Page 258 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blest’ 255

The function of surrogate banker, however, was not the only one the State
Department delegated to ARAMCO. To all intents and purposes it also
resigned - whether it was fully aware of it or not is beside the point - the
conduct of American relations with Saudi Arabia into the company’s keeping.
Naturally ARAMCO saw this delegation as only logical and fitting, since its
management firmly believed that there was a broad coincidence of interests
between ARAMCO and Saudi Arabia, between Saudi Arabia and the United
States, and between the United States government and American oil com­
panies operating in the Middle East. It was far from being alone in holding this
view. Since as far back as the inter-war years there had existed a general
consensus of opinion in those governmental, commercial and philanthropic
circles in the United States which had close connexions with the Middle East
that the sooner Britain and France were made to abandon their residual
positions in the region the better it would be for all concerned - for the West as
well as for the Middle East. The doctrine - for it was no less than an article of
faith - was posited upon two assumptions: the first, that the days of the

European empires were numbered anyway, and the West as a whole could only
retain some positive influence in this vital strategic area by recognizing the
force of Arab nationalism and fostering the national independence of the Arab
countries; the second, that the demise of British and French power in the
region would open up new and profitable avenues to American commerce - not
least to American oil companies.
It was a doctrine to which the State Department was a fervent subscriber — as
was only natural, since it had been one of its begetters. Well before the doctrine
found its most triumphant expression in the humiliation of British and French
arms at Suez in 1956, the State Department had applied it with enthusiasm to
the Arabian peninsula, and it continued to do so, with undiminished ardour, in
the years afterwards. Writing in 1966, in the light of his experiences as
commander of the United Nations observer force in the Yemen during the civil
war, Major-General Carl von Horn observed of the State Department’s policy:
‘Basically, I had the impression that, under a cloak of a benefactor and
supporter of national aspirations in the Middle East, there was the desire to cut
the throat of British influence in the Persian Gulf.’ Certainly this was true of
ARAMCO, and it had been ever since the day that the company began to see
the presence of Britain in Arabia as an obstacle to the realization of its own
ambitions in the peninsula. Over the years it had developed an almost obsessive
resentment of Britain’s special treaty relationship with the littoral shaikhdoms
of eastern Arabia, and of her long and intimate connexion with the sultanate of
Oman. There were even some in the senior ranks of ARAMCO (those who had
constituted themselves, as it were, the company’s ikhivari) who wanted to
re-write the historical record, so as to obliterate all trace of Britain’s past
relations with the Gulf.

Behind the resentment, however, lay down-to-earth commercial con­