Saudi Arabia

By providing the excuse that Hussayn lacked disciplined fighting forces to be able to maintain the region, the British lent support to their agent Ibn Saud. Therefore, after WWI, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and with British assistance, Ibn Saud and his Ikhwan, or “brotherhood”, the shock troops of Wahhabism, set out to conquer the entirety of the Peninsula. As described by Algar, in Wahhabism: A Critical Essay:

Far from being a spontaneous or autonomous development, the extension of Saudi control across the peninsula should therefore be placed in the context of the general reconfiguration of the Middle East that was then underway, largely under the charitable auspices of the British, ever generous with lands that were not theirs. It formed part of the same pattern as the division of the Arab lands of the Fertile Crescent into artificial units; the implantation of Zionism in Palestine under the protection of the British mandate; the establishment of the “secularist” Turkish Republic; and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran.⁹⁹

This Wahhabi conquest of the Arabian peninsula, however, came at the cost of 400,000 killed and wounded. Cities such as Ta’if, Burayda, and al Hufa suffered all-out massacres carried out by the Ikhwan. The governors of the various provinces appointed by Ibn Saud are said to have carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations. Ibn Saud’s cousin, Abdullah ibn Musallim ibn Jilawi, the most brutal among the family, set about subjugating the Shiah population by executing thousands.

Nevertheless, after a visit to the newly conquered Arabian peninsula, Rashid Rida published a work praising Ibn Saud as the saviour of the Holy sites, a practitioner of authentic Islam and, two years later, produced an anthology of Wahhabi treatises. Ultimately, the Salafi and Wahhabism shared common fundamentals. Primarily, a disdain for all developments in Islam subsequent to the first two generations of Muslims, or the Salaf as Salih, the repudiation of Sufism, and the abandonment of adherence to one of the Madhhabs.

By 1924, the Wahhabis, through the instigation of “Abdullah” Philby, reconquered Mecca and expelled the Hashimites. Ensuing protests to Wahhabi vandalism and cruelty rang out throughout the Muslim world, but in 1926, Ibn Saud called an international conference to ratify his control of the Haramayn. And, finally, in 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was officially created, with British sanction. Even long before he had become King, the English monarch knighted Ibn Saud, and bestowed upon him the Order of the Bath, an order of chivalry founded by George I, and the highest honour accorded to nonroyalty.

Through the assistance of Jack Philby, Allen Dulles, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations who would later head the CIA but at the time worked for the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, helped the Rockefeller oil companies gain Saudi Arabia which would soon become the world’s single greatest oil resource, accounting for nearly half of total oil production.

In 1933, the Saudis granted oil concessions to California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), affiliate of Standard Oil of California (Socal, today’s Chevron), headed by John D. Rockefeller Jr. of the Round Table and a founding members of the CFR.

In 1936, Socal and the Texas Oil Company created a partnership, which would later be named Aramco, or the Arabian-American Oil Company. To Socal and Texaco were added the Standard of New Jersey and Socony-Vacuum, the predecessors of Exxon Mobil. The Aramco partners, along with British Petroleum (BP), Royal Dutch Shell, and Gulf Oil combined as a cartel to control the price of oil, known collectively as the Seven Sisters. With the Saudi royal family, they controlled the world’s largest source of petroleum.

In 1945, Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in Egypt, to forge an important US-Saudi economic alliance. Roosevelt had acted on the advice of Harold Ickes, then Petroleum Coordinator for National Defense, and a State Department which in December 1942 had noted, “It is our strong belief that the development of Saudi Arabian petroleum resources should be viewed in the light of the broad national interest.” ¹⁰⁰

The Saudis, however, would be unable to concede to Roosevelt’s request to approve increased Jewish settlement in Palestine, due to the precarious task the Saudis had adopted for themselves of pretending to defend Islam, though also supporting American interests in the region and refraining the rest of the Arab world from aggressive action against Israel. Under the stipulated conditions, American military and technical personnel would be admitted to Saudi Arabia. A US Air Force base was built at Dharan in 1946. Britain however, retained the major responsibility of maintaining Western security interests for another decade. In return, the Saudis declared war on the Axis powers, doing so within a month of the meeting with Roosevelt, and were allowed to be included in the founding conference of the U.N.

Footnotes:

99 Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, p. 42.
100 Engdahl, William. A Century of War.