America, Oil, and War in the Middle East

America, Oil, and War in the Middle East Toby Craig Jones Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means neces- sary, including military force. —Jimmy Carter, state of the union address, Jan. 23, 1980 Middle Eastern oil has enchanted global powers and global capital since the early twentieth century. Its allure has been particularly powerful for the United States. The American romance began in earnest in the 1930s, when geologists working for Standard Oil of California discovered commercial quantities of oil on the eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. In the years that followed, enchantment turned into obsession. Shortly after World War II it became clear that oil was more than merely a coveted industrial commodity. The most visible and celebrated event in that history occurred when Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, the founding monarch of Saudi Arabia, aboard the uss Quincy on Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake in February 1945. The meeting permanently linked Middle Eastern oil with American national security. It also helped forge one of the twentieth century’s most important strategic relationships, in which the Saudis would supply cheap oil to global markets in exchange for American protection. A bargain was made. And so too was a future tinderbox.1 Over the course of the twentieth century, preserving the security not just of Saudi Arabia but of the entire Persian Gulf region and the flow of Middle Eastern oil were among the United States’ chief political-economic concerns.2 The pursuit of American power in the Gulf has been fraught with peril and has proved costly in terms of both Toby Craig Jones is an associate professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is grateful to Vishal Kamath, Matthew Oliveri, Courtney Shaw, Justin Stearns, Chris Toensing, Robert Vitalis, Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicut, and the JAH referees for their criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. Readers may contact Jones at [email protected]. 1 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 2008), 385–86; Lloyd C. Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (New York, 2009), 19–25. 2 For an alternative take on the political economy of oil and the need to protect supply, see Timothy Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order,” Social Text, 20 (Winter 2002), 5. Timothy Mitchell notes that “contrary to popular belief, there is too much [oil]. Oil is the world’s second most abundant fluid, so any producer is always at risk of being undercut by another. If all one wanted was a market in oil to supply those who need it, this would pose no problem. But the oil industry is about profits, not markets, and large profits are impossible to sustain under such competitive conditions. The potential rents—or ‘premiums on scarcity,’ as they are called—could be realized only if mechanisms were put in place to create the scarcity.” See ibid. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas045 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 208 The Journal of American History June 2012 America, Oil, and War in the Middle East 209 blood and treasure. Oil has flowed, although not without difficulty. Since the late 1970s the Gulf has been rocked by revolution and almost permanent war. Security, if measured by the absence of conflict, has been elusive, and safeguarding the Persian Gulf and the region’s oil producers has meant increasingly more direct and dearer forms of U.S. intervention. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the American military occupation there represented only the latest stage of American militarism in the Middle East. While more considerable in scale, duration, and devastation than previous military misadventures in the region, the Iraq War was the outgrowth of several decades of strategic thinking and policy making about oil. It is true, of course, that terrorism and especially the attacks of September 11, 2001, helped accelerate the drive to war in 2003, but to focus too much on 9/11 is to overlook and discount the ways that oil and oil producers have long been militarized, the role oil has played in regional confrontation for almost four decades, and the connections between the most recent confrontation with Iraq and those of the past.3 Oil and war have become increasingly interconnected in the Middle East. Indeed, that relationship has become a seemingly permanent one. This outcome was not inevitable; the United States has not only been mired in the middle, but its approach to oil has also abetted the outcome. It is also important to understand the U.S. emphasis on security, and the contradic- tions of its approach to it, in a broader regional context. While this essay does not dwell on the U.S.-Israeli relationship, U.S. Persian Gulf policy and America’s relationship with the region’s oil producers were often at odds with the alliance between the United States and Israel. The tensions created by American policies in the Gulf have undermined U.S. claims about pursuing regional security more generally. This contradiction played out most spectacularly during the 1973 oil crisis.4 The Strategic Logic of Militarism The United States is not the only Western power with a history of war in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In a rush to secure and expand their own supplies in the region, the British landed an expeditionary force near Basra in what is now Iraq in 1914. By 1918 the British captured Baghdad and ensconced themselves and their allies there, a perch from which they projected power for several decades.5 American ascendance in the Persian Gulf later in the century created a new pattern of militarism and war. Unlike its predecessors, the 3 Sheila Carapico and Chris Toensing wrote in 2006 that “to hear American politicians and the commercial news media tell it, the greatest military power in world history hastily launched an ill-conceived invasion because of intelligence failures and wishful fantasies of sweets and flowers. It is as if, to paraphrase a sentiment heard in White House hallways on September 11, 2001, history really did start on that day, and nothing that happened beforehand mattered. It is as if the United States had never articulated a global vision of ‘full-spectrum dominance,’ acted upon hegemonic ambitions in the Persian Gulf or planned for forcible ‘regime change’ in Iraq.” See Sheila Carapico and Chris Toensing, “The Strategic Logic of the Iraq Blunder,”Middle East Report (no. 239, Summer 2006), 6–11, esp. 6. For the best account emphasizing the role of 9/11 in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, see F. Gregory Gause III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (New York, 2010), 184–97. 4 On the tensions between U.S. policies regarding Israel and oil, see Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicut, “The End of the Concessionary Regime: Oil and American Power in Iraq, 1958–1972” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2011). 5 On Iraq and the British role there see Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (New York, 2000), 30–147; Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Bathists, and Free Officers (Princeton, 1978); Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, 2005); Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: A History of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York, 2003); and Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York, 2008). 210 The Journal of American History June 2012 United States did not wage war out of old-fashioned imperial calculation or ambition. American oil wars have not been about establishing direct control over oil fields nor about liberation or freedom, at least not political freedom for the peoples of the region. Instead, they have primarily been about protecting friendly oil producers. The objective has not necessarily been to guarantee that Middle Eastern oil made its way to the United States, although meeting basic domestic energy needs remained a vital part of the broader calculation. Keeping prices stable (not low) and keeping pro-American regimes in power were central to U.S. strategic policy. The pattern of militarism that began in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s has partly been the product of American support for and deliberate militarization of brutal and vulnerable authoritarian regimes. Massive weapons sales to oil autocrats and the decision to build a geopolitical military order in the Gulf that depended on and empowered those rulers resulted in a highly militarized and fragile balance of power. And from the 1970s on, oil- producing states have faced repeated internal and external threats, including domestic unrest, invasion, and regional or civil war, or at least the imminent prospect of turmoil. Such instability and conflict has had much to do, of course, with internal political problems, only some of which were the result of outside intervention. But the militarization that began in earnest under the United States’ watch exacerbated and accelerated those uncertainties and helped further destabilize oil-producing states and the region.

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