Page 491 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

488 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

failure to provide him with information on this very subject.) For Atherton to

argue thus required either an overwhelming ignorance of the record of Saudi
Arabia’s past behaviour towards her smaller neighbours, or a wilful blinking of

that record, or a cynical indifference to the continued independence of the
smaller Gulf states. That the last was the most likely explanation is borne out
by the burden of the State Department’s evidence before the congressional

committees over the preceding five years. For at no time in those years had the
department’s spokesmen attempted to examine, even in the most perfunctory
fashion, the threat that Saudi Arabia had presented and continued to present to

the littoral shaikhdoms. Instead, as we have seen, they treated the committees
to a well-laundered version of Saudi Arabian history, designed to accord with
their advocacy of Saudi Arabia’s fitness to play the role of guardian of the
Gulf’s security.

What the United States has done in helping to arm Persia, Saudi Arabia and
the minor Gulf states to the teeth has been to create an explosive situation of

potentially nightmarish proportions. It has been a policy - if one can dignify it
with the name - of unbelievable foolishness, culpable irresponsibility and
addled opportunism, which has done the gravest disservice to the peoples of
the Gulf and to Western interests there. The United States, however, is not

alone among the Western powers in bearing the blame for bringing the Gulf to
its present dangerous pass: she has been run a very close second by Britain and
France in the race to inundate the Gulf with arms. Upon the motives, other

than the obvious one of financial gain, which impelled the French to sell
massive quantities of arms to the Arab states, it is pointless to dwell; for the
processes by which the national interests of France are perceived and pursued

by her governments have for years now been unfathomable to non­
Frenchmen. It is almost as difficult, though for very different reasons, to
understand the behaviour of Britain in indiscriminately selling arms to anyone
in the Gulf who wanted them. For whereas it might be argued in partial

extenuation of the United States’s delinquency in this respect that Americans
in general were unfamiliar with the Gulf and the nature of the peoples around
its shores, the British knew full well what the area was like and what the effects

Of It h^dlr 3nd h7e injection of arms were likely to be.
late nineteenth c? °t pr^nc^pa^ objects of British policy in the Gulf from the
arms Rvrh r' n uJV onwards to limit the importation and distribution of
d u the FirSt W°rId War considerable progress had been made
t l^e S*Ze r^e Gulf arms traffic by means of

thro 6 states> trough the series of Hague conferences and
ug irect engagements with the other European powers. After the war the
°r was continued under the auspices of the League of Nations, meeting with
a good measure of success. No such accomplishment stands to the credit of the

nited Nations, the League’s successor, presumably because the majority of
tts members would have considered any restriction upon their freedom to