Oil is supposed to have hit over US$60 a barrel this week, and it's rising. Dubai-based analyst Emilie Rutledge had an interesting commentary on al-Jazeera which mentioned the ongoing US occupation of Iraq as a major contributing factor to the sudden, drastic rises in oil prices over the last two years.
From there, Rutledge brought up a good point about war profiteering in the region, when she noted that increasing oil prices-- thus indirectly the Iraq invasion and occupation-- were resulting in record levels of profits lining the pockets of elites in the Gulf states:
Since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, the price of oil has steadily climbed upwards. A barrel of oil today costs
At the same time all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia - have experienced levels of economic growth not witnessed since the 1970’s.
According to a recent Institute of International Finance report, the GCC's aggregate nominal GDP grew by 17% in 2004 and is likely to grow as impressively this year.
OPEC members Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pumped 4% more oil in 2004 than in 2003, leading to a huge increase in revenues.
In the past three years, the value of Saudi oil exports has equaled the revenue generated in the 1990s
True to the sort of mammoth spectacles usually preferred by autocracies, the cheers of the Gulf's oil-gorged US-backed emirs, kings, princes, capitalists and other dictators at the mayhem and carnage of continued occupation and violence in Iraq have not tended to be very subtle. In a recent article on Dubai, for example, Mike Davis writes that testimonies to these record oil profits are in evidence all around, in mushrooming, lavish swathes of consumerist excess, and jaw-dropping temples to Futurism that would have made Albert Speer proud:
Dozens of outlandish mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.
Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill...
...Under his leadership, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board into which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, "cities within cities" -- whatever is the latest fad in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: Everything must be "world class," by which he means number one in The Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first sunken hotel among other firsts.
Of course, to look at the 'price of oil' in terms of profits and dollar value would be to accept a highly flawed ideological construct, one which ignores not only the blood price being paid in Iraq, but also, as Davis writes, the labor of migrant workers who prop up the oil economies of the Gulf States, often facing systematic abuse, racism, and exploitation.
(Meanwhile, on the demand side of things, we might want to start thinking seriously about these issues here in China... as Rutledge sort of alludes to, looking at the current trends of 'development' in China together with theories of peak-oil might suggest that we're setting ourselves up for a big, big fall:
China, which is now the world's second-largest consumer of oil, has over the past few years accounted for approximately 40% of the growth in global demand. The EIA forecasts that Chinese demand will double by 2025.)