A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

The Middle East is ridden with strife thinly

papered over. Arab nation is divided from Arab

nation, fundamentalist Muslims from moderate

Muslims who accept the secular state, Persians

(Iranians) from Arabs, feudal tribal monarchies

from secular republics, the oil-rich from the poor

nations. Why is there so much conflict? Is there

one root cause? If the Zionists had not created

Israel, would there have been peace? Were the

Arabs set against each other by outside powers,

by the Russians, by the British, by the Americans?

Or do the problems of the region derive from a

backlash against the imposition of alien Western

traditions on a traditional Islamic society? Is the

conflict of terror waged in the twenty-first century

by extreme Muslim groups in the Middle East

and the West, a so-called ‘clash of civilisations’?

How artificial are the national frontiers, the result

of great-power bargains imposed on the region

after the First World War?

Central to the Middle East’s geopolitical

importance is its oil, a commodity vital since 1945

to the prosperity of the oil states, the West and

Japan. Before the Second World War Middle

Eastern oil was less significant: the US, Mexico

and Venezuela were the major oil exporters,

Venezuelan oil production alone in 1939 exceed-

ing that of the entire Middle East. But during

the war, Iraqi oil became vital to Britain, which

occupied the country jointly with the Soviet

Union. It was the dramatic expansion of oil con-

sumption after the Second World War, the indus-

trial changeover from coal to oil and the

expansion of motor and air travel that gave the

Middle Eastern oil-producing nations so import-

ant a role in Western economies. The US then

ceased to be an exporter of oil and became an

importer.

Between 1919 and 1939 the US, Britain and

the Netherlands had secured a virtual monopoly of

Middle Eastern oil concessions and so came to

dominate world marketing. Iran was the region’s

major oil producer, and Britain was able to keep

out foreign competition, retaining control until

the nationalisation dispute of 1951. The US oil

giants, meanwhile, worried about oil reserves in

the US, with the backing of the American admin-

istration, gained a large share of the oil conces-

sions, which were to prove the richest of the

Middle East after the Second World War: Aramco,

a consortium of US companies, secured oil rights

in Saudi Arabia; Gulf Oil, a half-share of the oil

resources of Kuwait; and the US also gained a share

in Iraqi oil. Britain further agreed to share Iraqi oil

with France, whose spheres of influence in the

Middle East contained little oil. French-controlled

Syria, and the Lebanon before 1945, earned addi-

tional royalties from the pipelines carrying oil from

the Iraqi Kirkuk field to Tripoli; a ‘British’ line ran

through Transjordan and Palestine to Haifa. Until

the mid-1950s Britain remained not only the

dominant political power in the Middle East but

also the most important oil power.

During the last decade of the twentieth and the

early years of the new century, the Western wars in

(^1) Chapter 37
A PROFILE OF THE MIDDLE EAST