The oil whodunit mystery
United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismissed the Houthi claim that the Yemeni rebel group carried out Saturday’s strike on two Saudi Arabian oil processing facilities. There was ‘‘no evidence’’, he said. Instead, he blamed Iran.
No surprise there. The way things are at the moment, if an asteroid were about to strike the Earth, the US would blame Iran. But there is no evidence the drones came from Iran. Pompeo is simply trading on the assumption that Yemenis are too ignorant to manage that sort of technology, so it must be Iran.
Saudi Arabia, and the alliance of Arab states that has been bombing Yemen since 2015, push the same line. It goes down fairly well in the kingdom, where most people look down on Yemenis for being poor and less educated, but it isn’t actually true.
In fact, the Yemeni air force had Scud missiles for decades before its government collapsed in 2015 and the technicians to service them. Some of those technicians threw in their lot with the Houthis and upgraded those Scuds by inserting a larger fuel tank. The ‘‘Super-scuds’’ were more a morale booster than a war-winner for the Houthis, who live under a daily bombardment from the air, with 7290 documented civilian deaths so far. The attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, if the Houthis’ claim is true, would just be another morale-booster, even though it has temporarily cut world oil production by about 5 per cent.
But was it the Houthis? At this point there is no clear evidence – but it could have been. They have the motive and they may have the technology.
They have used small drones in previous air strikes and there are bigger drones available commercially that could do the damage seen at the Saudi facilities. It would be quite a trick for the Houthis to acquire 10 of them – the number they say they used in their attack – but stranger things have happened. Or maybe they did get their hands on military drones, which would certainly be up to the job. One apparent flaw in the Houthi theory is that there are no civilian drones capable of flying the almost 800 kilometres from Yemen to the Saudi targets. However, most of the land around the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities is open desert and launching the drones from 25-50km away would escape detection.
Who would launch them? There are a million Yemenis resident in Saudi Arabia, plus 2-3 million Saudi citizens who suffer severe discrimination because they follow the Shia version of Islam.
There are even Sunni Saudi citizens, mostly Islamists, who are sufficiently disaffected to attack the regime directly. That is a large pool to fish in if you are looking for local collaborators to smuggle the drones in and launch them – which is what the Houthis say happened. None of this proves it was the Houthis or that it wasn’t Iran.
And we should be grateful US President Donald Trump, for all his faults, is the grown-up in the house this time. On Sunday, Trump tweeted: ‘‘There is reason to believe we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of attack and under what terms we would proceed.’’
Trump doesn’t want a full-scale war with Iran and neither does Saudi Arabia.
It probably won’t happen.