Now that our gas prices are through the roof…where’s Kuwait to bail us out? Can someone explain why we had to rescue a country rich enough to defend itself?
How stupid are we to have even supported the first Gulf War? We’re fools! See what thanks we get from Kuwait now??? They’re so slick…sitting so quiet in their little country living high off the hog, and of course, living in “Democrazy”, of course!
Hmm, I wonder if we can make cars run off blood?
So the idea is ‘They are so rich, they should give us their money?’ What a sad thought.
And the fact of the matter is that compared to the size of the U.S. economy, they aren’t particularly rich. It’s a tiny country with a ppp-GDP of ~$48 billion. The only reason the per capita income is so high is that only a minority of the pretty small population shares in the wealth.
Their ability to ‘bail us out’ is pretty much nil, even if they wanted to.
“Rich” and “strong” are not always the same. How could a country the size of Kuwait ever plausibly have fielded an army to match that of Hussein’s Iraq? Yes, Taiwan has been able to hold off any threat of aggression from the incomparably larger PRC – but that’s because they have the Taiwan Strait and a good navy. Hussein’s troops just had to walk across the border.
How rich is Kuwait? Do you even know how much Kuwait did pay for? No, you just wanted to rant without doing one iota of research. It’s not that hard to find out about the Gulf War:
Of course we didn’t have our own, selfish, motivation for wanting the S.H. out of Kuwait. I mean, we couldn’t have cared less if he marched into Saudi Arabia as well, taking that source of oil for himself and/or his plans for dominating the Middle East. No, that couldn’t have been it at all. We were just duped.
When come back, bring an argument, not a rant.
Kuwait’s not going to scab out on the OPEC. The economic and political consequences would probably make it a bad idea for them, even if they got a lot of American money for it.
Like it or not, Kuwait can’t “bail us out.” The price of oil isn’t set by OPEC in any meaningful sense anymore; it’s set by supply and demand. Excess sweet crude production capacity around the world is pretty minimal right now, and that’s not going to change - except for the worse.
Suppose for a second that Kuwait sold 50 million barrels of oil at $10/barrel to a U.S. company, call it Acme Oil Importers, Inc. Acme, noting that the world price of oil is running at about $47/barrel right now, would sell the oil at that price, clearing a quick $1.85 billion profit. The market price of oil would be unaffected, as would the price of gasoline.
Now, about Gulf War I: I’d argue that the civilized countries of the world have good reason to block nations’ attempts at expansion by conquest: we all profit in a world where commercial rivalry has taken the place of war, and if we bloody the noses of the occasional dictators who try to conquer neighboring lands, fewer of them will try it, and fewer of them will see reason to build up large armies and weapons stockpiles to begin with.
I’d ask why we were in such a hurry to go to war against Saddam in 1991, when negotiations with him were moving in the right direction: just a few weeks before we started bombing Iraq that January, he’d released 3,000 U.S. hostages. IMHO, it was worth another few weeks of negotiation to see if we could find a face-saving way for Saddam to back out of Kuwait.
But that’s my only quibble. If it turned out he wasn’t going to budge, the best thing for us and for the world was to push him out of Kuwait. It has nothing to do with the Kuwaitis, and everything to do with turning our world into one where aggression doesn’t pay. (Similarly justified, IMHO, were Britain’s kicking Argentina out of the Falklands in the early 1980s, and our kicking Milosevic out of assorted non-Serb pieces of the former Yugoslavia.)
The rise in gas price has very little or no relationship to Kuwait. It has more to do with the following facts:
[ul][li] China and India have greatly increased the amount of oil that they use.[/li][li] The price of oil is based on dollars and the dollar has gone into the dumper.[/li][li] No new refineries have been allowed to be built for enviromental reasons (also add nuclear energy being curtailed).[/li] Other reasons to be added by those pointing out what I forgot. :D[/ul]
My understanding is every nation except Saudi Arabia is at peak production all the time anyway, so they can’t increase exports right now.
It’s worse than that. Even SA might have passed its all-time production peak and have no strategic reserves left with which to stabilize oil prices. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1DE9-42BC-920B-91E5850FB067.htm See also http://www.hubbertpeak.com/summary.htm.
Does anybody still think the Gulf War was about Kuwait?
Not quite. We have buckets of oil in the ground. (I went out this morning to check, it is still there.) What we lack is the ability to get it to market.
When the price of oil was low there was no need to build more wells, pipes, terminals and all that. Now that we need them, it will take time to build them.
[QUOTE=kniz]
The rise in gas price has very little or no relationship to Kuwait. It has more to do with the following facts:
[ul][li] China and India have greatly increased the amount of oil that they use.[/li][li] The price of oil is based on dollars and the dollar has gone into the dumper.[/li][li] No new refineries have been allowed to be built for enviromental reasons (also add nuclear energy being curtailed).[/li][li] Other reasons to be added by those pointing out what I forgot. :D[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Inflation. The current price of oil is actually not very high, when you measure it against a constant dollar.
You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “peak oil production.” It does not mean that a given oilfield (or national oil industry), having passed its production peak, is about to run out of oil immediately; it means that its exploitation follows a bell curve, it has passed the peak of that bell curve, and henceforth it will follow the downslope – that is, each year it will cost more and more to force less and less oil out of the ground. The United States (as geologist M. King Hubbert predicted in the 1950s) passed its all-time oil production peak in 1970. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil) There are still plenty of productive oil wells in the U.S. – but not enough to meet our present needs, nor even to meet our needs if they had not increased since 1970.
The PRC could have blown Taiwan’s defenses to smithereens at any time since about the mid-1950’s. They were (and are) dissuaded only by the military and economic support provided by a large chunk of the industrialized world, and by the fact that the same large chunk of the industrialized world made it extremely clear that an invasion of Taiwan would be regarded as a Very Bad Thing. A fact which was not true for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. A case could (and has) been made that Hussein simply misunderstood the vague signals he was receiving.
ummm, actually no. There have been multiple threads about this.
Well, I don’t remember seeing any. Educate me.