America's Great Game (16 page)

Be that as it may, the book that resulted from Kim’s 1947 tour,
Arabs, Oil, and History
, was a remarkable document in its own right: part travelogue, part introductory survey of Middle Eastern affairs, part Arabist polemic, and part a personal manifesto by the man soon to take charge of the region for the CIA—a sort of blueprint for early US covert operations in the Arab world. As such, it is worth pausing the narrative briefly to consider the book’s main points.

First,
Arabs, Oil, and History
was strikingly critical of earlier European imperialism in the Middle East and the legacy of autocracy and underdevelopment it had left behind. For example, whereas TR had praised the British in Egypt, Kim condemned the “faulty British tactics which rel[ied] upon stability imposed by a small, selfishly interested clique.” Under the client king Farouk—a pudgy playboy, in Kim’s pen-portrait—Egyptian society was characterized by a startlingly deep economic divide between the ruling class and the rest of the population,
summed up for Kim in the old Arab saying “Cakes for the Fat, an Onion for the Thin.” A similar state of affairs prevailed in the Arab states ruled by the Hashemites, “the most British-dominated of Arab dynasties,” as Kim put it. Transjordan, governed by the vain, slippery, and overweight king ‘Abdullah, was a “little artificial impoverished country.” In Iraq the downtrodden masses so hated the Hashemites that, if “it weren’t for British protection (which allowed them to build up their own secret police and army), Abdul Ilah and the others would be murdered in two hours”—a prescient observation, as later events proved. Among the Middle Eastern countries within the British sphere of influence, only non-Arab Iran escaped complete condemnation in
Arabs, Oil, and History
, and even here Kim’s review was less than glowing. The young shah was barely mentioned—Kim had far more to say about the charismatic chief of the Qashqai tribe, Khosrow Khan—and the same Iranian army that had just “liberated” Azerbaijan was dismissed as corrupt and ill-disciplined.
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Kim did compliment some individual Britons for their “wholly personal contributions” to Western relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, among them Lawrence of Arabia, Jack Philby, and the Orientalist adventurer Aubrey Herbert (the model for the master of disguise Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan’s
Greenmantle)
, whom he described, with a hint of envy, as “able to don native dress and vanish without trace into quarters which no foreigner could enter.” In short,
Arabs, Oil, and History
was not altogether devoid of its author’s earlier enthusiasm for British imperial culture. Overall, though, the verdict on Britain’s record was surprisingly harsh: the main consequence of the British presence in the Middle East was a profound sense of Arab “bitterness” toward the West that was now “available to demagogues (and the Russians) for whatever purpose they may choose.”
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Fortunately, there was an alternative model for the Middle East–West relationship and future American policy, one based not on “political domination and economic exploitation,” but rather “on common interests.” Here Kim explicitly invoked the United States’ distinctive history of nongovernmental interaction with Arabs and Muslims: the missions of nineteenth-century evangelists, the building of American universities in Beirut and Cairo, and, most recently, the efforts of the American oil industry to improve education, medicine, and communications in Saudi Arabia. These activities, which contrasted with the general
dearth of earlier official US involvement in the region (symbolized for Kim by the ineptness of the goodwill mission he had accompanied to Saudi Arabia in 1944), had caused Middle Easterners to adopt “a different attitude toward [Americans] as distinct from other Westerners.” Together, these activities constituted “a national asset of incalculable value” and, potentially, “more effective bulwarks of national security than the imperialisms of Russia and Britain.”
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Furthermore, a sizable group of Arabs were naturally disposed to friendship with the United States. The “Young Effendis,” as Kim Roosevelt called them, using a term coined by Archie’s friend British explorer Freya Stark, were Arab nationalists who wanted to rid the Middle East of the vestiges of European colonialism, including its client monarchies. Despite their anticolonial politics, these nationalists were no communists, Soviet Russia appearing to them in much the same guise as the imperial Western European powers. They had also resisted the urge taking hold among some groups of young Arabs—the recently created Muslim Brotherhood, for example—to reject all foreign influence in favor of a xenophobic form of Islamism. Instead, reflecting the fact that many of them had been educated at American-founded institutions in the region, and a few in the United States itself, the Young Effendis positively welcomed American interest in their countries. They identified with causes similar to those traditionally promoted by US visitors, such as education, health care, and women’s rights. Although strongly associated with particular countries—Egypt, for example, where nationalist reformers had “made some real strides in the right direction,” and Syria, home to “a very promising group of Young Effendis”—the phenomenon was a region-wide one, with “sober crusaders in education, government, and medicine . . . to be found from Istanbul to Aden, from Cairo to Teheran.”
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Having identified the United States’ main assets in the Middle East—its nongovernmental presence there and the potential local allies to be found among the ranks of young Arab nationalists—Kim Roosevelt went on to outline a concrete program for future American policy toward the region: “a little Marshall Plan” involving an alliance of US government and business that would promote “the social and economic advancement of Middle East peoples” and thereby foil “Communist infiltration and revolutionary tactics.” Other Western powers, especially the British, could assist this effort by providing Americans with the
benefit of their area expertise. Some traditional elements of Arab society could also be harnessed to the cause, as the example of Ibn Saud and his partnership with ARAMCO showed. (Kim had thoroughly absorbed the OSS Arabists’ enthusiasm for the “Lord of the Desert,” describing him as “proud and erect”—a real man, in other words, unlike the effete, corpulent Hashemites.) Nevertheless, looking across the whole region, its future clearly lay with the modernizing program of the Young Effendis and their efforts to turn themselves into a viable Arab middle class. And the inspiration for this movement should be not some faded European colonial power but rather the young, progressive democracy of the United States.
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Kim Roosevelt had a final point to make in
Arabs, Oil, and History
, and it concerned what he perceived as the main threat to his vision of future American–Middle Eastern relations: US support for Zionism. On this issue, Kim was no less outspoken than the OSS Arabists. In entertaining Zionist demands for a Jewish state in Palestine, Kim argued, the United States risked squandering the Arab goodwill carefully built up by generations of private American citizens. It was even possible that Arabs might end up rejecting democracy itself, the system of government that had produced this obviously wrongheaded policy. Nor did the Zionist cause necessarily benefit the Jews who espoused it, he continued, as it invited an anti-Semitic backlash in the West and exposed Jewish settlers in Palestine to the hostility of their Arab neighbors.

