Page 313 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

3IQ Arabia, the Gulf and the West

payment in crude oil for the Rapier missile system being installed in Persia
The British government hastened to comply with the edict, being nervously
aware of the value to the ailing British economy of the Persian arms contracts.
(The price of a Chieftain tank, for example, had been increased from £295,000
to £450,000 by August 1976 and it was still rising.) It was crystal clear by this
time, though no one would say so publicly, that the shah’s infatuation with
the deadly playthings of war had reached the pathological stage, just as his
lofty vision of himself and his country’s place in the world had passed the
limits of reason. ‘I hope my good friends in Europe and the United States and
elsewhere will finally understand’, he told Anthony Sampson in an interview

at St Moritz in February 1975, ‘that there is absolutely no difference
between Iran and France, Britain and Germany. Why should you find it
absolutely normal that France will spend that much money on her army,
and not my country?’*

From the decline of the Safavid empire in the late seventeenth century to the
fall of the Qajar dynasty in the early twentieth century no Persian government
had been able to control for any length of time the entire Persian coastline from
Khuzistan in the west to Makran and Baluchistan in the east. The reason, apart
from the prevalence of corruption, incompetence and feebleness in the
administration of the empire, was the lack of seapower at the disposal of
Persia’s rulers. Much of the coast was inhabited by Arabs, in whose hands the
entire shipping resources of Persia were concentrated. Secure in the knowledge
that they could, as a last resort, take to the sea and from there inflict consider­
able damage upon Persia’s trade, they were able for generations to set the will
of provincial governors at naught. Nadir Shah in the eighteenth century’
attempted to remedy the deficiency by constructing navies for both the Caspian
Sea and the Gulf. The Caspian project, which involved the transfer of part of

the Arab population of the Gulf coast to the shores of the Caspian, came to
nothing, and from the early nineteenth century onwards Persia was forbidden
by Russia to maintain any naval vessels in that sea. In the Gulf, Nadir Shah
managed to assemble a force of some twenty to thirty ships, built in Europe and
in India, which were manned by Indian Muslims and Portuguese renegades.
The Indians, however, when ordered to sea to destroy Arab shipping, refused,
on the grounds that they were Sunni Muslims and would not fight their fellow
Sunnis. Instead, they turned on their Persian officers, who were Shii, butc '
ered them and made off with the ships. Not only was this the end of Na r
Shah’s attempt to create a Persian navy but it was virtually the end of all sue
attempts - apart from the purchase of a couple of German steamers in the late

nineteenth century - for 200 years.
Though Persia possessed no navy to enforce her will in the Gun, she
than made up for the lack by the extravagance of her pretensions to dominion
• Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, p. 256.