American and British rivalry

When Anthony Eden, the British Prime minister whose career collapsed when the US pulled the plug on the 1956 Anglo-French campaign  to reclaim the Suez Canal, he had conversation with Enoch Powell, who said “I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans.”

The competition was underway in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt on his way home from the Yalta summit with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met Abdulaziz ibn Saud – King of Saudi Arabia, the land to which he gave his family name, – on a US warship midway up the Suez Canal.

To this day Saudi Arabia with its petrol-dollar has been the cornerstone of Middle East policy for every US president and British Prime Minister.

James Barr narrates in Lords of the Desert, the UK was using this American lease-lend funds to upgrade its oil facilities in Iran and Iraq as well as to curry flavour  with 1bn Saud, in whose kingdom the US has its biggest oil concession. Roosevelt soon had had enough of British middlemen taking credit and extended Lend-Lease directly to the Saudis.. “I hereby find the defence of Saudi Arabia vital to the defence of the US”, he declared – Even Donald Trump’s statement last week  essentially saying that any responsibility that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman had in October’s gruesome murder in Istanbul of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi took second place to his promise to buy $110bn in US arms.

When Saudi Arabia and Iran were both monarchies, they got along easily until the overthrow of the Shah in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. One has to understand the history of Middle East,  The House of  Saudi was already under attack at home from Sunni extremists without Tehran now seeking to export its Shia radicalism. Saudi rulers reacted by using their increased oil wealth to export the radical bigotry of Wahhabi Islam which has done untold damage to Muslim culture worldwide. The Saudi and their Gulf allies encouraged by the west, bankrolled Saddam Hussien’s 1980 invasion of Iran.  In the years following the World War II, the rivalry and sometime partnership between the US and Britain would shape the modern Middle East. 

 

Lord Of the Desert: The Battle Between the United States and Great Britain for Supermacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr, Basic Books $32, 432 pages.