Crude World (25 page)

A militiaman’s AK-47 in front of a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr

There was time to ponder what Iraq’s oil reserves had paid for in the quarter century of Saddam’s rule. It underwrote roads and universities and hospitals, but its nonconcrete legacy was disastrous. Since the 1960s, there had been repression, war, poverty, more war, more repression, more war. Oil creates a particularly volatile type of grievance. It is one thing for people to be poor due to factors beyond a listless government’s control—being landlocked or drought-stricken, for example. It is another thing for poverty to proliferate under a hated regime that plunders or wastes an immense amount of wealth. On the eve of the American invasion, with government institutions discredited and inept, religious figures possessed the preponderance of authority in Iraq. Shiite and Sunni clerics were the answer to the question of where
people go for succor, voice and direction if their government fails them for decades and, in the wake of invasion by an army of infidels, ceases to function.

When the Nigerian state began to collapse on itself in the 1980s, there was little to take its place or shore it up because the country was fractured along hundreds of ethnic and religious lines; low-level anarchy ensued. In Najaf, the collapse of Saddam’s petrostate had created the spectacle of people literally crawling to seek help from religious figures like Muqtada al-Sadr; in Sadr’s office one day, I saw petitioners prostate themselves in front of him, asking for assistance. Sadr was about thirty years old and still a student of the Koran, but his power derived from his revered father, an outspoken grand ayatollah who was murdered in 1999 by presumed Mukhabarat agents.

The violence that would consume Iraq in its post-Saddam era had already begun in Najaf. As Saddam’s regime fell apart, an exiled Shiite leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, was flown into the town by the American military, which hoped to insert a pro-Western voice. When Khoei made his first visit to the tomb of Imam Ali, a crowd chanting Sadr’s name beat, stabbed and shot Khoei to death. One version of events had the crowd dragging him to Sadr’s office a few hundred yards away, where Sadr gave the order for execution, because Khoei’s family was a rival to his own. Among the Shiites, who were the long-repressed majority in a country dominated by its Sunni minority, sorting out the future would not be a peaceful affair. This, too, was a legacy of oil, as I was about to be told.

Sadr swept into the room with several aides, most as young as he was. Dressed in a black gown and turban, he moved at a forward angle, leaning ahead, as though he was in a hurry or lost in thought or both. There was no shaking of hands, no exchange of pleasantries, no eye contact as he sat in the armchair kept vacant for him. It was as though a dark cloud had moved into the room and sat before me. He nodded at my interpreter in a way that meant,
Begin
. He showed no emotion aside from graveness, as I had seen him do the day before, while delivering a sermon at the Kufa mosque, where his assassinated father had delivered
his sermons. In addition to killing his father, Saddam’s regime had murdered Muqtada’s brothers and a famous uncle, whose body was set on fire after nails had been drilled into his head.

Sadr had mentioned, at his sermon the day before, that enemies would try to stand in the way of Iraq. I asked whether he had Americans in mind. He didn’t hesitate to say that President Bush wanted to carve up and weaken Iraq, the better to control its oil. “Everyone knows that America is not looking for reforms to unify the country,” Sadr told me. “They will be an enemy to us or, shall we say, they will not be a friend to us. We are looking for a unified Islamic nation, so we think our aim is different than their aim.” This theme became explicit in the years ahead, as crowds carrying Sadr’s portrait marched in Najaf and shouted, “Oh, occupier, our oil is for us, not you.”

Violence took its inevitable course, as Sunni and Shiite militias fought the American occupiers and fought each other. For some Iraqis who took up arms, oil was not just a nationalist rallying cry but a source of funding for their efforts. About $200 million a year in smuggled oil went into the coffers of militias, according to a U.S. government report, though the actual figure was probably higher. This was done by tapping oil from pipelines (as rebellion-for-profit militias did in Nigeria) or by demanding a cut of the revenues earned by the state oil company. Until the Iraqi army threw it out in 2008, Sadr’s Mehdi militia was in control of Basra, where it received a percentage of the oil that was exported from the local port. Up north, Kurds and Arabs who lived in Kirkuk claimed rights to the giant oil field outside the city; the standoff might well be resolved by force. Even as the anti-American insurgency calmed down in 2009, a new round of oil warfare beckoned.

Just as America had other concerns when it invaded, Iraqis killed each other for reasons distinct from petroleum. But without a doubt, oil was a violence-inducing intoxicant for the people who lived atop it as well as the foreigners who desired it. The country has too much for its own good. It seems reasonable to consider that the fighting may not stop until the wells run dry.

Ali al-Naimi is barely five feet tall but can be found in a crowd quite easily, because he is always at its center. Naimi, as you’ll recall, is the minister of oil for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so the center is wherever he places his Guccis. On a warm spring evening in Washington, D.C., he was the easy-to-locate guest of honor at a reception at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where his welcomers included envoys from America’s financial behemoths. Merrill Lynch sent a representative from its executive suite, as did Morgan Stanley, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Dyncorp, General Dynamics, U.S. Steel, Chevron, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Energy. Almost everyone wore pins of side-by-side Saudi and American flags that were handed out at the door. But it was an evening in which desire mixed with anxiety, like a nineteenth-century ball at which a hundred suitors make flattering compliments to just one belle.

