This essay was first published in the Palestine Chronicles 2006 03 27 and is copyright protected.
Not to be published without consent of the author.
The Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, struggled uncomfortably out from under the rule of the Turkish Ottomans after the First World War. Part XV of Imperial Perspectives takes a broad view of Britain’s imperial demise and the rise of American ‘strategic oil’.
XV The Fertile Crescent
Unfortunately, after the Ottomans, Mesopotamia was up against new equally formidable forces that would continue to alter and shape their world throughout the Twentieth Century and even more so into the new millennia. Politically it is a story of imperial land grabs under the banner of Orientalists delivering civilization and modernity to the backward Arab peoples. The ultimate reality of these empires is that of resource control at almost any expense, that resource being, obviously, oil. The Wilsonian ideals of each national grouping having their say in establishing their own government in their own land hardly even received any lip-service in the Middle East.
British oil
After the First World War it was recognized that oil was the “fuel of the future” and the British navy argued that they would need those areas for future reserves: “The greatest oil-field in the world extends all the way up to and beyond Mosul, and even if it didn’t we ought as a matter of safety to control sufficient ground in front of our vital oil-fields to avoid the risk of having them crushed at the outset of the war.”[1] Arnold Wilson, unrelated to Woodrow, governor of Mesopotamia from 1918 to 1920, believed that, “Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul should be regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes and under effective British control.”[2] True to the imperialists of all colours he argued that “The average Arab…sees the future as one of fair dealing and material and moral progress under the aegis of Great Britain…under which all classes will be given the maximum degree of liberty and self-rule compatible with good and safe government.”[3]
British history in the area obviously taught the American empire nothing about the situation as the rhetoric and the actions are so amazingly parallel even though separated by eighty years. The British story was about good governance and freedom; the American story is about democracy and freedom. Both are lies designed to conceal the real intentions of empirical ambitions. In another familiar assessment when rebellions broke out throughout the region in 1920, Wilson blamed it on “outside agitators”. The reaction, nothing new to us in the current war, involved a new element of warfare as “In a new but very effective tactic, their [British] aircraft machine-gunned and bombed from the air.”[4] Winston Churchill, in a display of his ignorant and racist non-humanitarian side advocated the use of mustard gas “which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.”[5] Lloyd George, presciently quoting from the future, reacted to calls for withdrawal from Iraq by responding “Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?”[6]
But the British did not withdraw, they set up a puppet government; the Americans will not withdraw, not completely, as they will maintain garrisons in the area in case their puppet government gets out of their control; the Arab world will not see freedom now as they did not after the First World War. As King Feisal, neither an Iraqi nor a Shi’ite, was set up to rule the new country of Iraq, Leo Avery, Colonial Secretary, argued for the continued use of air power, “If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively throughout his kingdom it is entirely due to British aeroplanes. If the aeroplanes were removed tomorrow, the whole structure would inevitably fall to pieces.”[7] The structure did not fall, but was supported by the building of an Iraqi security force and police force that gave the government “enormous coercive power.”[8] Ad nauseum, the comparisons are almost overwhelming in the ignorance of their perspectives.
The end result of the “Peace of Versailles” was that “The Arab world as a whole never forgot its betrayal and Arab hostility came to focus on the example of Western perfidy nearest at hand, the Zionist presence in Palestine.”[9] The Fertile Crescent remained a fertile land of wars of imperialism.
Strategic Oil
During the Second World War, oil became a paramount resource. The significance of that requirement was not lost on the politicians of the era who began describing its importance in strategic terms. Michael Klare, in his book “Blood and Oil”, provides a history of quotes that outline this train of thought. In 1944, Commodore Andrew Carter of the Army-Navy Petroleum Board said, “that known petroleum reserves…of the United States are inadequate to meet…either the wartime needs…or the needs of the civilian economy.” Other government figures indicated the U.S. should “pursue a “more and more aggressive foreign oil policy aimed at assuring access to petroleum overseas,” and “promote the “substantial and orderly expansion of production in Easter Hemisphere sources of supply, principally the Middle East.”
The end result was that by the end of the war “the exploitation of Saudi Arabia’s vast petroleum reserves had become a major foreign policy objective,” as those resources constituted “a stupendous source of strategic power; and one of the greatest material prizes in human history.” As a strategic resource, it involved both the world of corporations and politics as much as the military. It became “more than a business enterprise” to involve “the defense and safety of the nation,” leading Roosevelt himself to declare, “the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”[10]
The Middle East strategy became viewed through other concerns including the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union and the developments in Palestine that created the new Jewish state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people. Oil as a strategic resource, repressive politics, the interweaving of the three largest monotheistic religions, and the rhetoric of freedom and democracy compared to the bloody interventions on the ground created a taut fabric with tensions set to potentially rip it apart. Oil has and is being strained through this fabric, creating today’s explosive and poisonous toxic brew.
