Bitter Lake, Bitter Legacy: The Saudi King, Abdul Aziz, guarantees the United States access to Arabia's almost limitless oil reserves and, in return, President Franklin Roosevelt guarantees the Saudi monarchy's security. The photograph was taken aboard the USS Quincy, moored in the Great Bitter Lake, on 14 February 1945. The so-called "Quincy Agreement" set the course of US policy in the Middle East for the next 70 years.
THE QUESTION CONFRONTING the Democratic Party when it next
takes control of the White House will, simply, be: “What now?” The next
Democratic President will likely enter office with the two most powerful
Islamic nations in the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia, locked in a nuclear
arms race. Faced with the prospect of two bitter foes acquiring the means to
wipe it off the face of the earth, Israel (which already possesses its own
nuclear arsenal) will be screaming at the new Democratic administration to: “Do
something – or we will!” Doing something will be unavoidable – but what is it
that the United States should do?
On his way home from the Yalta Conference aboard the USS Quincy, in February 1945, President
Franklin Roosevelt paused briefly in the Great Bitter Lake (half-way along the
Suez Canal) to meet with Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia. In many respects
this meeting on Great Bitter Lake was as important to the world’s future as
Roosevelt’s meeting at Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Arising
out of the secret conclave between President and King was the so-called “Quincy
Agreement”, by which the United States guaranteed the security of the Saudi
monarchy, and the Saudi monarchy guaranteed the United States access to its
almost limitless oil reserves.
The tragedy of the Quincy Agreement is that it simply wasn’t
necessary. In 1945 the US was the most powerful nation on earth and just a few
months away from producing the world’s first nuclear weapons. Under Roosevelt,
the Americans had already set in motion the dismantling of the British Empire:
a process which would, in the space of two years, force Great Britain to
relinquish the “jewel” in its imperial crown – India. That Roosevelt, the
Roosevelt of 1940, would not have vouchsafed US protection to the deeply
reactionary Saudi dynasty; not when he could have had it swept away by forces
dedicated to establishing a modern, secular, democratic republic with just a
flick of Uncle Sam’s finger. Unfortunately, that Roosevelt no longer existed.
In his place was the gaunt, exhausted figure of the Yalta newsreels: a man
barely two months away from death.
It was this dying Roosevelt who resigned himself to
preserving not only the Saudi king (and his oil) but also the King of Egypt and
the Emperor of Ethiopia. Churchill and the British had convinced him that US
strategic interests would be best served by keeping in place every one of the
petty kings and potentates that Britain had installed across the Middle East in
the aftermath of World War I.
It was a fatal error. For the next seventy years the Americans
(aided and abetted at every turn by the British) found themselves obliged to
prop-up a corrupt collection of quasi-medieval reactionaries who had set their
faces against all the emancipatory forces of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and who were doing everything in their power to advance the most
extreme and retrograde interpretations of the Prophet Mohammed’s religious
teachings.
The alternative course of action: the road not taken; would
have seen the full weight of the US thrown behind the secular forces of Middle Eastern
nationalism and their quest for cultural and economic independence. Yes, many
of these nationalist leaders may have been mildly socialist, like Gamal Abdel
Nasser of Egypt and Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran, but no more so that the leaders
of Sweden or India. With the encouragement and support of the United States,
the Arab and Iranian peoples could have constructed modern, open societies to
match the magnificent civilisations of their past. Moderate Islamic
democracies, forever beholden to the United States for underwriting their
freedom, prosperity and independence.
What actually happened, of course, was that when the
aforementioned Mosaddegh attempted to establish just such a government in Iran,
the CIA (represented, ironically, by Roosevelt’s son, Kermit) and the British
secret service, MI6, colluded in mobilising the reactionary Muslim clergy
against him and restored to the Peacock Throne the craven and vicious Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi – Iran’s hereditary (and now absolute) ruler.
That this anti-democratic behaviour has remained a constant
of US policy in the Middle East is due in no small part to the State of Israel.
Born out of the acquisition and, later, the expropriation of Arab properties in
the former British mandate of Palestine, Israel’s existence has always
constituted a major obstacle to the peaceful evolution of a modern and moderate
Middle East.
Had the US and Britain been willing to stand behind secular
Arab nationalism and the establishment of democratic governments in Egypt,
Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Arabia, the Gulf States and Iran, it is possible that
Israel may have felt sufficiently secure to negotiate a lasting modus vivendi between the Palestinian
Arabs and Israeli Jews. From 1956 onwards, however, Britain and America were
happy to use Israel as a battering ram against Arab nationalism and, at need,
the entire Muslim world. A strategy which has positioned Israel as a nuclear-armed
obstacle squarely athwart every path to Middle Eastern peace.
How to respond when the next Democratic President of the
United States asks: “What now?” Tell her to reverse every policy the United
States has followed in the Middle East since the USS Quincy hove-to in the Great Bitter Lake in February 1945. Yes,
it’s a little late for such a radical realignment of US policy – but better
late than never.
This essay was originally
posted on The Daily Blog of Friday,
11 May 2018.
