Yamani's Oil-Spill: Energetic Arabs on America's Energetic Conflicts

FROM THE ARTICLE: As you (should) know by now, I’m a big fan of the Nitzan-Bichler analysis of Middle East politics on the basis of the global political economy of oil, turning standard Marxist, neo-colonial accounts of petro-politics on their head. Here’s my latest installment based on information I’m more privy to as a Middle Easterner. (If there is such a thing to begin with, bearing in mind also that Nitzan and Bichler are both Israelis, so your guess is as good as mine if they count!) I speak of the three interviews of Sheikh Ahmed Zaki al-Yamani on Al-Jazeera with all of the very interesting revelations he made, the general gist of which fits in with the Nitzan-Bichler thesis. While heavily involved in the mechanics of the 1973 October War ‘oil weapon’, he has to come to conclude thanks to subsequent events, that raising the price of oil was not in the interest of the Arabs but the US and the oil companies.