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‘Araby the Blest’ 261

ARAMCO could successfully evangelize in such aloof surroundings, it is
hardly surprising that it has found the propagation of its gospel to the Ameri­
can press and public an easy matter.

The political legacy bequeathed by ARAMCO to the United States was
twofold: the company had shaped the way in which Americans looked upon
Saudi Arabia, its rulers and its people; and it had also, by the manner in which
it had comported itself in Arabia, led the Saudi regime to expect the govern­
ment of the United States to exhibit a similar demeanour - accommodating,
pliant, deferential and gullible. Thus, when the State Department was eventu­

ally forced by the Egyptian intervention in the civil war in the Yemen late in
1962, and the alarm this occasioned in Riyad, to assume a more active role in
Saudi-American relations than it had hitherto played, it found its room for
manoeuvre closely circumscribed by the assumptions and expectations which
ARAMCO over the years had fostered in the minds of the Saudi ruling house.
It was also hampered by the disposition of some of its officials to view the
Arabian peninsula in much the same way as ARAMCO viewed it — which was a
further tribute to the efficacy of ARAMCO’s proselytizing. Having previously
neglected to work out a coherent and logical policy of its own towards the
region, the State Department had to proceed after 1962 on an ad hoc basis,
which inevitably produced inconsistencies, confusion and not a few ironies.
One of these concerned the attitude to be adopted towards Britain’s presence
in the peninsula. Officially the Gulf was recognized as a British preserve where
the United States was content to leave the protection of Western interests in
British hands. Aden and South Arabia were another matter. The administra­
tion in Washington had welcomed the revolution in the Yemen in 1962 as
advancing the cause of republicanism and Arab nationalism, and before the
year was out it had granted recognition to the revolutionary government in
return for an undertaking from Nasser to remove his troops from the Yemen
within a short time. Needless to say, the undertaking was never honoured, and
all that the action of the United States achieved was to unsettle the Saudis and
offend the British. ‘I have always thought, and I still do,’ wrote Major-General
von Horn, the UN commander in the Yemen, some time later, ‘that beneath

this apparently logical decision by the Americans [to recognize the republican
regime] lay a baser policy aimed at embarrassing the British in southern
Arabia, linked with a desire to further their own oil interests in the Arabian
peninsula.’ But while the United States administration might see fit to applaud
botii the revolution in the Yemen and the nationalist struggle against the
British in Aden, the house of Saud viewed them in a different light, as posing a
threat to its own continued existence. Over the next few years, and especially
after the accession of Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz late in 1964, the United States was
eft in no doubt that what the Saudi government wanted was that the Egyptians
s ould evacuate the Yemen and the British should stay in South Arabia. At the