Page 83 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

8o Arabia, the Gulf and the West

chances. His foreign minister, Ardeshir Zahedi, was already in Saudi Arabia to
drum up support for a joint warning to the British government. The warning
was duly issued at Riyad in the second week of July, when Zahedi declared8

Tran and Saudi Arabia want Britain to leave the Gulf on the date already
announced’, and the Saudi deputy foreign minister, Omar Saqqaf, echoed
him, saying, ‘We are not interested in keeping British troops in the Gulf or any
other part of our region.’ Considering what both parties were up to at the time
it was rather like a conclave of burglars calling for the removal of the police

from the neighbourhood. From Riyad, Zahedi went on to Kuwait to seek
further backing. The Kuwaitis readily obliged. ‘Kuwait is strongly opposed to
the stay of British forces in the area, and insists on their withdrawal within the
identified period’, announced the foreign minister, Sabah ibn Ahmad Al
Sabah. On 15 July the crown prince and prime minister, Jabir ibn Ahmad Al
Sabah, told the national assembly, ‘We in Kuwait do not welcome or accept
any foreign presence in our area, be it British or anything else.’

At the end of his tour Zahedi happily summed up its results:

The views of Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are identical in . .. opposition to a British
military presence in the Gulf after 1971. All the States of the Gulf maintain the view that
Gulf affairs must be handled by the countries of the region without outside interference.

All the states of the Gulf? Or only those three who, by mere coincidence, had
the largest populations, the greatest wealth and, in addition, no treaty relation­
ship with Britain? What of the nine lesser states of the nascent Union of Arab
Emirates who stood to benefit least from Britain’s departure? Their rulers were
reluctant to express their true feelings in public, since outwardly they were
required to conform to the dictates of Arab nationalist dogma regarding

Western ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’. But there is little doubt that Shaikh
Rashid ibn Said of Dubai spoke for them all when, in mid-July, he tersely
replied to a correspondent of The Times, who had asked him whether he wanted
British troops to remain in the Gulf, ‘Who asked them to leave?’ ‘Abu Dhabi

and Bahrain’, he went on, ‘and in fact the whole coast, people and rulers,
would all support the retaining of British forces in the Gulf, even though ...
they may not give a direct answer out of respect for the general Arab
view.’
At the close of July Home announced that he was appointing Sir William
Luce, who had formerly been governor of Aden and afterwards politics

resident in the Gulf, as his special representative to examine the situation in t e
Gulf, to consult with the rulers and governments involved and to report is
findings in due course. Since his retirement in 1966 Luce had expresse
himself publicly about the current and future course of British policy in t e
Gulf, more particularly in two articles in the Daily Telegraph and the oun

Table in April and July 1967 respectively. Luce’s principal theme m 0 ,
articles was that the Gulf was ‘inherently a highly unstable power vacuum