Page 259 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

256 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

siderations as well as doctrinaire convictions. The original oil concession
granted to ARAMCO was, according to the proclamation issued by Ibn Saud
in 1933 j for the eastern portion of the Saudi kingdom, the limits of which had
not at that time been defined. By the terms of both the 1933 concessionary
agreement and the supplementary agreement of 1939, ARAMCO was
required to surrender in stages its rights to those parts of its concessionary area

which it had not explored or which it did not intend to develop. It was
obviously in the company’s interest, therefore, that it should survey within the
period available to it those parts of its concessionary area where the possibility
of oil being found seemed strongest, and that the limits of the concessionary
area itself should be drawn as widely as possible. These two considerations
inevitably led ARAMCO at the end of the Second World War to direct its
attention southwards and eastwards, beyond the Jafurah desert to the great
uncharted expanse of the Rub al-Khali and the coastal region to the north,
where the frontier of Saudi Arabia was undefined.
Whether it was at the prompting of ARAMCO that the Saudi government
resurrected and reasserted its territorial claims after 1945, or whether
ARAMCO’s impatience to extend its exploratory operations to the coast and
hinterland east of Qatar merely coincided with the reawakening of Ibn Saud’s
old ambition to extend his rule over the territory in question, the mutuality of
interests was obvious. Moreover, just as twenty years earlier Ibn Saud had
reasoned that the termination of the subsidy paid to him by Britain during and
after the First World War freed his hands for the conquest of the Hijaz, so the
replacement of the British subsidy paid him during the Second World War by
financial aid from the United States similarly freed him, he believed, from his
obligation under the Treaty of Jiddah of 1927 to respect the integrity of Qatar

and the Trucial Shaikhdoms. He had also decided by this time - or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that his son, Faisal, to whom he had largely
entrusted the conduct of the kingdom’s foreign relations, had decided - that
the United States would be a stronger as well as a more tractable and accom­
modating ally in the post-war world than Britain, whose star was on the wane
and whose interests, especially in Arabia and the Gulf, did not always coincide
with those of Saudi Arabia. It scarcely needs to be said that he was strongly
encouraged in this way of thinking by senior officials in ARAMCO, motivated
by the considerations of self-interest and hostility to the British presence in the
Gulf just noted.
The hand and, on occasions, the countenance of ARAMCO were all too
clearly visible throughout the successive stages of the frontier dispute from
1949 onwards. No one in the company appeared to experience any qualms- at
least none were expressed publicly - about the morality or wisdom of its
co-operation with the-Saudi government, even when the latter, as recounte
earlier, showed its contempt for the process of arbitration (and indeed for leg
restraints of any kind) by engaging in large-scale gun-running, bribery, su