Gasoline Prices -- Oil Issues

Gasoline Prices -- Oil Issues

What was Peyton Feltus referring to (in the article by Elizabeth Souder) when he said the word "shortage" conjures up "images for us older folks of the old days of the 70s…"?

What Feltus was alluding to was the 1973 Arab oil embargo -- carried out by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) -- that had a profound impact on transportation in the U.S. And caused sharp political responses from the United States toward the Arab states. The embargo was basically a political tactic by the Muslim states to punish the U.S. And other Western countries (including the Netherlands) that were supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.

To understand the background for the OPEC Oil Embargo it is important first to relate to the reasons for the attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria. The OPEC nations (Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar and Syria) used the power of their oil in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, which was launched against Israel by Egypt and Syria (who were not in OPEC at that time). The reason for the attack on Israel was to force Israel to withdraw from the territories they had occupied since the 1967 war. The Yom Kippur war started on the 6th of October, according to the History Learning Site. That is the holiest day of the year in the Jewish faith; Yom Kippur is "The day of Atonement" -- a day of prayer and fasting -- and apparently Egypt and Syria thought they could catch the Israeli military forces by surprise.

The war began with an estimated 1,400 Syrian tanks faced off against 150 Israeli tanks on the Golan Heights; in the Suez region, the History Learning Site claims that there were only 500 Israeli soldiers against an estimated 80,000 Egyptian troops. Other nations in that region helped the Arab cause (Libya gave money and weapons to Egypt; Iraq donated MIG fighter planes; Tunisia, Sudan and Morocco joined in the war by supporting Egypt and Syria) and by October 8, Israeli troops began to push back and turn the tide. Reportedly the reason the Israeli military was able to attack and repel the aggression -- besides the fact that Israel was literally fighting for its survival -- is that the U.S. provided important intelligence from a spy plane (SR-71 Blackbird). Thanks to the spy plane pinpointing where the enemy forces were gathering, Israel could pound those forces from the air and in time -- thanks also to U.S. military equipment being shipped to Israel -- the war was won by Israel.

But the OPEC nations knew how much the U.S. depended on Arab oil supplies; as Rudiger Graf writes in the peer-reviewed journal Diplomatic History, the use of an embargo to punish America and the Netherlands was "…watershed in history, signifying the growing dependency of industrialized nations on foreign oil and a power shift in the global economy" (Graf, 2012, 185). The "oil weapon" had never been used by Muslim nations against the West, and the point was to for America and other "…economically powerful countries to comply with their political demands" (Graf, 185).