“We’re trying to get some of that Saudi oil,” I heard one businessman confide to another.

“It’s hard to get,” the other replied, with adolescent envy.

Naimi swept into the ballroom a half hour late, his slight runner’s frame giving him a birdlike demeanor. He moved as quickly as the central banker of oil might be allowed to move in such a crowd. Hands were extended and shaken, warm greetings were made, laughs were plentiful even if the joke was not heard and, in general, confidence and
confidences were encouraged. Even the highest-ranking executives, feigning incidental interest, tilted their heads to eavesdrop as Naimi hopped past. They listened to his brief speech as though their destiny was being revealed. “We are the biggest exporter of crude oil and the U.S. is the biggest consumer of crude oil,” Naimi began. “That makes for excellent complementarity.” He smiled, cueing polite laughter.

Naimi was born in 1935 in the desert around Khobar, a small port on the Persian Gulf. He was as unprepared for modernity as Saudi Arabia itself. His parents were Bedouin, and the family migrated endlessly with their sheep and camels. When he began tending his tribe’s livestock, he was told not to wander out of sight of their tents, lest he get lost in the infinite desert. His life was destined to be hard, because well into the twentieth century, the Bedouin suffered the same deprivations as their ancestors centuries earlier. But Naimi had the good fortune to be born around the same time as American geologists began looking for oil in the Saudi desert not far from where his tribe wandered. The discovery of oil showered Saudi Arabia with money, paying for highways and palaces and turning a boy nomad into a globe-trotting minister
whose mere words could alter the world’s economy. Oil remade the country, but it could not produce tranquillity.

The Kingdom Center in Riyadh

A country’s birth is rarely a peaceful event. It’s often the result of violence, and Saudi Arabia was no exception.

The country’s founder, Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal al-Saud, after whom it is named, unified his kingdom in 1932, acquiring new territory through military victories and strategic marriages into rival tribes (he had at least seventeen wives and a number of concubines). But within a few years his project was floundering. The king borrowed money from almost every business with funds to spare, and still civil servants were not paid on time. In the Middle East, a king without money is not king for long, so to keep his household and his nation afloat, Ibn Saud, as he is known to westerners, had to take out loans from his personal banker. He finally arranged a more secure lifeline from a distant source—Standard Oil of California, which paid £55,000 in gold for exploration rights. As historian Madawi al-Rasheed has noted, “The oil concession came at a time when the state lurched from one financial crisis to another … [and it] resulted in immediate relief.”

The exploratory team, led by a geologist named Max Steineke, set up a crude camp near Khobar, sleeping in tents by night and occasionally riding camels by day to survey the desert. The color of their skin was new to the Bedouin, as was the behavior of these interlopers, who started the day not with prayers but, sometimes, with calisthenics. Their searches paid off. In 1938, at an exploratory well known as Dammam 7, the Americans pierced a vast reservoir. After news of the discovery was cabled back to San Francisco, Steineke’s camp was augmented with rudimentary air-conditioning and other amenities that meant the Americans would be staying for a while. A year later, Ibn Saud opened a valve that let the first Saudi oil flow onto a tanker ship, the
D.G. Scofield
. The future of the country and the planet shifted at that moment, yet few people noticed. The American government did not even have an embassy in Saudi Arabia—its nearest diplomat was in Egypt. The only Americans at the ceremony were oilmen.

Saudi Arabia was, at the time, one of the poorest nations in the world. Largely illiterate and preindustrial, it had meager exports and minimal relations with the outside world. Ibn Saud rarely ventured outside the country, and hardly any of his few million subjects had done so, except in seasonal migrations with their livestock. The royal court was delighted with its new source of revenue, but there were doubts among the nation’s conservative population, always wary of outsiders. How would their lives be changed by oil? Who would truly benefit from it? One of the best portrayals of this dawn-of-oil era is found in the novels of Abdelrahman Munif, especially
Cities of Salt
, which begins in an oasis town whose residents do not understand what the white-skinned visitors are looking for. A skeptical tribesman, wary of foreigners who promise wealth for everyone, warns his friends, “What does it concern them if we get rich or stay just as we are? Watch their eyes, watch what they do and say. They’re devils, no one can trust them.”

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the American-Saudi relationship remained cozy and sleepy. The extraction of oil rose gradually, under the control of Aramco, a consortium of American companies led by the very fortunate Standard Oil of California (now known as Chevron). With oil costing two or three dollars a barrel, Saudi Arabia had a steady but not extravagant stream of revenue. Its oil was not even needed by the United States, which was, until the 1950s, a net
exporter
of oil. But as America’s economy expanded in the 1960s, along with its oil-intensive culture of cars and suburbs, the once-vigorous fields of Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana were being depleted. By the early 1970s, American production had peaked and the country was importing one-third of the petroleum it consumed. The little-noted shift that had begun when Ibn Saud loosed the first shipment of Saudi oil onto world markets was now going to be felt by the entire world.