Iranian oil on troubled Arab waters

A hugely unexpected moment at yesterday’s regular OPEC oil cartel meeting.   Iran outfoxed Saudi Arabia and defeated US and Western interests to raise production in the face of rising prices and falling Libyan output.

Iran is in the Chair and managed to get countries including Iraq (in which there are still 46,000 US troops) and Algeria to frustrate Saudi/American desires to get production up.   The Saudis will probably raise production unilaterally.   But it’s a neat insight into the Iran/Saudi interests wrapped up in events in Bahrain.  The failure by the rest of the world to take note of the events in the island state are coming home to roost.

Bahrain’s long Sunni hegemony enshrined in the Royal Family has been under siege from the state’s Shia majority.   My own visits to Bahrain over the years have left me with the firm impression that the Shia’s got a raw deal so that this particular ‘Arab Spring’ has little to do with the power play of Shia Iran one side of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia the other.

The West appears to have sided with the Royal family and the Saudi intervention, for fear that Shia rights would end up producing another Iranian ally.   Now, amid the continued arrests and beatings of Shia protesters, to not much complaint from the rest of us, that is precisely what has happened.

So we are left with the first ever OPEC meeting in which Iran has been able to to muster more than the standard Venezuelan support.

In the meantime the bombing of Tripoli stumbles on inconclusively.  A Whitehall mandarin asked me last night why Mr Cameron has faced none of the peace protests or noise over Libya, that Mr Blair faced over Afghanistan and Iraq.   I did not have a very coherent answer.   It’s a question I am now asking myself!

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