Wash. Post admits Hamas is to blame

In a rare instance of willingness to acknowledge savages are to blame for causing a "cease-fire" to collapse, the Washington Post admits the Hamas is the one at fault here, but that's otherwise all:

After just a week, the fragile Gaza peace is fraying. Israel halted the transfer of aid to Gaza on Sunday and launched airstrikes after it said Hamas fighters killed two Israeli soldiers. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have threatened to withhold reconstruction funds so long as Hamas stays in power. Given the continued barbarity of Hamas, a happy future for the people of Gaza is probably out of reach in the near term. Yet full war is also unlikely to resume.

Consider this a win for President Donald Trump, who brought about the ceasefire. It’s also an acceptable outcome for Israel, which has seen the return of all living hostages. And, perhaps most important, this might the best anyone can really hope for in the Middle East.

Naturally, they vehemently refuse to acknowledge Islam's got any accountability here, and if they don't think it should stop being indoctrinated, then no wonder nobody can hope for much in the middle east. And of course, they fail to acknowledge that any crowds in Gaza who cheer when alleged collaborators with Israel are murdered execution style by the Hamas only make clear they're as barbaric as the overlords are. One of the biggest tragedies in this case is that the Gazan Muslims are "happy", but for all the wrong reasons. If any of them are leaving for other countries, hopefully ones like the UAE and even Indonesia, it'll be far better as a result.

Muslim gulf states buy real estate near the District of Columbia

While most conservatives' attention may have been focused upon China's buying of real estate in the USA, it would seem little attention's been given to how Islamic countries like Qatar and the UAE have been doing the same:

Arab Gulf states have quietly and sometimes secretly purchased at least $282 million worth of real estate in Washington’s most elite neighborhood.

Situated high atop the banks of the Potomac River and overlooking the nation’s capital, Virginia’s “Gold Coast” has long been the home of America’s ruling class. Today, it’s home to a number of high-profile Washingtonians, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whose home on Arlington’s tony Chain Bridge Road has been swarmed by an encampment of anti-Israel protesters since Hamas’s October 7th invasion of Israel.

But since 2019, a mysterious entity called 600 CBR LLC has been buying up property in the area, building up a compound that sold for three times as much as Jeff Bezos’ $23 million D.C. mansion. Though the buyers behind 600 CBR are unknown, the real estate blog UrbanTurf reported in 2022 that “the buyer is from the United Arab Emirates and that settlement documents confirm this.”

The embassy of the United Arab Emirates owns extensive property just down the block from the 600 CBR compound, and the compound’s primary residence is directly across the street from Blinken’s $5 million home. Since October 7th, anti-Israel protesters have been living in the narrow strip between the road and the LLC’s property, with their tents, signs, and buckets of fake blood just inches from its fence.

It is unclear whether the various Arab nations who own the properties are involved in the protests outside Blinken’s home, which The Daily Wire reported likely violate several state and local laws. The UAE embassy did not answer questions from The Daily Wire about whether UAE royals are behind the purchase, nor their stance on the protest outside Blinken’s home.

[...] The Embassy of the State of Qatar’s nearby compound is assessed to be worth $20 million. The oil-rich nation has just 300,000 citizens—half the size of the District of Columbia—but recently counted 2 million residents. The vast majority of its residents are foreign laborers working in conditions sometimes described as “modern slavery.”

Qatar has been in the international spotlight since Hamas’s invasion of Israel. The terrorist group’s leaders operate out of Qatar, and the nation’s representative to the Arab parliament said “There can be no peace or negotiations with the Zionist entity.” Qatar has also enmeshed itself into D.C.’s culture by becoming part-owner of the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards.

This news certainly does make clear the whole notion the UAE and Saudi Arabia have improved, morally or otherwise, is still far from being so. The question now is whether anything can be done to reverse the situation. This is disturbing and can't be taken lightly. Even in Europe, there's only so much of this that can't be overlooked.