To these by now well-rehearsed anti-Zionist arguments, Kim added another that related specifically to his own dream of a US-Arab alliance for progress. By fuelling anti-Western feeling in the Middle East, American support for Zionism strengthened the hand not only of communist elements there but also of antiforeign zealots such as the Muslim Brotherhood, thereby isolating and marginalizing moderate, secular progressives like the Young Effendis. “The long-range danger,” Kim concluded, in a statement remarkable for both its prophetic quality and, given some of his own later actions, its historical irony, “is that we encourage the creation of an isolationist, fanatically reactionary, and xenophobic force which will dominate an important segment of the world and constitute an always-festering wound in the side of peace.”
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The arguments of
Arabs, Oil, and History
strongly resembled elements of US Cold War strategy in Western Europe—not just the Marshall Plan’s emphasis on government-business partnership but also the
identification of local progressives as potential American allies. (Early CIA operations in Europe often focused on strengthening the position of liberals and social democrats, the so-called Non-Communist Left, who were perceived in Washington as the most important strategic counterforce to Stalinist expansionism.) To a certain extent, then, Kim was simply paraphrasing the foreign policy wisdom of the late 1940s, which emphasized the role of US-led economic development as a weapon for defeating communism—an idea that would increasingly be applied to Third World theaters of the Cold War in the guise of modernization.

