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‘Araby the Blest" 257

version and attempted assassination. Nor did any senior official of ARAMCO
evince the slightest doubt in public about the propriety of the company’s
involvement in an attempt to despoil the shaikhdom of Abu Dhabi of the
greater part of its territory, to impair the concessionary rights of the Iraq
Petroleum Company, British Petroleum and the Compagnie Frangaise des
Petroles, and to injure the political interests in the Gulf of the United States’
principal ally. That ARAMCO felt itself free to act in such cavalier and
unprincipled fashion was a measure not only of the extent to which the State
Department had abdicated its responsibility for the conduct of American
relations with Saudi Arabia, but also of the confidence ARAMCO reposed in
the effectiveness of its influence in Washington.
The confidence was not unfounded. When Sir Anthony Eden, the British
prime minister, visited Washington in January 1956 for consultations with
President Eisenhower, he found that the version of the origins and course of
the frontier dispute that ARAMCO had circulated in the United States had

been swallowed, hook, line and sinker, by the American administration. John
Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, had some weeks earlier told both the
Netherlands and the Australian ambassadors in Washington that the British
eviction of the Saudis from the Buraimi oasis in October 1955 had been ‘an act
of aggression’; while Eisenhower himself solemnly informed Eden that ‘people
in general ... tended to think that the whole Arabian peninsula belonged, or
ought to belong, to King Saud’. That such ideas should enjoy the currency they
did was eloquent testimony to the success of the propaganda campaign
ARAMCO had been conducting for many years on its own behalf and that of
its Saudi patrons. It had constituted itself the interpreter of Saudi Arabia - its
people, its history, its culture and, above all, its ruling house - to the United
States at large, and because there were no other sources of information
about that country open to the American public, ARAMCO could put
across its version of recent Arabian history and politics with almost insolent
ease.
Its propaganda was framed in a manner likely to strike a sympathetic
response in the American people. The principal theme was that of ‘manifest
destiny’. The conquests of Ibn Saud were depicted as the culmination of his
dynasty’s quest for dominion over Arabia from sea to sea; his subjugation of
Hasa, the Hijaz, Jabal Shammar and Asir was represented as ‘nation­
building’. Much emphasis was laid upon the spiritual nature of the Wahhabi
movement, upon its puritanical aspects (with Riyad cast in the image of
Salem), upon the felicitous alliance of religion with secular power, and upon
the harmonious blend of piety and statecraft inherent in the person of the

Saudi king-imam. To make the analogy more familiar, the term by which the
Wahhabis distinguished themselves, muwahhidun (‘believers in oneness’),
was consistently rendered as ‘Unitarians’, a usage which must have puzzled
the adherents of the American Unitarian Church and their fellow Americans