by Peter Maass
Until the 1970s: See “As Oil Giants Lose Influence, Supply Drops,” by Jad Mouawad, New York Times, August 19, 2008.
7 Desire
In a famous meeting: The deadly purge has been widely reported. See Neil MacFarquhar, “Saddam Hussein Had Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years,” New York Times, December 29, 2006, and Bay Fang, “When Saddam Ruled the Day,” U.S. News & World Report, July 11, 2004.
The United States even supplied Iraq: Reported by Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup,” Washington Post, December 30, 2002.
Donald Rumsfeld, a pharmaceutical: See Christopher Marquis, “Rumsfeld Made Iraq Overture in ’84 Despite Chemical Raids,” New York Times, December 23, 2003.
“There were indications”: See Joost R. Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja, p. 7.
“our vulnerable friend Saudi Arabia”: George H. W. Bush and Brent Scow-croft, A World Transformed, p. 303.
“They won’t stop here”: Ibid., p. 319.
“[Saddam] has clearly done”: Ibid., p. 323.
As the writer: Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, p. 2. Much of my description of Mossadegh and the coup comes from Kinzer’s invaluable book.
Even British foreign secretary: Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men, p. 68
“Ever since Churchill”: Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped, p. 137.
As Roosevelt later wrote: Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men, p. 173.
Roosevelt had shown: Ibid., pp. 179–80.
The shah, returning home: Ibid., p. 191.
A month after Iraq’s invasion: The speech was made on September 11, 1990.
Americans sensed this: See Christopher Layne and Ted Galen Carpenter, “Time for Congress to Vote on the Issue of War in the Gulf,” Cato Institute Foreign Policy Briefing No. 5, December 14, 1990. Layne and Carpenter cite several opinion polls, including one published by the Los Angeles Times, in which 53 percent of the respondents opposed going to war against Iraq. Posted at www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-005.html.
Nayirah, a teenage Kuwaiti girl: The hearing, held on October 10, 1990, was organized by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, chaired by Democrat Tom Lantos and Republican John Porter.
She tearfully recounted: My account of the Nayirah saga is taken from a number of sources, including Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Wald-man, The Press Effect, pp. 16–20; John R. MacArthur, “Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?,” New York Times, January 6, 1992; Arthur E. Rowse, “How to Build Support for War,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1992; and “When Contemplating War, Beware of Babies in Incubators,” Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002.
Bush reinforced the theme: The speech, on October 28, 1990, was made at Hickam Air Force Base, adjacent to Pearl Harbor.
In the debate: Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Iraq War Reader (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 135.
Chevron was one of the buyers: “Chevron to Pay $30 Million to Settle Kickback Charges,” New York Times, November 15, 2007.
“It is tempting”: “The War in Iraq Is Distracting the West from the Looming Crisis in Saudi Arabia,” Anthony Sampson, Independent, May 22, 2004.
“This is the guy that tried to kill my dad”: Bush made the remark at a fundraiser in Texas on September 26, 2002.
As Saddam’s regime fell apart: There are a number of accounts of the killing that day; the details remain murky. I have drawn on many articles, including several stories written by reporters for Knight-Ridder who were in Najaf at the time, as well as an account from Newsweek (“Murder at the Mosque,” by Joshua Hammer, May 19, 2003) and The New Yorker (“The Uprising,” by Jon Lee Anderson, May 3, 2004).
“Should all his ambitions”: A transcript of Cheney’s speech is posted at www.georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html
“Anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts”: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, p. 35.
One version of events: Sadr’s involvement was mentioned in a report by an Iraqi judge who investigated the killing. “Take him away and kill him in your own special way,” Sadr said, according to the judge’s account. See “Sword of the Shia,” by Jeffrey Bartholet, Newsweek, December 4, 2006.
“Oh, occupier”: The slogan was mentioned in Anthony Shadid’s August 30, 2005, story in the Washington Post, “Sadr’s Disciples Rise Again to Play Pivotal Role in Iraq.”