37th Israeli government, and Netanyahu's 6th term as premier, is sworn in

Israel's 37th government has been sworn in at the Knesset, and this also marks the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu's 6th term as prime minister:

Israel's 37th Government was sworn in on Thursday, with Benjamin Netanyahu beginning his sixth term as prime minister.

The swearing-in ceremony began at 11:00 a.m., during which Netanyahu presented his agenda to the Knesset plenum. These include stopping the Iran nuclear program, developing state infrastructure and restoring internal security and governance.

During his address, which was interrupted by members of the opposition, Netanyahu said "Losing elections isn't the end of democracy – it's the essence of democracy. In a democracy, we don't climb the fences of the Capitol, and we don't climb the fences of the Knesset."

Unfortunately, this is something the current leftist opposition in the Knesset no longer seems willing to respect, and likely never did. I guess that's why the sad part is how Yair Lapid, upon leaving office, refused to shake Netanyahu's hand:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first to take the oath of office. Most of the heads of the opposition parties were present out of respect for the ceremony, but opposition leader Yair Lapid left the plenary hall even before Netanyahu was sworn-in without shaking his hand as is customary.

What really makes this sad is that it hints at where things are headed with the left, which is bad for democratic relations. It could take years to mend the damage Lapid's causing with his ostracizing approach. But, this does demonstrate why it's good he's now out of office. He was causing all the harm he's going to cause, even in the opposition.

So let's hope Netanyahu can handle all the trouble the left's already causing. What if they intent to do everything they can to sabotage his efforts to make peace with Saudi Arabia, for example? Regrettably, that's something they're more than willing to do, if reality says anything about their conduct.

WASH. TIMES LOOKS AT THE STORY OF OBAMA'S BOW

After a week or so of the MSM being silent about president Obama's bow to the Saudi king, The Washington Times has addressed the issue:

In a shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate, President Obama bowed to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London last week.

Mr. Obama later said in Strasbourg, France, "We have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect." Symbolism is important in world affairs. By bending over to show greater respect to Islam, the U.S. president belittled the power and independence of the United States.

The bow was an extraordinary protocol violation. Such an act is a traditional obeisance befitting a king's subjects, not his peer. There is no precedent for U.S. presidents bowing to Saudi or any other royals. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt shook hands with Saudi King Abdulaziz in February 1945. Granted, Mr. Roosevelt was wheelchair-bound, but former President Dwight D. Eisenhower shook hands when he first met King Saud in January 1957. Mr. Obama's bow to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques does not help his image with those who believe he is secretly a Muslim, and why he chose to bow only to the Saudi King and not to any other royals remains unexplained.

No Americans of any station are required to bow to royalty. It is one of the pillars of American exceptionalism that our country rejected traditional caste divisions. Article I Section 9 of the Constitution forbids titles of nobility and stipulates that no officeholder or government employee may "accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state" without the consent of Congress. Judith Martin wrote in her Miss Manners column in 2001 that bowing "is not an ordinary bit of foreign etiquette one might adopt out of courtesy when traveling. ... Americans do not properly bow to any royalty. We show respect for other countries' leaders the same way we do to our own."

Press outlets have been conspicuously silent on Mr. Obama's bow. Compare this to the New York Times' reaction when former President Bill Clinton inclined a bit too far when meeting Japanese Emperor Akihito in 1994. According to the Gray Lady, "The image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent president, and the Emperor of Japan." Former President George W. Bush received thorough press attention after being photographed holding hands with then-Crown Prince Abdullah in 2005. "It clearly strikes a nerve," CBS News reported, while David Letterman satirized Mr. Bush as "officially the gayest president since Lincoln." These two cases were tame compared to Mr. Obama's full-out genuflection, which makes us wonder why it is not worthy of comment.

Mr. Obama is proving that one can be elected president without knowing how to behave presidentially. His servile gesture was fully fitting with the tone of his humility tour of Europe. In his eagerness to be loved personally, the president has lost sight of the fact that the leader of the free world also must be respected.

