Audience with King Saud, December, 1932
Hello, Your Majesty! I know you’re a busy man, what with the new government and all the wives and kids and the squabbling among the tribes and whatnot, so I’ll get right to the point:
Have I got a deal for you! Bear with me while I outline the plan. You see, we have this thing we call oil. You may know it as that stuff that sometimes gets the camels’ feet all black and sticky. You chaps over here don’t have any use for it, but where I come from in the Heathen West, we’re crazy about the stuff.
So here’s what we want to do: first, we run around all over our side of the world developing a fine appetite for everything about oil. We do it all: we invent machines that need it, develop whole new technologies that use it, and come up with processes to turn it into all kinds of useful stuff. In other words, we create a huge market for it!
Next we send some people over to explore for oil in your neighborhood —with your kind permission, of course, sir!
Did I mention this is a no-lose proposition for you? See, if we don’t find any oil, we just go away! No cost, no obligation on your part, and sorry we bothered you.
But if we do find some oil — well, King, this is your lucky century! We’ll send our engineers over here to get it out of the ground; pump it and ship it and tidy up afterward; and (here comes the really good part) pay you so much for it that you’ll be rich beyond imagining!
That’s right! Instead of, say, killing you and taking your oil (the way you guys have always done things, if you don’t mind me saying so), we’ll make a deal with you to pay you enormous sums of money to take the oil away!
But wait, there’s more! We’ve done our homework, sir, and we happen to know that you’ve already made arrangements with the Wahhabis and various other wild and crazy local boys who happen to infest your fine sandbox over here, to sort of let them call the shots, religion-wise, if you just stick to the governing thing. And a fine arrangement it is, Your Grace. You’re a sly fox, you are! Because they’re a bloodthirsty bunch, if you’ll pardon my candor, and anything you can do to keep that crowd in line is well worth the effort.
See, here’s where we come in again. We are going to pay you so much for oil that you can dole out goodies to those rascals and keep them occupied running madrassas and raving in mosques until the camels come home. And just in case they still get a little restless once in a while, they can go raise hell with somebody over the borders somewhere, and leave you alone.
Now we also recognize that occasionally those rascals of yours are going to wander a little far off the reservation (as we say back home), and we might even find some of them causing trouble in our neck of the woods. Not to worry! As long as the oil keeps flowing, you’re an ally and that’s all there is to say about it.
Want to build a few madrassas in our neighborhoods? No skin off our noses. The radical lads want to get a nice head of steam and blow up a few things? Who are we to object too much? A deal is a deal, and that’s just the way it is.
You see, we have our own bunch of troublemakers, so we know what you’re going through.
It’s because of them that we don’t just drill for oil in our own backyard and keep all the proceeds for ourselves. And it’s because of them that we’ll make deals with the likes of you, Your Majesty, and risk having your religious rejects come over to our part of the globe to preach hellfire and ritual beheadings to the locals, and maybe even knock down a few buildings.
So what do you say, Your Kingship, Sir? Have we got a deal?
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