About $zoo million: The $200 million figure comes from the New York Times story “Iraq Insurgency Runs on Stolen Oil Profits,” March 16, 2008, and “Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says,” New York Times, May 12, 2007.
Until the Iraqi army: “Oil, Politics and Bloodshed Corrupt an Iraqi City,” New York Times, June 13, 2006.
8 Alienation
On a warm spring evening: The reception, held on May 16, 2005, was sponsored by the U.S.–Saudi Arabian Business Council.
Naimi was born in 1935: Details of Naimi’s early life come from John Lawton’s “Naimi: ‘I Hope to Tell Him “Objective Accomplished,”’” published in Saudi Aramco World Magazine, May/June 1984, and “The Arabs,” by David Lamb (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 276–78.
The country’s founder: Dilip Hiro, The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 2. There are many estimates on the number of wives; Hiro’s number is seventeen, but there appears to be no consensus.
He finally arranged: For a colorful account of the negotiations, see Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, pp. 289–92.
“The oil concession”: Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, p. 93.
After news of the discovery: See Wallace Stegner’s Discovery!: The Search for Arabian Oil, an excerpt of which, detailing the moment of oil being found, was published in Saudi Aramco World magazine in January/February 1969; and “Well Done, Well Seven,” by Mary Norton, in Saudi Aramco World magazine, May/June 1988.
The only Americans: Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped, p. 91.
“What does it concern them”: Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, p. 29.
“The moment has come”: Yergin, The Prize, p. 606.
“petrodollars actually sever the very link”: Terry Lynn Karl and Ian Gary, “The Global Record,” Foreign Policy in Focus, PetroPolitics Special Report, January 2004.
He died in 1953: See Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia, p. 75.
Long before Hollywood A-listers: See “Abramovich Spending Goes Sky-High on Flying Palace,” London Times, August 22, 2004, and Joe Havely, “Air Force One: The Flying White House,” CNN, February 15, 2002.
“A jungle inhabited by beasts of prey”: The cables have been posted on the Web site of the Campaign Against Arms Trade, at www.caat.org.uk/issues/saudi-bribery.php. The Guardian newspaper has also published them at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/
jun/07/bae18.
“misused or got corrupted with $50 billion”: The interview was broadcast in a 2001 PBS documentary, Looking for Answers. A transcript of the interview was posted at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/
terrorism/interviews/bandar.html.
The prince, whose vacation compound: Kirk Johnson, “A $135 Million Home, but If You Have to Ask …,” New York Times, July 2, 2007.
A former fighter pilot: See David Leigh and Rob Evans, “The Bandar Cover-Up: Who Knew What, and When?,” Guardian, June 9, 2007, and Nelson D. Schwartz and Lowell Bergman, “Payload: Taking Aim at Corporate Bribery,” New York Times, November 25, 2007.
Even the advent: The television protest, as well as the introduction of women’s education, is described by Peter W. Wilson and Douglas F. Graham in Saudi Arabia: The Coming Storm. London: M.E. Sharpe, 1994, p. 55.
The revolt of the alienated: My accoun
t of the siege is drawn from a number of sources, foremost among them Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, pp. 88–94.
In the final battle: For a description of the use of CB gas, as well as the executions, see Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine, pp. 191–92 and 238–40.
An American think tank: See “The Saudi Connection: How Billions in Oil Money Spawned a Global Terror Network,” U.S. News & World Report, December 9, 2003. The $70 billion estimate came from Alex Alexiev of the conservative organization Center for Security Policy. On June 26, 2003, Alexiev cited the estimate in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security; a transcript is posted at www.kyl.senate.gov/legis_center/subdocs/
sc062603_alexiev.pdf.
With a population: For Saudi funding as the proportion of the faith’s costs, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 149.
The oil boom enriched: The biographies of Mohammed bin Laden and his seventeenth son are well known by now. Some of the latest sources I drew on include Wright’s Looming Tower and Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, as well as Coll’s earlier Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
Although his wealth: See Coll, The Bin Ladens, pp. 351–52.
