{"id":36186,"date":"2018-07-26T06:32:08","date_gmt":"2018-07-26T11:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36186"},"modified":"2018-07-26T06:32:08","modified_gmt":"2018-07-26T11:32:08","slug":"saudi-oil-shipment-halt-a-potential-watershed-in-the-yemen-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36186","title":{"rendered":"Saudi oil shipment halt: A potential watershed in the Yemen war"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saudi oil shipment halt: A potential watershed in the Yemen war<\/a><\/h3>\n

A spike in oil prices<\/a> as a result of a temporary halt in shipments through the strategic Bab el Mandeb strait may be short-lived, but the impact on Yemen\u2019s three-year-old forgotten war<\/a> is likely to put the devastating conflict on the front burner.<\/p>\n

The halt following a Saudi assertion that Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had attacked two Saudi oil tankers<\/a> traversing the waterway drives home the threat the conflict poses to a chokepoint in international trade and the flow of Gulf oil to world markets. The Houthis said they had attacked a Saudi warship<\/a> rather than oil tankers.<\/p>\n

An estimated 4.8 million barrels of oil are shipped daily through Bab al Mandeb that connects the Red Sea with the Arabian Sea off the coast of Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea.<\/p>\n

The halt of oil shipments could provoke an escalation of the conflict with external powers intervening in a bid to assist Saudi Arabia and the UAE in defeating the Houthis and dealing a blow to Iran\u2019s regional presence.<\/p>\n

By the same token, the halt potentially offers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates an opportunity to focus international attention on resolving a civil war aggravated and turned into a regional conflict by the two Gulf states\u2019 military intervention in March 2015.<\/p>\n

Rather than proving to be a swift campaign that would have subdued the Houthis, the intervention has turned into a quagmire and a public relations fiasco for Saudi Arabia and the UAE.<\/p>\n

International criticism of their conduct of the war is mounting as a result of its devastating human cost<\/a>. Voices in the US Congress, the British parliament and other Western legislatures as well as human rights groups calling for a halt of arms sales to Saudi Arabia<\/a>are growing ever louder.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saudi oil shipment halt: A potential watershed in the Yemen war A spike in oil prices as a result of a temporary halt in shipments through the strategic Bab el Mandeb strait may be short-lived, but the impact on Yemen\u2019s three-year-old forgotten war is likely to put the devastating conflict on the front burner. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[20980,407,18241,2245,20981,701,901],"class_list":["post-36186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-bab-el-mandeb-strait","tag-houthi","tag-james-m-dorsey","tag-oil-market","tag-oil-shipments","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36187,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36186\/revisions\/36187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}