The Houthis in Yemen have taken credit for the drone strikes against Saudi Arabia. Iran denies any involvement, but US and UK intelligence say the drones originated from Iran. If this is true these new drones were most likely this was made possible by the top secret stealth drone the Iranians captured from the CIA in December 2011 (and possibly the drone they just shot down this past June).
Saudi Aramco, one of the largest companies in the world and the main source of income for "the Kingdom", has not been daunted by these attacks, and the damage they caused. They were determined to go along with the IPO, hoping it would be the largest in history.
Just like all the state run industries in China, which boast improbably high success rates, most of Aramco's business was shrouded in secrecy for decades. With this recent IPO, however, the curtain has been pulled back and we've uncovered some very unsettling news. Saudi Arabia isn't floating on the ocean of oil that it once was, and that it lead the world to believe. Its oil production is only about 72% of what it had boasted, and most of that oil is diluted with the billions of gallons of seawater they are pumping into the ground to get the oil out. It appears that Saudi oil production peaked in 2008, and with the boom of oil production in the US, the Kingdom cannot pump enough oil to pull a profit, because it simply doesn't have enough.
Saudi Arabia is the biggest welfare state in the history of the world. Nearly all the population subsists off of welfare, subsidized by oil revenue. Saudi citizens bring in "guest workers" from poorer Islamic countries to live and work as slaves on their behalf so as not to soil their clean hands by doing labor of any kind. Fully one third of the population of the Kingdom are foreign nationals residing in country on multi-year work visas. They are not allowed to move about unsupervised by the family who brought them there, and are slaves in all but name. The Kingdom has been desperately trying to diversify its economy for years, seeing as how its vast reserves of oil were being depleted and the millions of uneducated living off welfare would overthrow the King and his tiny oligarchy should the gravy train stop providing for their every need and desire.
If the Houthis, or even Iran, launched an attack on the Saudi oil fields then the current low-level fighting in Yemen may escalate into a larger regional war. A larger regional war may lead to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world's oil flows. The global disruption will be terrible, but it won't be fatal for the United States, which, due to fracking, is a net exporter of fuel. The US does not need oil from the gulf states. And, for Saudi Arabia, that's a big problem since America is able to pump so much oil and gas that it is seriously undercutting the depleted oil sheikh's only source of income.
Regardless of who is responsible, the right thing to do would be to let the Saudis fight their own battles. Unfortunately, what is right is not always what is possible. The US may be caught in a bind because of what lies at the very foundation of the global economy. The US dollar is the world's reserve currency, and it is not based on gold or silver or the "full faith and credit" of the United States government, or even the total economic output of the millions of workers toiling away like myrmidons.
The US dollar, more accurately referred to as the Petrodollar, is based on a tacit agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia that the United States would act as the private military of the Kingdom in exchange for the Kingdom throwing its weight around to influence every other sovereign entity on the planet to use the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency. When the agreement was made many decades ago the Saudi's controlled a third of the world's oil and had the leverage to influence the spending habits of the planet. Now that they have shrunk in relevance thanks to fuel reserves being exploited elsewhere, coupled with their own rapidly diminishing reserves, the Saudis may be contemplating the unthinkable to keep from facing economic collapse and revolution.
The real perpetrators of the attack may not be the Houthis, or the Iranians. The Saudis may have blown up their own oil fields to create an artificial oil shortage to make pumping the black gold profitable again, increasing the price of their IPO. More deviously, the false flag attack may have been conducted to trap the US into a war with Iran to eliminate the Kingdom's main enemy once and for all. Such a war would seriously weaken the United States, including the resources needed for the US to extract and sell its own oil should the economy collapse following the inevitable larger war with Russia that will ensue. This will once again inure the US to dependence on Saudi oil, further strengthening the regime's grip on power. The Saudis may be attempting to damage their major rivals in terms of oil and natural gas production - namely the United States, Russia, and Iran - by dragging them into an unwinnable war so as to stave off the inevitable collapse of their own regime.
The United States may be trapped in a no-win situation that will lead to economic ruin. Either the US abandons the Saudis to fight their own war, which will lead to the abandonment of the Petrodollar as the world's reserve currency and the start of a new depression in the US, or the US gets dragged into war to protect the Petrodollar that will lead to, at the very least, exploding debt and the start of a new depression. There may be no way out of the impending crisis that may have been started by the Saudis' bottomless greed.
But would the Saudis really do such a thing?
All the news not mystical or urban enough for page 1
