Oil colour
bonald Watt 1,4Ver Play: The Tumultuous World of East I . 18;90-1973 Leonard Mosley eidenfeld and Nicolson £3,75) iher 1)0 e is a curiously unpleasant taste to this Mr Mosley has chosen a remarkable -1`rsle and one which well needs exploring 11°E.sv that the shortfall between the energy the,sis of the major industrial nations and ue,ll' indigenous supplies has spread to the enite(1 States and become the basis of scare 1d lines and Time cover stories. It is a m,te which in many ways is well suited to
'''I,ftsley's particular talents. The history of 6 ' middle Eastern oil industry is full of co
irrf-til crooks, imperial twisters, oriental in
and industrial practices reminiscent of A' robber barons of nineteenth-century
illislerica. Few figures connected with the oil px(lUstry emerge with any credit from a close fivarhination of their behaviour in the eightyYears to which Mr Mosley's narrative is wrected. The whole theme seems remarkably t:ll-suited to the kind of expose journalism 1.15hich, among other sister causes, Mr MoswYs. former employer, Lord Beaverbrook, "tbs so addicted!' yullt as one ploughs through Mr Mosley's -ofieltlessly off-colour narrative one's sense mdistaste begins to grow. It is not only that Mosley's refuses to admit any nobility of iLaracter, so that, for example, Abdul .Aziz 07' Saud, a man both heroically brave in the Arab tradition, and sophisticated and sivare of external realities so as to hold his tbate together and independent throughout Years which followed his expulsion of the .fasi
letnites from, the Hejaz in 1925, appears
Ply as an ignorant and uncultured barba4101 easily gulled by his Levantine advisers st1,.(1 the Armco negotiators; or that Sheikh 41"akhbut bin Sultan of Abu Dhabi, a poet t;i1(1 a man generous to a fault, the epitome of tie classic Arab virtues, appears as a "rapa024S," "Short-sighted " "oligarch with the b'u canard about keeping his wealth in gold r4rS under his bed. It lies in Mr Mosley's cu us obsession with the cruelties of tradition" Arabic law and with the practice in the °I'e backward parts of Arabia of packing b.e Vaginas of women with rock salt after the r:;r11) of their first baby, a practice which sults in the condition of atresia, making itorki and third births very often fatal for
Mother. This practice is explained on at
s1 two separate occasions with all the r,oral fervour and determination not to spare of the shocking details which used to disINuish the old Sunday Pictorial. is when we realise how much skulduggeMr Mosley has missed that the suspicion Nins to arise that Mr Mosley has set out to tite a roman o these. His thesis depends es'N'itiallv on the proposition that much of the °resent rancorous determination with which
the national oil administrations of the Middle East are pursuing the large international oil companies has to do with the collective stupidity the latter exhibited during the 1940s and 1950s. This is not an untenable thesis by any means. But since the source of much of Mr Mosley's information is, on his own showing, individuals among the independent American companies who broke into the Middle East in the late 1950s he tends to see their forerunners as a single group, the Anglo-Americans as he often calls them. This is greatly to confuse the issue, and to miss entirely the deadly rivalry and suspicion that used to exist between the big four of the Aramco group and the Anglo-Iranian, later British Petroleum, complex. It has led Mr Mosley completely to neglect. for example, the whole episode of the Burairni oasis dispute, to miss the Saudi support for the Imam of Iman, and the British military intervention in 1959 to suppress that man of dubious piety; to ignore the constant incursions of Aramco drilling teams into the eastern Aden protectorates; and in his animus against the Sultan of Oman — who was indeed far from being a nice man — to represent the People's Front for the liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf as a genuine liberation movement rather than a group of would-be revolutionaries stationed in the South Yemen and armed and trained by the Chinese. It has led Mr Mosley into some other canards also. His suggestion that Sir William Luce engineered the Persian occupation of the two islands at the mouth of the Gulf known as the Tumbs and claimed by Sheikh Saku of the minute emirate of Ras-al-Khaimah in order to ease the Sheikh's way into the Union of Arab Emirates once it was clear that his hopes of independent oil wealth were baseless, is worthy of the imagination of a French journalist. It has no more truth than his allegation that the Labour government of 1950-51 were determined to use force against Iran on the nationalisation by Premier Mossadegh of the Anglo-Iranian oil fields and were restrained by American representations and Soviet threats to occupy northern Iran. The truth is that the ' send-a-gunboat ' group in the Labour cabinet never had any chance of carrying the majority of their colleagues with them in face of the impossibility of reconciling such action with the whole thrust of British attempts to use the United Nations Charter as a means of prising Russia loose from central Europe.
As one continues to read one discovers more and more that Mr Mosley has refused to consult any of the standard academic works on the Middle East in general or on its oil industry and politics in particular. A few memoirs, a few travelogues, a scattering of the specialised press, and a great deal of personal evidence provide the basis for his conclusions. It is this which gives the book its only real interest, his account of the two trends in current Arab oil politics, nationalisation and participation, with its paradoxical conclusion that nationalisation, which must of necessity be confined purely to oil-producing facilities In the country nationalising them is paradoxically, much more in the oil companies' interests than participation which' involves sharing the control of the whole operation up to the petrol pump in Mitcham, Munich, Milan or Minneapolis. Interested parties are advised to read Mr Mosley's final chapters with care and attention. The remainder should be read only by connoisseurs of Mr Mosley's particular talents.
Previous page
