Use Of The Saudi Oil Weapon.

The IHT report added: "Several European officials said in interviews that they believed that the United States and Saudi Arabia have an unwritten deal to keep oil production up, and prices down, to further squeeze Iran, which is dependent on oil for its economic solvency".

Writing in The Washington Post on Nov. 29, 2006, a senior Saudi government security adviser warned that Saudi Arabia will intervene - using money, weapons and its oil power - to prevent Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias from massacring Iraqi Sunnis once the US begins pulling out of Iraq. The adviser, Nawaf Obaid, is a cautious person working for the Saudi government. He would not have written such a warning in a US newspaper of such high standing and The Washington Post would not have published it, had he not been authorised to do so by someone at the top political leadership.

Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbours, led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt and including Jordan, fear that the sectarian violence in Iraq could spill into large-scale civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis in the Muslim world and set off a political earthquake far beyond this part of the Middle East.

The Muslim world has a population of about 1.4 billion. Of this the Sunnis account for about 90%. The Ja'fari Shi'ites account for less than 10%. But the Shi'ites are concentrated in the world's biggest oil provinces in the Middle East - mainly in Iran, Iraq, the Saudi Eastern Province and in communities spread all the way from Kuwait down to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Obaid wrote in The Washington Post that the Saudi leadership was preparing to revise its Iraq policy to deal with the aftermath of a US pullout, and was considering options including flooding the oil market to crash prices and thus limit Iran's ability to finance Shi'ite militias in Iraq. Obaid said: "To be sure, Saudi engagement in Iraq carries great risks - it could spark a regional war. So be it: the consequences of inaction are far worse". The Washington Post said the opinions expressed were Mr Obaid's own and not those of the Saudi government, headed by King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz. But, again, it is unlikely that such a piece could have been written without permission.

Obaid wrote: "To turn a blind eye to the massacre of Iraqi Sunnis would undermine Saudi Arabia's credibility in the Sunni world [as being its leader] and would be [regarded as a Sunni] capitulation to Iran's militarist actions in the region".

The UK newspaper The Scotsman on Nov. 30 quoted an "official Arab source" as saying: "Saudi Arabia is worried about Iran imposing its political agenda on the region. We don't want Iran and its allies to have a free hand. Iran knows that it is vulnerable and that Saudi Arabia has the upper hand [through the oil weapon] and maintains real weight and power".

The Scotsman quoted a "Western diplomat based in the Saudi capital", Riyadh, as saying that Saudi Arabia was already funding Sunni tribes in Iraq. Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter and a close US ally, fears Shi'ite Iran has been gaining influence since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Tehran Ups The Stakes With 328 Centrifuges: Reuters on Feb. 6 reported European diplomats as saying Iran had installed two cascades of 164 centrifuges each in its Natanz underground nuclear plant, laying a basis for full-scale enrichment of uranium. The cascades were to be test-run shortly, without uranium feedstock inside, and fuel material would then be added if the tests were successful. The 328 centrifuges would be the vanguard of 3,000 planned for installation in the coming months. Iran recently finished installing piping, electrical cables and other equipment needed to begin so-called "industrial-scale" enrichment in the vast subterranean complex, which is fortified and ringed by anti-aircraft guns in the central Iranian desert.

Firing up the cascades would dramatically sharpen Iran's confrontation with Western powers. Reuters quoted diplomats as saying the installation of the first two cascades was likely to be the gist of Iran's planned announcement of "significant" nuclear progress on Feb. 11, when it caps anniversary celebrations of its 1979 Islamic revolution. Reuters quoted an EU diplomat in Vienna, headquarters of the IAEA which has inspectors at Natanz, as saying: "Two cascades have been installed in the underground plant, but they are not yet being run with gas. Their plan is to start dry-spinning the cascades within days and then start feeding them with UF6 (uranium feedstock gas)", alluding to findings during recent visits by IAEA inspectors.