumer and Vagit Alekperov, the Russian billionaire whose company, Lukoil, had bought Getty Petroleum’s chain of thirteen hundred gas stations. The pumps at this station were new, as were the paint and signs and flags, bearing the name and red-and-white colors of Lukoil.
The howling of police sirens heralded Putin’s approach. When he emerged from his limousine Schumer and Alekperov attached themselves to his side and guided him to the station’s mini-market, where the president ate a Krispy Kreme donut that had a caloric value at odds with his semifamous judo fitness routine. Approaching a pod of TV cameras, Senator Schumer took the initiative, living proof of the insider joke that nothing is more risky than standing between Chuck Schumer and a microphone. With gasoline prices rising at the time, and with the Middle East becoming a geographic profanity in America, Schumer wanted to thank his new best friend.
Vagit Alekperov, president of Lukoil
“We are welcoming Lukoil to New York because we want to see competition,” he said. “The more competition there is, particularly against OPEC, the better New York will do and the better America will do.”
Schumer beamed broadly and even bowed slightly as he pumped Putin’s hand. The latter, dressed in a statesmanlike gray suit, white shirt and blue tie, smiled without warmth, which is harder than it sounds, and offered his hand in a programmed way. Known for being abrupt, Putin departed without making a public statement. His presence was his message. Alekperov articulated a scrubbed version of the view from the Kremlin. “American consumers are getting a new source of energy,” he declared. “The source is located on reliable Russian territory.”
Russia’s resurrection at the dawn of the twenty-first century is one of the great narratives of our times. It goes like this: After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russia was not so much a country as a black-market bazaar stretching across eleven time zones in which anything could be purchased—a favor from a minister, a murder by a cop, a kilo of uranium. Boris Yeltsin was a brave and well-meaning president, yet a drunk in charge of a collapsed economy. Then, the miracle. Oil prices began to rise and within a few years the nearly 10 million barrels a day that Russia pumped out—it was the second-largest producer in the world, after Saudi Arabia—netted a new fortune. Instead of spiraling into the status of a nuclear-armed failed state, Russia regained its health under Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin. That’s why Putin, rather than dashing around New York to beg for aid, was instead celebrating a Russian company’s purchase of a slice of corporate America.
What’s accurate about this narrative is that oil had pumped Russia full of money, turning it into an energy superpower. By 2004, Moscow counted more billionaires than New York, and middle-class Russians who could not afford a new pair of shoes in the 1990s were flying to Greece on package vacations. But where was Russia heading? The local media, remarkably independent in the Yeltsin era, were all but nationalized by Putin. The opposition, ignored or maligned on the airwaves and harassed in the streets, became irrelevant. As democracy shrank, corruption thrived, life expectancy continued to decline and the security services occupied the commanding heights of not just law enforcement but economic activity. After the inevitable easing of its oil boom, what kind of empire will Russia finally resemble, if it resembles an empire at all?
I had a particular interest in this question. In college, I studied Russian and enrolled in as many courses in Soviet and Russian history as I could find. I even attended a summer program at Leningrad State University, which was Putin’s alma mater, though he had entered the KGB by the time I arrived in his hometown in 1980. What was missing in my studies was oil. I started to fill the gap once by chance in my senior year, when I visited the Rialto theater in Berkeley, California, to watch Andrei Konchalovsky’s Siberiade, an epic about Siberia and its alteration after oil was discovered. I enjoyed the film, but understanding the Soviet Union and the Cold War did not seem to require a grasp of oil’s role. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush and an eminence of the Cold War establishment, manifested this blind spot when I asked him a few years ago about oil in Sovie
t history. “Let’s suppose the Soviet Union was like India, without huge energy resources,” he mused. “It might have made a huge difference. I never thought about it.”
The few people who have thought about it rightly concluded that oil was crucial to the life and death of the Soviet Union, and their findings are relevant to what is unfolding in Russia today. In the late 1950s, the Soviet economy faced an energy crunch; it even had to import some fuel. Then oil was found in Siberia. Moscow could not only fill its own energy needs, it could give oil to its Communist allies and earn cash by selling some of its crude on open markets. When the 1973 embargo initiated high oil prices, Soviet output was fortuitously hitting its stride, eventually reaching 12 million barrels a day, which was more than Saudi Arabia produced. It was a regime-extending windfall for the Kremlin. I remember how Americans always marveled at the inferiority of Soviet products and the mystery of how the USSR kept its tottering command economy going. But it wasn’t so mysterious—80 percent of the Soviet Union’s considerable hard-currency earnings came from energy sales, just as most of Russia’s export revenues now come from the same source. In Soviet times, this financial adrenaline sustained the state but created a vulnerability, because if the oil money ceased to flow, the dysfunctional corpus that was the Soviet economy would crash. “Without the discovery of Siberian oil, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades earlier,” wrote Stephen Kotkin, director of Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University.
The Central Intelligence Agency realized in the 1980s that nuclear missiles were not the only doomsday weapon that could destroy the Soviet Union. A steep fall in oil prices might do the job without radioactive consequences. When Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd visited Washington in 1985, the price of a barrel was $30, a very high level (in those days) that was painful for consumers. President Reagan urged Fahd to lower oil prices, which could be done through higher production. Reagan’s stance was shaped largely by domestic concerns—Americans would have more money in their pockets if oil cost less. But the impact on Soviet finances was emphasized by CIA director William Casey, who met secretly with the Saudi ruler to promote the virtues of low oil prices as an economic dagger into the hearts of the godless Communists in Moscow.