316 DESTINY DISRUPTED
bordering the Persian Gulf. By the time the supercompany was ready to
drill, the area in question was part of the British "mandate." It was then
that the British created Iraq and put their Hashemite client in charge of it.
The oil consortium immediately approached King Faisal for a monopoly
on the country's oil resources, and he gladly accommodated them. Going
into the negotiation, the Iraqis were hoping for a 20 percent equity share
in the company, but they compromised at 0 percent, in exchange for a flat
fee per ton of oil extracted, that sum not to be linked in any way to the price
of oil or the company's profits, at least for the first twenty years of the
agreement. Equity in the company was divided among the several Euro-
pean powers and the United States, and the only real wrangling was among
them over who would get what percent. In 1927, after all these issues had
been settled, the company found the first oflraq's enormous oil fields.^4
Nine years later, Aziz ibn Saud celebrated the discovery of oil in his
realm as well. Saudi Arabia would, in fact, turn out to have the world's
biggest reserves of the crucial mineral. The Saudis had barely started
pumping their oil when World War II broke out and the strategic signifi-
cance of oil soared even higher. During that war, U. S. president Franklin
Delano Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, and the two men reached an under-
standing to which both sides have adhered faithfully ever since, even
though it is not enshrined in any formal public treaty. The deal ensures the
U.S. unfettered access to Saudi oil; in exchange, the Saudi royal family gets
as much U.S. military equipment and technology as it needs to stay in
power against all comers. Indirectly, this understanding partnered the
United States with the Wahhabi clerical establishment and made American
military prowess the guarantor of the Wahhabi reform movement. And by
the time World War II broke out, the Wahhabis, and the Islamists
throughout Dar al-Islam were gathering their strength for a full assault on
the secular modernists.