Now that's really strong stuff there. As far as I know, none of the presidents of European countries who use that kind of political system bowed to the king, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have policies similar to the US on how to greet monarchies, which if so would make them smarter than Obama on the subject.

MSM DOESN'T WANT BLACK COMMUNITY TO KNOW OBAMA DID SOMETHING DEMEANING

Power Line tells that the MSM has largely decided to go silent on the subject of Obama's bow to the Saudi king. Even the Wash. Post hasn't run a full story on it, and while Michael Fletcher, their White House correspondent, did run an online question about it, he still seemed to prefer avoiding the challenging answers about it.

I can guess why they'd rather avoid the subject - they don't want the black community to know that Obama, as a man of black descent, did something that's insulting and demeaning to the community. Challenging question then: does this not suggest that the MSM really does have contempt for racial minorities?

TOTALITARIANISM IS MAKING A COMEBACK

Claudia Rosett warns in Forbes that totalitarianism is on the rise again in the 21st century (via Hot Air):

Dictators are making a comeback.

Just four or five years ago, the headlines were full of democratic movements, notably the yellow, rose and cedar "revolutions" in the Ukraine, Georgia and Lebanon. The Taliban had been toppled, Saddam Hussein overthrown. Democratic stirrings were heralded from the streets of Iran and China to promises of reform in Saudi Arabia and Libya. Freedom was continuing a roll begun way back in the Reagan era. Tyrants were on the outs with polite society.

These days, dictators are on a roll. Among the many signs was last week's op-ed in The New York Times by none other than Muammar Qaddafi, unrepentant and brutal tyrant in Tripoli for the past 40 years--though, for the purposes of this piece, the Times identifies him politely as "the leader of Libya." I am still pondering that article, and not solely because this is the same New York Times that last fall rejected an op-ed by John McCain when he was running for president. Qaddafi used his patch of American editorial space to float a plan that would demographically blitz democratic Israel out of existence by setting up a single combined Palestinian-Israeli state, which he suggests we call "Isratine."

It's tempting simply to dismiss such stuff as unintended self-parody--whether on the part of Qaddafi, the Times or both. But it is also a token that tyrants are back in style, not only feeling safe to venture out of their spider holes but preening as elder statesmen and increasingly welcomed back to the parlors, editorial pages and negotiating tables of democratic high society. [...]

Freedom House Research Director Arch Puddington highlights Iran, Russia, Zimbabwe and Venezuela as showing "enhanced anti-democratic tendencies." But these are surrounded as well by a scene of broader decline.

Freedom House attributes part of this slide to "gathering authoritarian pushback against opposition parties, nongovernmental organizations and the press." It might be tempting to blame such pushback on President Bush's democracy agenda. Except, coinciding with this decline, Bush dropped the dead-or-alive approach to terrorists and their state sponsors during his second term, and soft-pedaled the democratization push. Increasingly during his final years in office, he relied on soft power, talks at Annapolis, talks with North Korea, talks via the European Union and the mechanisms of the predominantly undemocratic United Nations.

I'm glad to see that she's acknowledging Dubya's betrayal of principles that really took effect during his second term of office. But she's wrong that there's ever been any real democratic push in Lebanon, and come to think of it, in Iran or China either. And Russia is certainly moving back to totalitarianism, and has been ever since Vladimir Putin took office.

The Cold War, it's sad to say, has returned, mainly because would-be democratic leaders failed to make any convincing effort to ensure that democracy would hold steady.

And one more note: to think that the House of Saud could be so easily persuaded to allow democracy is simply missing reality.

A MOSQUE NEAR THE NORTH POLE

Guess where the latest plan is to build a mosque?

While the North Pole’s landscape may evoke images of igloos and barren snow fields, the crescent moon and minaret will soon vie for their place in Norway’s Arctic thanks to a Saudi businessman’s donation to build the region’s first mosque.

