Page 317 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

314 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

him on similar charges and found guilty. The following year five more flag­
officers were dismissed the service after being accused of financial malpractices
connected with the development of the port of Bandar Abbas.
There was, in short, something decidedly Gilbertian about the Persian navy
and the shah’s dreams of admiralty.

When I sally forth to seek my prey,
I help myself in a royal way:
1 sink a few more ships, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do;
But many a king on a first-class throne,
If he wants to call his crown his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever / do,
For I am a Pirate King.

Nothing, in fact, has changed since Lord Curzon, well over eighty years ago,
delivered his slighting verdict on the concept of a Persian navy — the subject of
the shortest chapter in his monumental Persia and the Persian Question - with

the words: Tn these few’ pages I have come to both the beginning and the end of
,
all that there is to be said about the naval strength of Persia. Ex nihilo nihil fit’
and I am even surprised at my own tale of bricks, with so modest an allowance
of straw.’
It was only its nuisance value that gave, and may yet give, the Persian navy
significance. However mediocre in calibre it may be, it is still superior to the
naval forces of the other Gulf states. How the shah may have intended to use it
is now only a matter of academic interest. The historical tendency of Persia in a

period of strong central government, as with many states, has been towards
expansion, and Muhammad Reza Shah plainly considered himself the equal in
might and lustre of any Qajar or Safavid monarch. He never troubled to
conceal his contempt for his Arab neighbours, Iraq included, or that he found
their continued survival somewhat ridiculous. ‘It must be said’, he told a
correspondent of L’Express in 1970,

that in the Near East there are countries which have been created after the First World

War with the stroke of a pen by Britain. These countries have no value and are
worthless.... All these make life difficult in our region and force us to spend more in

the field of defence.

He expressed the same sentiments in his conversation with Anthony Sampson

in 1975-
We don’t want the land of others, we don’t need the wealth of others, we have enough:
furthermore, we could have crushed all those nuisance people much more: we never did
it ... [though] the strength that we have now in the Persian Gulf is ten times, twenty

times more than the British ever had.