But
Arabs, Oil, and History
was more than just an echo of Washington Cold War planning discussions. It also bore definite traces of OSS-style Arabism, the result of its author’s wartime experiences working under Stephen Penrose in Cairo. For example, Kim portrayed the Palestine issue less as a policy challenge for the United States than as a moral and humanitarian crisis within the Arab world. Writing at a time when Palestinian refugees were starting to flood into neighboring states, he described the situation as “a human tragedy, . . . public-health threat, . . . [and] very real political problem to the shaky Arab governments.” He was also prepared to state the ethical case for the Palestinian Arabs. “It is, essentially, . . . very simple,” he wrote at one point. “It rests on the assumption that those who have been living in a land have the strongest possible claim to that land.”
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There was one respect, however, in which
Arabs, Oil, and History
differed from the pronouncements by the OSS and State Department Arabists of the previous generation: it was much more sensitive to the feelings of Jewish Americans. For example, Kim was quick to acknowledge the sincerity of the Zionist desire for a haven from persecution and the part played by past Gentile actions in causing that feeling. “To our shame, anti-Semitism in one degree or another has been a distinctive feature of Occidental cultures from Russia to America,” he admitted. “You cannot blame Jews for deciding that they must learn from that bitter lesson.” Anti-Semitism in the Arab world also attracted denunciation in
Arabs, Oil, and History:
Kim’s pen-portrait of the Palestinian leader and notorious Nazi collaborator the Grand Mufti Muhammad Amin al-Husseini was an unflattering one, consistent with Kim’s criticisms elsewhere of Islamist xenophobia. This last characteristic of
Arabs, Oil, and History
perhaps reflected the fact that, unlike some earlier Arabists, Kim personally knew many Jews, both in the Middle East itself—his
wartime acquaintance, Teddy Kollek, became a lifelong friend—and within the United States. (Archie Roosevelt, incidentally, shared in several of these friendships.)
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In short,
Arabs, Oil, and History
seemed an ideal combination of reasonable argumentation, engaging personal reflection, and sensible policy prescription, all served up by a favorite son of one of America’s most famous families. Americans might not have heeded the State Department and OSS Arabists, but surely they would listen now.

AFTER RETURNING TO THE UNITED
States from his tour of the Middle East in the fall of 1947, Kim plunged into a nationwide lecture tour about his impressions of the region, taking as his theme the title of his 1946
Harper’s
article, “The Arabs Live There Too.” Like his grandfather Theodore, Kim was not blessed with a strong public speaking voice, but he made up for this with an informal, relaxed style of delivery that appealed to audiences. He also possessed considerable verbal dexterity; one listener noted the fact that during a forty-minute-long talk in which he dwelt at length on the Palestinian situation, he did not use the words “Jew” or “Zionist” once. Meanwhile, Kim maintained a steady stream of publications, in venues ranging from scholarly journals such as the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
to the mass-circulation
Saturday Evening Post
, as well as writing regularly to the
New York Times
. The previous year, a State Department memo had noted that while there was “a large and aggressive element in public opinion” that supported the Zionist line, American anti-Zionism had “not been articulate.” It was as if Kim were now providing that missing voice.
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This was not, as he himself admitted, an easy task. In a January 1948
Middle East Journal
article, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim reconstructed the passage of events leading to the November 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state—“an instructive, and disturbing, story,” as he described it. Almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” were fervently opposed to Zionism, he claimed. Nonetheless, the Zionist movement had been so successful in winning over the newspapers and Congress to its cause, while imputing its opponents with ignoble motives, including anti-Semitism, that the US government had
eventually adopted a policy that was contrary to American interests in the region. The lesson, Kim concluded, was clear: “the partition of Palestine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests.” How this was to be achieved in the face of the growing power of Zionism was, unfortunately, less obvious.
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Part of the problem facing Kim was the lack of Arab representation in US politics. Some individuals and groups within the small Arab American community were prepared to speak out about Palestine—for example, Khalil Totah of the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York–based organization whose advisory board Kim had joined in 1946. (Kim’s “Partition of Palestine” piece was reprinted as an Institute pamphlet in February 1948.) The Institute also put Kim in touch with the Arab Office in Washington, the foreign publicity arm of the recently formed regional organization of Arab states, the Arab League. The staff of the Arab Office were mostly Western-educated, moderate nationalists of the sort Kim referred to approvingly as “Young Effendis,” and he did his best to help their cause, opening “many doors to us in the society of Washington and New York,” as the Office’s director Cecil Hourani (brother of the eminent Arab historian Albert Hourani) recalled later. But he was powerless to protect them when, having been accused in Congress of taking orders from the grand mufti and consorting with pro-Nazi elements in the United States, they were charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In December 1947, a week after the UN partition vote, the Arab Office announced that it was closing down its American operation in the face of a “complete and arrogant disregard for Arab rights, Arab interests, and Arab feelings.” The Institute of Arab American Affairs, whose director, Khalil Totah, developed an unfortunate (and probably unfair) reputation for emotional instability, suffered a similar fate, shutting up shop in 1950.
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