As Schwarz (2016) recalls, Winston Churchill once described Iran’s oil – “which the U.K. was busy stealing at the time” — as “a prize from fairyland far beyond our brightest hopes.” Churchill was right, but was seemingly unaware at the time that this would be the kind of fairy-tale blessing whose treasures almost invariably come tied with various terrible curses.
Oil Blessings & The U.S. Dollar
📕 “Maps, aesthetically scientific” →
📕 “Oil’s corruptive capacity” →
Recall that BP which is now British Petroleum (or ‘Beyond Petroleum’) was once, basically, British Persian.
Its all about the (the control of the) oil
It is hard not to see how the commercial extraction and exportation of oil since before the creation of the modern nation state, in most instances, on the Arabian peninsular has not had an elemental impact on these countries’ political and socioeconomic trajectories since the early decades of the last century.
As per a 1957 Time magazine piece, “THOUGH Britain has populated the Middle East with British political advisers to Arab rulers, and for a time seemed to be running the whole show, in economic fact the region has in recent years been dominated by U.S. companies, who stay out of local politics. They produce about twice as much of the Middle East’s oil as the British. and own nearly 60% of the area’s known reserves. Tiny, treeless Kuwait. the richest producing state in the rich Middle East, is, for example, a sheikdom under British protection and equipped with a British political agent, but its British producing company is half-owned by Gulf Oil (U.S.). Americans also team up with British. Dutch and French interests in Iraq. But Saudi Arabia’s Aramco is entirely an American concession—a syndicate formed by Standard Oil of California, the Texas Co. and Jersey Standard Oil (Esso), plus a smaller share to Mobil Oil.”
1973 oil crisis
Operation Cyclone… Iran–Contra affair… The USA and the UK were funding Afghan mujahideen from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. It is now know that the CIA and MI6 were supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
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