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Loading... America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and I)by Robert Vitalis
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America's Kingdom debunks the many myths that now surround the United States's "special relationship" with Saudi Arabia, or what is less reverently known as "the deal": oil for security. Taking aim at the long-held belief that the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO, made miracles happen in the desert, Robert Vitalis shows that nothing could be further from the truth. What is true is that oil led the U.S. government to follow the company to the kingdom. Eisenhower agreed to train Ibn Sa'ud's army, Kennedy sent jets to defend the kingdom, and Lyndon Johnson sold it missiles. Oil and ARAMCO quickly became America's largest single overseas private enterprise. Beginning with the establishment of a Jim Crow system in the Dhahran oil camps in the 1930s, the book goes on to examine the period of unrest in the 1950s and 1960s when workers challenged the racial hierarchy of the ARAMCO camps while a small cadre of progressive Saudis challenged the hierarchy of the international oil market. The defeat of these groups led to the consolidation of America's Kingdom under the House of Fahd, the royal faction that still rules today. This is a gripping story that covers more than seventy years, three continents, and an engrossing cast of characters. Informed by first hand accounts from ARAMCO employees and top U.S. government officials, this book offers the true story of the events on the Saudi oil fields. After America's Kingdom, mythmakers will have to work harder on their tales about ARAMCO being magical, honorable, selfless, and enlightened. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.7665509538Social sciences Economics Production Business Enterprises By Industry Chemical TechnologyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.5)
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Wikipedia in English (3)
1
The author sets out to demolish some impressions deliberately spun by the oil companies, particularly ARAMCO in the period from World War 2 to the 1970s: that the US oil men were technical and commercial heroes of an undeveloped desert frontier; that the Saudi monarchy was a progressive and well-meaning institution; and that the oil company was putting an extraordinary effort into developing Saudi Arabia as a modern nation. The glossy ARAMCO magazine was the kind of PR work that supported this kind of spin.
As the author shows, the American oil company set up labor-exploitative work camps similar to those of mineral extracting companies of the US and Europe for the past several decades. The US camps were moreover racist and segregated, following the same pattern as the Jim Crow culture of the US. And ARAMCO and the US State Department often worked together to ply the Saudi monarchy with money and favors in order to maintain their preferential treatment. This relationship continued to wax strong in spite of that monarchy's anti-Jewish bigotry and obvious anti-democratic attitudes.
Unfortunately the text reads poorly. It is as if the author dictated the text and was so enchanted with his own way of phrasing things that he neglected to empathize with how the reader would cope with his many long self-interrupted sentences, where the subject and verb have been separated by miles of interjected after-thoughts. The tone is often one of a gossip columnist dressed as a scholar. And what is one to make of the final words of his Acknowledgments, where he thanks Brian Wilson and Neil Young, the two inspirations for the book?
At any rate, we are indebted to the author for his thesis and evidence. (