A Saudi businessman has donated 20 million Krone ($2.78 million) to build the first mosque in the Arctic region, near the northern part of Norway, according to a news report published by a local Saudi newspaper.

It's just like Norway to do something like this, and allow the House of Saud to build a foothold for the Ummah in a district of theirs.

Via Galliawatch.

GORDEN BROWN INVITES IN SAUDI ARABIA TO INVEST IN THE UK'S NUCLEAR INDUSTRY

Mark Alexander of A New Dark Age Is Dawning notified me of this June 21, 2008 article in the Telegraph. Excerpt:

Gordon Brown has invited oil-rich states like Saudi Arabia to invest in the next generation of British nuclear power stations.

The Prime Minister extended the invitation to OPEC members as part of a deal he will propose at a summit in Saudi Arabia on Sunday.... 



And check out the photo of Queen Elizabeth II on the arm of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The UK is selling itself out, even to developing alternative sources of energy!

The Saudi investments in Bill and Hillary Clinton

Democratic Underground certainly comes in handy from time to time. This post, which describes the Clintons' eight-figure ties to the Saudis, deserves investigation.

...when we learn that the Saudis were... 'donating' to the Clintons, we need to ask ourselves, how much... and what did they get in return?

Bill Clinton's presidential library raised more than 10 percent of the cost of its $165 million facility from foreign sources, with the most generous overseas donation coming from Saudi Arabia, according to interviews yesterday.

The royal family of Saudi Arabia gave the Clinton facility in Little Rock about $10 million... according to people directly familiar with the contributions...

Craig Unger, the author of House of Bush/House of Saud ...claimes ... "Finally, it is worth pointing out, as Craig Unger does in his book, that Saudi Arabia has not just contributed to the Bush family. According to Unger, Bill Clinton approached Prince Bandar in 1991 for $20 million to launch a Middle East studies program at the University of Arkansas and that Prince Bandar announced that the request was approved shortly before Bill Clinton won the presidential election...

...There may be some irony in that, by Unger's own account, Saudi Arabia has contributed eight times as much to Bill Clinton's charities than to George H.W. Bush's" http://www.newsaic.com/f911chap3-2a.html... So what did the Saudis get in return ? ...Did the Clintons think that the money was 'no strings attached' ? ..of course not..the favors would start to roll...

The Clinton administration shut down a 1995 investigation of Islamic charities, concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia's suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation that raised millions for anti-Israel terrorists, federal officials told The Washington Times.... If federal agents had been allowed to conduct the investigation they wanted in 1995, they would have made the connection between the Saudi government and those charities," said Mr. Loftus, now a St. Petersburg, Fla., lawyer who filed a lawsuit last week accusing a Florida charity of fraud...

"Had the charities been shut down, they would have been unable to raise the millions that since have been used by terrorists in hundreds of suicide attacks," he said...

Following the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, Clinton hunted Osama with a passion -- but a passion circumscribed by the desire to protect the sheikdom sitting atop our oil lifeline. In 1994, a Saudi diplomat defected to the United States with 14,000 pages of documents from the kingdom's sealed file cabinets. This mother lode of intelligence included evidence of plans for the assassination of Saudi opponents living in the West and, tantalizingly, details of the $7 billion the Saudis gave to Saddam Hussein for his nuclear program -- the first attempt to build an Islamic Bomb...

The Saudi government, according to the defector, Mohammed Al Khilewi, slipped Saddam the nuclear loot [...thinking...] he would only use the bomb to vaporize Iranians... Clinton granted the Saudi defector asylum, but barred the FBI from looking at the documents.

Al Khilewi's New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told me he was stunned. Wildes handles some of America's most security-sensitive asylum cases. "We said to the FBI, 'Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We'll even pay for the photocopying!'" But the agents who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil.

