Oil, Sand & Power

America's centry in the Middle East

von Muhammad Rab Nawaz, Saad Nizami

368 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Oil, Sand, and PowerI started writing this book because I kept noticing the same pattern show up again and again in American policy toward the Middle East. A decision gets made that seems smart at the time, usually for oil, security, or some short-term political win, and a decade or two later it blows up in a way nobody planned for. The 1953 coup in Iran is the clearest example. The US helped remove Iran's prime minister to protect oil interests, and twenty six years later that same country became one of America's biggest adversaries. I wanted to trace where that pattern came from and how far back it goes.This book covers about two hundred years, starting with the first American missionaries in Ottoman territory in the 1820s and going up through the Abraham Accords in 2020. Along the way I get into the 1938 oil discovery in Saudi Arabia and the alliance that came out of it, the covert operations during the Cold War, the 1967 and 1973 wars and how they reshaped the region, the Iranian Revolution, both Iraq wars, 9/11 and the War on Terror, and the ongoing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.I'm seventeen and I'm not going to pretend I have some special insight that historians don't. What I did do is spend a lot of time with declassified documents, memoirs, and primary sources, and tried to write something that connects all these events into one continuous story instead of treating them as separate chapters of history. Growing up in this part of the world, I've also seen how these decisions from decades ago still shape daily life and politics here, and I wanted that perspective in the book.If you've read Karen Armstrong, Thomas Friedman, or Bernard Lewis and you're interested in how we got from 1953 to where we are now, I think you'll find something useful here.