Saudis Will Pump More Oil, Suggest U.N. Moves

With tens of thousands of soldiers already deployed in desert encampments near the Kuwait border, a clearly more confident Saudi Arabia called Saturday for the United Nations to explore military options against Iraq and said that the kingdom is ready to pump an extra 2 million barrels of oil a day to help ease international shortfalls.

Shedding some of the diplomatic caution that has so far hushed the kingdom’s public response to the Persian Gulf crisis, top Saudi officials declared that diplomacy had “failed” to dislodge Iraqi troops from Kuwait and said “the issue of peace and war” depends on Iraq’s response to the crisis.

“We have tried in every way possible, through direct contact with the Iraqi leadership and multiple contact with other Arab countries, to prevent the consequences. We have failed,” said Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal. “We have failed for one simple reason, that throughout these efforts Iraq has refused . . . a solution to the problem, which is withdrawal from Kuwait and restoration of its legitimate leadership.

“Any diplomatic contact without these two principles,” Faisal added, “is diplomatic contact that is doomed to die.”

The Saudi foreign minister took note of suggestions by some U.N. members that the United Nations go beyond its call for economic sanctions and authorize military enforcement of the embargo against Iraqi trade. “We wholeheartedly support that action,” he said.

Saudi officials called for an immediate meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to respond to an anticipated worldwide shortfall of 4 million barrels of oil a day resulting from an international embargo on Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil that followed Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of the tiny Persian Gulf emirate.

Saudi Oil Minister Hisham Nazir said Saudi Arabia is prepared to pump an extra 2 million barrels of oil a day if OPEC fails to find some other resolution to the shortfall. But OPEC countries are still likely to fall short of meeting the worldwide shortage by as much as 1 million barrels a day at current production capacity, Nazir said.

“We do not necessarily want to take unilateral action. We prefer to go through OPEC. But if they refuse to meet, then we have no alternative,” the oil minister said. “If we discover that there is an obstinate position on the part of some of the OPEC countries, we are not going to let the Third World countries and other countries go down the drain.”

Saudi officials also for the first time declared that Iraq’s oil pipeline to the kingdom has been shut off, lending official sanction to the effective halt in operation of the 979-mile facility since an international trade embargo nearly eliminated buyers for Iraqi oil.

The Saudis, previously reluctant to antagonize Iraq, had not made any official announcement earlier, but last week quietly declined to send out tugboats to allow two Iraqi tankers to dock at the pipeline loading facility on the Red Sea coast at Muajjiz.

On Saturday, in an unusual, daylong session with American and British television networks, newspapers and news agencies, Saudi Oil Minister Nazir announced, “The pipeline is closed, and will remain so until the crisis is over and the U.N. says so.”

Privately, Saudi officials admitted that they had been waiting for American and Arab troops to move into defensive positions before making any pronouncements likely to antagonize Iraq, which has 170,000 troops in Kuwait, many massed near the Saudi border.

Now, many Saudis are prepared to take an even harder line. The foreign minister asserted that even if Iraq agrees to withdraw from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia will demand “international guarantees” to assure that it is a permanent withdrawal.

Though Saudi Arabia has said it has no desire to interfere in Iraq’s internal affairs, some officials conceded privately that the guarantee Saudi Arabia most wants to see for Kuwait’s security is an end to the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Saudi Arabia is providing aid to resistance fighters in Kuwait and is also supporting efforts by the Kuwaitis to destabilize the government in Iraq, including radio broadcasts into Baghdad, said one high-ranking Saudi official.

“The preparedness for such activities are under way,” he said. “In our view, if Saddam Hussein goes, his system will go with him . . . the whole structure of the Baath Party in Iraq will fall.”

Saudi intelligence reports for the first time show that tanks and other armored vehicles have been deployed along Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia. Previously, all military activity had been confined to the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border, and Saudi officials have not determined how to interpret the new deployment, which one official said is still relatively small.

Iraqi troops in Kuwait appeared to be stationed in a large arc beginning at the Kuwaiti capital and extending westward and then south toward the Saudi border. Most are “dug in” in defensive positions, and the nearest large troop concentration is about 25 miles from the Saudi border, said one official. However, the Saudis remain alert because Iraq’s troops were similarly deployed along the Kuwaiti border shortly before the Aug. 2 invasion, he said.

Saudi officials have also detected the movement of large numbers of Iraqi troops away from Iraq’s border with Iran in the days since Hussein made peacemaking overtures to end Iraq’s 10-year-old conflict with Iran that halted in a grudging cease-fire last year.

There is no evidence yet to show that troops from the Iranian front have been redeployed to the Kuwaiti border, but Saudi intelligence reports do show an estimated five or six divisions of Iraqi troops massed at the Iraq-Kuwait border near Basra “which can reach us very quickly,” one official said.

Iraqi troops have been seen in Kuwait with protective gear against chemical weapons, he added.

Acting to contain a worldwide pricing spiral that has driven oil prices past $28 a barrel, Saudi Arabia has asked for an “immediate” OPEC meeting to resolve what Nazir acknowledged is “a destabilized market . . . a crisis.”

Saudi officials maintain that the price spirals are a result of “panic pricing” but are strongly critical of OPEC’s slowness to convene a meeting to discuss a resolution.

“We honestly don’t see how an organization which is in a crisis refuses even to meet to discuss the crisis,” Nazir said.

Saudi Arabia, currently producing 5.38 million barrels a day, has had requests for production of 7.9 million barrels a day in the weeks since the crisis began.

Nazir said Saudi Arabia can gear up to meet about half the 4-million-barrel-a-day shortfall caused by the loss of Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil to the world market. “In a very, very short time, days,” Nazir said. Other OPEC countries such as Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates can, by Saudi estimates, produce an additional 1 million barrels a day, he said.

“To tell you the truth, our numbers don’t show so far that they can (make up the remaining shortfall),” he said. “I’m not so sure they can completely make up the shortage.”