Tripartite Aggression and the Eisenhower Doctrine
The Saudis remain largely unmentioned during the Suez Crisis of 1956, or as the Egyptians know it, the Tripartite Aggression. Britain, France and Israel colluded to prevent the nationalization of the Suez canal, each for their own reasons: all wanted access to the canal; France was concerned about Egyptian support for the Algerian rebellion; Britain was above all else concerned abut empirical control; and Israel had been in ongoing conflict along the Egyptian border, a country sworn to destroy it. [11] With no effective military and bankrolled by the surplus of oil being exported for western needs, the Saudi role was limited to cutting off diplomatic relations with Britain and France and stopping oil exports to them. The unexpected intervention of the United States put an end to the created crisis and in turn put an end to Britain’s power as an empire, “Henceforth, Britain would be the servant of US policy. It would be American policy to act unilaterally to ‘defend’ the Middle East.”[12]
Following this war, another in the series of ongoing Middle East empirical battles, President Eisenhower outlined his policies, which “led inexorably to the hegemony the US now exercises over the world.”[13] In a speech to Congress on January 5th, 1957, Eisenhower acknowledged that oil was the primal reason for the policy he had developed. The Middle East “contains two thirds of the presently known oil deposits of the world….The nations of Europe are peculiarly dependent upon this supply.” In referring to the supposed communist threat to the area, and to the threat to empirical interests posed by Nasser, he warned that “if they were dominated by alien forces hostile to freedom, that would be both a tragedy for the area and for many other free nations whose economic life would be subject to near strangulation.”
In wonderful twists of rhetoric Eisenhower evokes the concept of freedom and democracy that have been and still are highly ascribed as the main reason for military intervention as required or invited. After describing the Middle East’s wonderfully benevolent role of using its “vast economic resources” to enhance the well-being of the world he goes on to provide the moral concerns, “if its cultures and religions and their shrines are to be preserved for the uplifting of the spirits of the peoples, then the United States must make more evident its willingness to support the independence of the freedom-loving nations of the area.” Perhaps if the ‘world’ had minded its own business, those resources would be fully available without war, but that of course leads to the market place being dominant – the oil goes to the highest bidder. Markets are free only if it suits the U.S. corporations, otherwise they must be controlled at the point of a gun and it did not matter whether that was an American controlled gun or a gun controlled by an American puppet government.
Welcome the CIA
The Eisenhower Doctrine did not support the ‘freedom loving nations’ but provided a policy for intervening for or against them according to the nature of the perceived or created threat, communism being the main threat utilized at the time. It authorized “military assistance and cooperation” and would “include the employment of the armed forces of the United States” as needed and requested. [14] With the CIA already spread throughout the region, the American empire was primed to assert itself over the oilfields that its corporate headquarters so greedily desired.
Along with control of Saudi Arabia, the United States used covert CIA operations to overturn the nationalist government of Iran, installing the Shah Pahlavi as their puppet. Similarly, a nationalist and left leaning Iraqi leader was gunned down by the CIA supported Ba’ath, which included Saddam Hussein. Certainly these freedom-loving governments were exactly what the U.S. wanted - compliant, non-democratic, and obedient client states that used internal security police to control the population through favouritism, interrogation, torture, and execution. The U.S. owned, indirectly, the Middle East.
The events of 1979 would change that accomplishment – the Iranian Revolution, the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia, and the ascendance of Saddam Hussein to leadership - not directly nor immediately, but over the next twenty-five years of increasing hostility towards the American influence and presence. But before that, and as a precedent to that, the rise of the Jewish state of Israel in the occupied territory of Palestine became a new American frontier with many parallels to its old wild west frontier.
[1] Leo Amery cited in MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919, Six Months That Changed the World. Random House New York, 2003. p. 396.
[2] Cited in MacMillan, ibid, p. 397.
[3] MacMillan, ibid, p. 398.
[4] MacMillan, ibid, p. 408.
[5] Fisk, Robert. The Great War For Civilisation, The Conquest of the Middle East. Fourth Estate, London, 2005. p. 178.
[6] Ibid, p. 176.
[7] www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/irq3-m31_prn.shtml
[8] Ibid.
[9] MacMillan, ibid, p. 409
[10] Klare, Michael T. Blood and Oil – The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2004. p. 30-33.
[11] Kamrava, Mehran. The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since the First World War. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005. p. 95.
[12] Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation, The Conquest of the Middle East. Fourth Estate, London, 2005. p. 1137.
[13] Ibid, p. 1137
[14] http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/midleast.htm