The Sudanese all but fleeced him: See Wright, Looming Tower, pp. 196–97 and 222–23.
At times, bin Laden and his followers: Ibid., p. 248.
“The Saudi Arabian government spares no effort”: Amnesty International, “Saudi Arabia: A Secret State of Suffering,” March 2000. Posted at www.amnesty.org/en/
library/info/MDE23/001/2000.
More than 30 percent: Employment statistics issued by the Saudi government are regarded as unreliable, downplaying the actual numbers of the jobless. The estimates I use come from an article by Eric Rouleau in the July/August 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs (“Trouble in the Kingdom”). Later estimates have not varied significantly from the figures used by Rouleau.
The crucial thing: See “Petroleum, Poverty and Security,” an excellent report issued by Chatham House in June 2005. The report notes, “Petroleum output per head is a primary measure of petroleum resource flow, in the same way that GDP per capita is a measure of economic wealth.” Copy posted at www.chathamhouse.org.uk/
files/3254_bppetroleum.pdf.
In the early 1980s: See “Leisure Class to Working Class in Saudi Arabia,” by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 26, 2001.
The rhythm of life: For population figures, see “Young and Restless,” by Afshin Molavi, Smithsonian, April 2006. The story notes that not only are 75 percent of the population under thirty years of age, 60 percent are under twenty-one and more than one in three is under fourteen.
Addled on illicit drugs: See Josh Martin, “Arab Traffic Jam,” The Middle East, March 1, 2005.
I was not surprised: The URL is www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJup NDIKkEk.
9 Empire
By 2004, Moscow counted more billionaires: “Moscow Overtakes New York as the Billionaires’ Capital of the World,” Independent, May 14, 2004.
The local media: “It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Vanish from TV,” New York Times, June 3, 2008.
As democracy shrank: On life expectancy, see Nicholas Eberstadt, “Rising Ambitions, Sinking Population,” New York Times, October 25, 2008.
In the late 1950s: See Yegor Gaidar, “The Soviet Collapse,” published by the American Enterprise Institute, April 19, 2007, as well as Gaidar’s Collapse of an Empire, chapter 3.
“Without the discovery”: Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, p. 15.
But the impact: See Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, pp. 217–20. Also see Marshall I. Goldman, Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia, pp. 49--54.
At the end of 1985: For a description of the Saudi production increase, see Yergin’s The Prize, pp. 748—751.
“Gorbachev’s incipient perestroika”: Stephen Kotkin, “What Is to Be Done?” Financial Times, March 5, 2004.
According to Yegor Gaidar: Quoted from Gaidar’s “The Soviet Collapse.” Gaidar has noted that oil revenues propped up the Soviet economy for decades. In Collapse of an Empire, he wrote, “The hard currency from oil exports stopped the growing food supply crisis, increased the import of equipment and consumer goods, ensured a financial base for the arms race and the achievement of nuclear parity with the United States, and permitted the realization of such risky foreign policy actions as the war in Afghanistan;” see p. 102.
“Nothing is free”: Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism, p. 194.
Roman Abramovich, an oil multibillionaire: Details on Abramovich’s acquisitions are from “Abramovich Purchases Equal of Air Force One,” St. Petersburg Times, May 25, 2004; “A Roman Retreat,” Time, November 24, 2003; and “I’m No Napoleon, Says Abramovich,” Daily Telegraph, July 6, 2003.
A few days earlier: See “Advertisers Doubt NFQ Rival Killed Goldman,” Moscow Times, April 14, 2004.
Putin reportedly amassed: See Luke Harding, “Putin, the Kremlin Power Struggle and the $40bn fortune,” Guardian, December 21, 2007.
Since Putin had come to office: See Michael A. McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, “The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin’s Crackdown Holds Russia Back,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008.
Khodorkovsky was also challenging Putin: See Marshall I. Goldman, Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia, pp. 111–13.
When a Chinese firm tried: See “Chinese Company Drops Bid to Buy U.S. Oil Concern,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.
