"It was not until after the invasion of Iraq that we quit using Saudi airfields."
Bullsh*t. We were out of our main air force facility long before OIF. The Saudis did in fact request we leave.
"Rubbish to the nth degree. While oil prices declined in the mid-to-late seventies, it had nothing to do with any agreement between Carter and the Saudis. "
I never said it did, did I? Are you denying that the Carter library was built partially with a huge endowment by the Royal family?
The price manipulation happened during the Reagan years.
"While this hurt the Soviets economically, for a little while, the inability to compete with the Reagan military buildup later, in the 1980s is what finally bankrupted them."
WELL NO SHER SH*TLOCK. The price of one of their leading export commodities plummeting didn't help much, eh?
"The price manipulation happened during the Reagan years."
Manipulation?? From media I guess you get that.
Here's the history.
Oil prices shot up during the 1973-74 Saudi Oil embargo, from under $10 a barrel to nearly $15 a barrel.
From 1980 to 1986 non-OPEC production increased 10 million barrels per day (efforts to counter the cartel begun in the 1970s started coming on line in the early 198os). OPEC was faced with lower demand and higher supply from outside the organization.
Iran Oil production dropped from 6mil barrels a day in the 1970s to less than 1mil by 1981, while Iraq production dropped from 3.8mil barrels a day in 1979 to less than 500k barrels by 1981. By 1991, Iran was still only producing 3mil a day (50% of its '81 level). Iraq struggled throughout the 80s to regain its old production levels, got close - 3.5mil a day by 1990, but averaged no more than 1/2 that for all the 1980s.
Those production declines, world economic instability of the early 1980s and Middle East instability (Iran/ Iraq war) and increasing non-Opec production brought about a major decline in Opec production through 1985, and a corresponding Opec price increase, peaked briefly at about $38 a barrel in 1981-82, settling around $30 until 1985.
Between 1982 to 1985 OPEC tried to set production quotas low enough to stabilize prices. The attempts repeatedly failed, as various members of OPEC would produce beyond their quotas. During most of this period Saudi Arabia acted as the swing producer, trying to cut its production to stem the free falling prices. In August of 1985, the Saudis got tired of this role. Opec production had already fallen to 50% of its 1975 level. Even with the higher price, 50% less production with a lack of robust demand and greater world supply meant a large net revenue drop for the Saudis. They changed their price setting mechanism and linked their oil prices to the spot market for crude. By early 1986 Saudi production increased from 2 MMBPD to 5 MMBPD and crude oil prices plummeted below $10 per barrel by mid-1986. The Saudis tried to make up in volume what they were losing on price. There were now too many non-Opec players and world demand, the world economy, had not begun to pick up the extra supply. The Saudi move did not work and the lower prices hovered just above and below $20 until the late 1990s (a decade after the fall of the Soviets).
The Soviets were not caught in a Saudi-Reagan manipulated price decline, they were caught with bad timing in a growing global supply of oil meant for today's economy, not the world economy of 1985.
What hurt the needed EXPANSION of Soviet oil exports was not the Opec price decline, but Reagan's work to block the pipeline from Siberia to western Europe. Although Soviet crude was not the quality of Middle East crude, the pipeline would have provided a transportation-cost advantage for central Europe.