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 USSQuincy 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.
But it was the United States that did the most to facilitate the militarization of the region. Between 1975 and 1979 Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia purchased 56 percent of all the weapons sold in the Middle East and made almost one-quarter of all global arms purchases. Lee Hamilton, a leading Democratic congressman, warned in a 1973 statement on the floor of Congress about the potentially excessive nature of arms sales to the region. He remarked that the net impression left . . . is that we are willing to sell just about everything these Persian Gulf states want and will buy. And buy they did. Iran proved particularly keen to acquire as much high-tech military weaponry as possible. The shah purchased the newest weapons systems available from American manufacturers, including seventy-nine F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, the U.S. Navys premier fighter, in 1974.12 By the middle of the 1970s, the American notion of s
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The militarization of the Persian Gulf exacerbated existing instabilities and hastened an era of regional conflict. During the heyday of arms sales, some U.S. officials and elected representatives grew alarmed. Throughout the 1970s and into the following decade, members of Congress convened regular meetings to flesh out the potential harm of massive militarization in the Gulf. Much of the concern centered on the potential threat that newly armed Arab oil producers posed to Israel. Hamilton cautioned that the appropriate area for justifiable concerns is in the general policy of pouring lots of sophisticated arms in an extremely volatile portion of the Middle East, known not for exemplary regional cooperation, but instead for a plethora of territorial, ethnic, familial and political disputes over the last several hundred years.13
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Although others shared Hamiltons anxieties, those responsible for overseeing U.S. policy in the Gulf dismissed those concerns. The warnings expressed by Hamilton and others should have prompted caution, but few policy makers or arms manufacturers were inclined to question the stability of authoritarian regimes that had been longtime allies. Especially after the first oil boom, Gulf oil states seemed even more in command than before. Flush with billions of dollars in new oil revenues by the mid-1970s, the Gulf oil producers went on a decade-long domestic spending spree, throwing money at a range of social, economic, and potential political problems. Regimes in the region committed billions of dollars to modernization and development programs and to the expansion of cradle-to-grave social services.14
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The intent of that spending was to redistribute oil wealth as a means to stave off potential restiveness. And the potential for unrest was considerable. Most of the Gulf s autocrats came to power through conquest, alliances with imperial powers, or both. The preferred clients of the United States, the rulers of Iran and Saudi Arabia, used a combination of
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