The New York Times, in an editorial published today characterized President Bush's request for more oil from Saudi Arabia as unseemly special pleading.
"The next president is going to have to do a lot more to reduce America's consumption of fossil fuels and its dependence on the Saudis" the Times said.
As expected, the Saudis were gracious hosts when President George W. Bush visited King Abdullah's horse farm May 16. Also as expected, they politely declined to give Bush what he wanted: more oil to help lower US gasoline prices.
The Saudis want to be responsive to their customers, US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told reporters. But they were not prepared to respond to the president's entreaties.
Oliver Twist, desperate with hunger, rose from the table and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said, "Please, sir, I want some more."
Next week, President Bush, an unseen 42 gallon oil barrel in hand, will say to Saudi King Abdullah and other Saudi leaders, "Please, sirs, I want some more."
Those of us who have covered OPEC meetings over the past few decades have often wished we could be flies on the wall at these closed door ministerial huddles in Vienna, Doha or Caracas. Last week those wishes came true. And it was pretty dramatic stuff.
The journalists who had flown in from five continents to cover the OPEC summit in Riyadh were milling about the press room, writing stories, transcribing taped interviews or chatting, with one ear tuned to the television set that was relaying live coverage of the pre-summit proceedings.
If this story looks familiar, that's no surprise.
It's been written many times. Saudi Arabia tries to diversify its economy away from oil. In fact, while looking for the online version of the October 26 story, we stumbled across another story with a headline so simiilar to this one that at first we thought it was today's piece. But it wasn't. It just looked like it.
