[Peace-discuss] Nixon considered invasion to capture oil fields during '73 embargo

[patton paul]

Britain: U.S. Planned '73 Arab Invasion
By BETH GARDINER

LONDON (AP) - British spy chiefs warned after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war
that they believed the United States might invade Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
Abu Dhabi to seize their oil fields, according to records released
Thursday.

A British intelligence committee report from December 1973 said America
was so angry over Arab nations' earlier decision to cut oil production and
impose an embargo on the United States that seizing oil-producing areas in
the region was ``the possibility uppermost in American thinking.''

Details of the Joint Intelligence Committee report were released under
rules requiring that some secret documents be made public after 30 years.
The report suggested that then-President Nixon might risk such a drastic
move if Arab-Israeli fighting reignited and the oil-producing nations
imposed new restrictions.

The 1973 embargo and production cuts, used by oil-rich Arab nations as a
means to pressure the United States and Western Europe, caused a major
global energy crisis and sent oil prices skyrocketing.

The committee of intelligence service directors calculated that the United
States could guarantee sufficient oil supplies for themselves and their
allies by taking oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, with
total reserves of more than 28 billion tons.

It warned however that the American occupation would need to last 10
years, as western nations developed alternative energy sources, and would
lead to the ``total alienation'' of Arab states and many developing
countries, as well as ``domestic dissension'' in the United States.

Other records released Thursday showed that Prime Minister Edward Heath
was furious at Nixon over the American president's failure to tell him he
was putting U.S. forces on a worldwide alert during the 1973 Arab-Israeli
war.

Heath learned of the alert - considered a high point in Cold War tensions
- from news reports while he waited in the House of Commons for Foreign
Secretary Alec Douglas-Home to make a statement on the Middle East crisis.

Britain's intelligence listening post, Government Communications
Headquarters, had learned of the alert but did not tell Heath's office or
the Foreign Office because officials assumed Heath and Douglas-Home
already knew about it, the papers showed.

Nixon said he put U.S. troops on high alert for just under a week,
starting on Oct. 25, 1973, to show the Soviet Union that America would not
allow it to send military forces to aid Arab states fighting Israel.

The alert covered U.S. forces stationed in Britain, and Heath wrote in a
memo that he thought Nixon's move, which came in the midst of the
Watergate scandal, had been deeply damaging.

``Personally I fail to see how any initiative, threatened or real, by the
Soviet leadership required such a world wide nuclear alert,'' the prime
minister wrote. ``We have to face the fact that the American action has
done immense harm, I believe, both in this country and worldwide.''