In 1997, the Canadians caught and extradited to America one of the Khobar Towers attackers. In 1999, Vernon Jordan's law firm stepped in and -- poof! -- the killer was shipped back to Saudi Arabia before he could reveal all he knew about al Qaeda (valuable) and the Saudis (embarrassing). I reviewed, but was not permitted to take notes on, the alleged terrorist's debriefing by the FBI. To my admittedly inexpert eyes, there was enough on al Qaeda to make him a source on terrorists worth holding on to. Not that he was set free -- he's in one of the kingdom's dungeons -- but his info is sealed up with him. The terrorist's extradition was "Clinton's." "Clinton's parting kiss to the Saudis," as one insider put it...

It certainly begs the question: Why have the Saudis invested in Bill and Hillary Clinton?


And why are the Clintons withholding their Library's list of donors?

TWO IMPORTANT SPEECHES

First, Melanie Phillips points to a speech posted at Family Security Matters written by Newt Gingrich, that he gave at a JNF meeting at the Selig Center in which he really nailed what's wrong with today's politicians:

And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning. It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, ‘Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia.’

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy – in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, ‘We should wipe out Israel,’ he may say, ‘We should defeat the United States,’ but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?...

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, ‘I don't recognize that you exist,’ you don't start a negotiation. The person says, ‘I literally do not recognize’ and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is ‘Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody.’ And then he'll say, ‘Well, that's different.’

We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth…None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, ‘Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me.’ Our enemies get up every morning and say, ‘We hate the West. We hate freedom.

Gingrich makes a lot of good points about how it is the government itself that is making itself into modern-day Chamberlains and not willing to be truthful about the enemies of the west. Read the whole thing.

Next we have one given by Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset last week, in which he points out that we do not condition our existence on the enemies' agreement:

The UN resolution of November 29, 1947 recognizing a Jewish state was an important moment in the history of our nation, and an important moment in the history of all nations.

Since then, we have made peace with Egypt and Jordan, but the obstacle to widening the circle of peace remains what it has always been: the refusal of Israel's enemies to recognize the Jewish State in any borders.

Our enemies do not want an Arab state next to Israel. They want an Arab state instead of Israel.

Time and again they were offered an Arab state next to Israel: first, in the partition plan of 1947; then, indirectly, in the Oslo accords; later, unequivocally, at Camp David in 2000; and finally, in the countless declarations since then by both Israeli and international leaders which have called for two states for two peoples.

And how did our enemies respond to these offers? Time and again they violently rejected them. In 1947, they launched terror attacks and then an all out war to annihilate the Jewish state.

During the Oslo peace process, they terrorized Israel with suicide bombers; after Camp David, they orchestrated the Second Intifadah in which over 1,000 Israelis were murdered; since then they have fired thousands of Katushya rockets on the Galilee and thousands of Kassam rockets on the Western Negev in order, they say, "to liberate occupied Palestine" -- in other words, "occupied" Haifa, "occupied" Acre, "occupied" Sderot and "occupied" Ashkelon.

There's more to read of this too at the link.

Challenging Shari'a Law

Photo credit
Recently, Saudi Arabia defended the sentence passed on a nineteen-year-old Muslima who was gang raped. Originally she was sentenced to ninety lashes, but upon review the Saudi General Court in Saudi increased her sentence to 200 lashes. The woman had defied shari'a law in that she was in the company of an unrelated male. According to this November 21, 2007 article in the Washington Post,

The attack occurred in 2006. The victim says she was in a car with a male student she used to know trying to retrieve a picture of her. She says two men got into the car and drove them to a secluded area where she was raped by seven men. Her friend also was assaulted.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Our State Department has "expressed astonishment" over the barbarism of punishing the victim. Hello, State Department? Are you unaware of how Saudi enforces shari'a law? Are you aware of how all-encompassing shari'a law is in some Muslim countries?

Read the rest at Always On Watch.