Under the post-Communist rule: There are a number of excellent books about this period in Russian economic history. One of the best is Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism, by Chrystia Freeland. See also The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, by David E. Hoffman, and Paul Klebnikov’s Godfather of the Kremlin.
“Putin arrived on the scene”: See Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, “The Myth of Putin’s Success,” International Herald Tribune, December 13, 2007.
Not long afterward: See “Russia Plans to Sell Bonds in 2010, Seeks Loans from World Bank,” by Paul Abelsky, Bloomberg, April 27, 2009. The story, attributing its information to Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, stated that “the country’s Reserve Fund, one of its two sovereign wealth funds, may be exhausted by the end of this year.”
Russia’s megarich: See “Up in Smoke,” Forbes, March 30, 2009. The magazine reported that in the wake of the global recession, Moscow, which in 2008 had seventy-four billionaires to New York’s seventy-one, now had only twenty-seven to New York’s fifty-five.
A rash of street protests: See “Thousands Protest Across Russia,” the BBC, January 31, 2009, posted at www.news.bbc.co.uk/
2/hi/europe/7862370.stm. The story noted, “Protests on such a large scale were unthinkable just a few months ago as the economy boomed with record high oil prices and as the Kremlin tightened its grip over almost all aspects of society, the BBC’s Richard Galpin in Moscow says. But now with the economy in deep trouble, there is real fear amongst ordinary people about what the future will hold.”
“The state has become”: See Andrei Illarionov, “Russia Inc.,” New York Times, February 4, 2006.
10 Mirage
In the halls of American power: Chávez made the speech on September 20, 2006.
“rich countries with poor people”: See Joseph Stiglitz, “We Can Now Cure Dutch Disease,” Guardian, August 18, 2004.
But like the foreign companies: See David Luhnow and Peter Millard, “As Global Demand Tightens, A Big Producer Has Own Agenda,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2006, and Natalie Obiko Pearson, “Chávez’s Largesse Puts Strain on Venezuela’s State
Oil Company as Exports to U.S. Decline,” Associated Press, March 27, 2007.
Chávez proceeded to turn: The statistics and rationale for Chávez’s move are explained by one of his top oil advisers, Bernard Mommer, in “Subversive Oil,” a chapter Mommer wrote for the book Venezuelan Politics in the Chávez Era, Steve Ellner and Daniel Hellinger, eds. (Lynne Rienner, 2004). A useful overview of Chávez’s place in Venezuela’s petrohistory is contained in Michael Shifter’s “In Search of Hugo Chávez,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006.
The subsequent contraction: See my book Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Knopf, 1996).
Under Chávez, output was more than: There are contradictory statistics on Venezuela’s oil production. The government claims a daily production of 3.3 million barrels, but figures from OPEC and the International Energy Agency show output close to 2.4 million barrels a day. See “Venezuela’s Oil-Based Economy,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 27, 2008, copy posted at http://www.cfr.org/publication/12089/, and Rachel Jones, “Venezuela Seeks Investment from Big Oil,” Associated Press, January 15, 2009.
“To rescue and redistribute petroleum rent”: “A National, Popular and Revolutionary Oil Policy for Venezuela,” a report to the National Assembly by Rafael Ramírez on June 9, 2005.
PDVSA’s fastest-growing subsidiary: On Palmaven, see David Luhnow and Peter Millard, “As Global Demand Tightens, a Big Producer Has Own Agenda,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2006.
Chávez’s policies were born: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, p. 34.
“Venezuela is warming up”: The advertisement was published on December 7, 2005.
And not just there: See Juan Forero, “Chavez, Seeking Foreign Allies, Spends Billions,” New York Times, April 4, 2006; Michael Shifter, “In Search of Hugo Chávez,” Foreign Affairs, May 2006; and “New President Has Bolivia Marching to Chávez’s Beat,” Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2006.
Chávez made no secret: See Jon Lee Anderson, “Fidel’s Heir,” in The New Yorker, June 23, 2008. Anderson writes, “Venezuela outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to $1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia; the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in Haiti.”