Oil Crusades: America Through Arab Eyes

244 Pages·2007·1.27 MB·English

by  Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum

Oil Crusades
America through Arab Eyes
ABDULHAY YAHYA ZALLOUM
LONDON ANN ARBOR, MI
First published 2007 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum 2007
The right of Abdulhay Yahya Zalloum to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Design and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback
ISBN-13: 978-0-7453-2560-6
ISBN-10: 0-7453-2560-2
Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-0-7453-2559-0
ISBN-10: 0-7453-2559-9
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Introduction 1
1 The Beginning of the End? 8
2 God, Geology, Geopolitics,
and Geography: A Brief History of Oil 21
3 The Scramble for Oil in Iraq 41
4 Black Gold and the Dollar 69
5 Inside OPEC, Big Oil’s Invisible Hand 90
6 Crusading for Israel 110
7 Oil and God 155
8 Future Imperfect: Why America Must Change 180
Notes 208
Index 217
v
WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,
easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. … It is the
only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the
losses in lives.
Who Makes the Profits?
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people—didn’t one
of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their
powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or
something? How did they do in the war? They were a patri-
otic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts
for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. … Now
let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years,
1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we
find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of
normal times were pretty good.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically
shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to
manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910–1914 yearly
earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And,
like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to muni-
tions making. Did their profits jump—or did they let Uncle
Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914–1918 average was
$49,000,000 a year!
Who Pays the Bill?
We all pay them—in taxation. We paid the bankers their
profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold
them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers
collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The
bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to
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depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us—the people—
got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers
bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom
and government bonds went to par—and above. Then the
bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.
Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
(twice decorated with the Medal of Honor),
War Is a Racket(1935)
Acknowledgments
IHAVE LED A busy life over my 70 years as a workaholic
who averages 16–18 hours’ work a day. My first
acknowledgment therefore is to God for the good health
and energy with which He endowed me, which have made
my working practice possible. For the past ten years I have
devoted 4–6 hours a day to reading, researching, and writing,
reflecting on my firsthand experiences as well as the experi-
ences of others. I first began to record these reflections after
the age 60.
My parents, who had only a limited education themselves,
insisted that I pursue my university education in the United
States, an onerous undertaking for them, especially in the
1950s for those who earned their living in the troubled lands
of the Middle East to be spent in the much more expensive
US. They gave me all their support and stretched their
resources until the mission was accomplished. I am eternally
grateful to them.
I am grateful to an intelligent, loving, and devoted wife,
who took on the lion’s share of the responsibility for raising
our five children and raised them well. In my culture children
and family are the most valuable of our worldly assets.
I am grateful for the assistance of many for their contribu-
tions to the publication of this book. I start with Roger van
Zwanenberg, Chair of Pluto Press, with whom I brain-
stormed first by email and later face to face. Roger has
unique experiences in this world which he is pursuing
through his progressive Pluto Press. If any one person must
be singled out for his enormous contribution to this work it is
Ehsan Masoud. A London-based journalist, and a gentleman,
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he employed his professionalism to polish this book through
superb editing that made a difference. To him I am thankful.
Knowing the United States and the West for more than half
a century, almost a quarter of the life of the American
Republic before it became an empire, living in and experiencing
the worlds of Islam and the West, and traveling extensively in
Africa and large parts of Asia, including India and China,
I learned that the “conventional wisdom” promoted by the
establishment and corporate media is in many instances no
wisdom at all. I learned that it is not only people that lie, but
also governments, corporations, and even history books.
I learned that a religious police is not only a feature of some
Middle Eastern countries, for “thought police” exist in a
more sophisticated guise even in the self-proclaimed bastions
of liberty and freedom. Mainstream corporate media,
controlled by five corporations mainly in the US, broadcast
establishment views and narrowcast everybody else’s.
I learned that the grass is not always greener on the other side
of the fence, as one of those conventional wisdoms claims.
Preface
Permit me to control the money of a nation and I care not who makes
its rules.
Mayer Rothschild, founder of the
Rothschild dynasty
AS A YOUNG STUDENT in elementary schools in
Jerusalem, when it was the capital of Palestine prior
the creation of Israel in 1948, our history teacher
taught us about the Balfour Declaration—the document in
which Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to
another British peer promising to create a Jewish homeland
in someone else’s country. To my young, inquisitive mind
I wondered how a British politician, Lord Balfour, could
promise a British financier, Lord Rothschild, someone else’s
country—which happened to be mine! This relationship
between financiers and politicians puzzled me and I longed to
find an answer.
After I graduated from high school my parents insisted I go
to America for my university education. That was where a
good education in the land of equality, freedom, and the
pursuit of happiness could be found—or so they were told.
Unlike other imperial powers, the US government, strong as
it was, never waged war–except “to end all wars”!
At the age of 18 I left East Jerusalem airport bound for
Beirut, where I boarded a ship that sailed first to Port Said
and Alexandria in Egypt, and then to Europe, where
I boarded the United States, then America’s fastest and finest
transatlantic ocean liner. On arrival in the US, I went by train
from New York to Austin, Texas.
On the bus to the university campus I thought it odd that
African-Americans occupied the rear seats only. It must be a
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coincidence, I said to myself. Then, in the long registration
line, I was aware of the absence of black students. When
I inquired further I was told that “negro” students were not
admitted to that state university. To my surprise, when
I went downtown, “Whites Only” or “No Negroes” signs
were common features in restaurants, parks, and public toi-
lets. However, history books taught that, almost a century
before I arrived in the United States, Abraham Lincoln was
supposed to have fought a war to free those very people. But
1,400 year earlier, the Prophet Mohammad had preached
that all people are equal regardless of color, creed, or race.
And he practiced what he preached. His council was
multiracial—among its most trusted members were Bilal, a
black African, Suhaib, a Roman, and Suleiman, a Persian.
My sense of shock is best expressed by quoting from Colin
Powell’s memoirs, My American Journey:
While we were training in the north Georgia mountains the only
black church was some distance away in Gainesville. I wanted to
go to services on Sundays, and the Army thoughtfully provided
me with a half-ton truck and a driver, a white corporal, to take
me to Gainesville. There I sang and swayed with the rest of the
Baptist congregation. The next Sunday, the corporal pointed out
that because he had to drive me to church, he could not attend
services himself. Would it be all right, he wanted to know, if he
joined me? The minister was a kindly man and said it would
ordinarily give him great pleasure …. But his presence in a black
church might not sit well with the local white folks. It might be
wiser if the corporal waited in the truck.
What my father had feared … the reality I wanted to ignore,
was forcing its way into my life, the lunatic code that made it
wrong for two men to sit together in a house of God, or share a
meal in a restaurant, or use the same bathroom. (1996, p. 41)
I was asking similar questions four decades before Powell did.
In an optional history course I took, I was very surprised to
discover that during World War II all Japanese in America were
held in detention camps, including American citizens of