The Saudis Take On Global Warming

Excerpt from this article in the November 18, 2007 edition of the Washington Post, about the recent OPEC meeting:

King Abdullah warned global warming activists and lawmakers against targeting oil use. "The echoes repeated here and there about the effect of petroleum on the environment is a discourse laced with . . . fallacies," he said.

Environmental concerns have come up repeatedly this week because OPEC officials worry that new taxes or cap-and-trade programs for greenhouse gases could add to the cost of petroleum products and put a dent in demand for oil. Earlier in the week, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said that "we do not like policies that discriminate against petroleum or fossil fuels in general."

Al Gore, take notice. You've been called a liar, and the Saudis worry that your global-warming agenda could dent their bank accounts.

CANDID CAMERA

Sort of, but not for humor's sake.

Article from the November 17, 2007 edition of the Washington Post:

A dispute among OPEC ministers during a closed-door session Friday spilled into the open when a camera was inadvertently left on, broadcasting into the nearby press room a quarrel over whether to stop pricing crude oil in dollars.

According to reporters who watched the broadcast for half an hour before Saudi officials pulled the plug, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki urged the group to price oil in another currency or a basket of currencies, a perennial issue that has drawn greater attention recently because of the sinking value of the dollar.

"We're backing this Iranian proposal," Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said in Spanish, according to Bloomberg News.

But Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal rejected the idea, suggesting that the group refer the question to the finance ministers from member countries of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. But he said the group should not announce that its finance ministers would look at the issue because that might drive the dollar down even further.

"There will be journalists who will seize on this point, and we don't want the dollar to collapse instead of doing something good for OPEC," Faisal told the ministers.

The weak dollar has hurt oil exporters who use oil revenue to buy goods priced in euros or yen. That has added inflation pressures in oil exporting countries. On the other hand, many wealthy exporters, including Saudi Arabia, hold huge dollar-denominated assets.

The United States has imposed sanctions on Iran's biggest banks and pressured other banks to stop dealing with Iran. Tehran is already selling oil in euros and yen, but those transactions mostly translate the current dollar price, oil traders said.

Apparently, Saudi's protectio of its own interests could work in favor of U.S. interests. For now.

Meanwhile, next year, Saudi is planning to pump out more high-quality oil. From this article in the November 17, 2007 edition of the Washington Post:

...Next year, Saudi Aramco, the state oil company, plans to boost production by 250,000 barrels a day, one step in an effort to expand the kingdom's oil-production capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day from the 11.3 million barrels. The new production is part of a strategy that could ease market tension and is designed to preserve Saudi Arabia's ability to produce 1.5 million to 2 million barrels a day more than its actual output in the face of rising world oil demand, said a senior Saudi Oil Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Tell me of any other country that's made commitments this broad on its own," Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the deputy minister of petroleum and natural resources, said during preparations for this weekend's summit of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. "We are the only country with a policy of maintaining excess capacity."

[...]

This week, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi reiterated pledges that Saudi Arabia would eventually deliver 1 million barrels of oil a day to China and keep the world well supplied.

Some analysts said that could be difficult because many of Saudi Arabia's oil fields are old and in decline. The rate of natural decline in Saudi fields was slightly faster than anticipated this year, according to a Saudi strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the subject. From 2005 to 2009, output from existing Saudi fields is expected to decline by 800,000 barrels a day. But Saudi Arabia's output capacity is about the same as it was 30 years ago.

If the amount of oil the Saudis can produce is open to question, the cost of production is not. Naimi estimated that it costs Saudi Arabia about $2 to produce a barrel of oil. Developing new fields is also cheap, he said, running about a quarter or less of exploration and development costs elsewhere. Asked whether Saudi Arabia would be interested in investing in Canadian tar sands, which require more than $40 per barrel in investment, Naimi said there would be no point....

Oh, goody, goody! Let's clap our hands in gratitude for the Saudis and their generous promise to pump more oi. But remember that any surplus of oil from Saudi will occur after the heating season is over here in the States.

Here's a picture of those in control:


No wonder their facial expressions are so smug!