Saudi Arabia Must Keep Pumping Oil to Buy Stability: Peter Coy |
| BusinessWeek - Mar 3, 2011 |
It’s been more than a week since youthful Saudi Arabian demonstrators bucked the regional trend and cheered their ruler, celebrating his return to the kingdom from medical treatment abroad. Saudi Arabia remains relatively calm in a Middle East burning with revolutionary fervor.
All is not well in the desert kingdom, however, despite the respect many Saudis feel toward the frail 86-year-old they call the Custodian of the Two Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud.
Saudi Arabia is a strange amalgam of a fundamentalist brand of Islam that looks to the seventh century for inspiration and an efficient, enlightened energy corporation, Saudi Aramco, that belongs to the 21st. This harnessing of old and new may be nearing the end of its useful life. Saudi Aramco has been the cash register that pays for social stability, but it will have a harder time financing the kingdom in coming years as the cost of finding and producing oil goes up and a needy population grows. In any case, Aramco oil may be as much a curse as a blessing -- it breeds complacency, feeds corruption, and finances the puritanical strain of Islam, Wahhabism, which speaks against that corruption.
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- Posted: 2011-03-03 11:06:56
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