Saudi-US Relations - Thomas Lippman

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SUSRIS EXCLUSIVE

The Proud Heritage of Aramco:
A Conversation with Thomas Lippman

Editor's Note:

We are pleased today to share our conversation with Thomas Lippman, adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, about the role of Aramco in the modernization of Saudi Arabia and its part in forging the generations old relationship with the United States. His book "Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia," chronicles much of the story of Aramco and the role it played for the intrepid Americans who alongside Saudi partners forged the oil industry in the Eastern Province and laid the groundwork for the government to government, business to business and people to people relationships. You may also have read here Mr. Lippman's introduction to the book "Discovery! - The Search for Arabian Oil" by Wallace Stegner, published last year. SUSRIS will reprint Mr. Lippman's introduction tomorrow for your consideration and is looking forward to the upcoming publication of his book, "Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy, USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East."

SUSRIS caught up with Mr. Lippman by phone at his office in Washington, D.C. yesterday on the eve of one of his many visits to Saudi Arabia. We thank him for taking time to share his perspectives with you.

The Proud Heritage of Aramco:
A Conversation with Thomas Lippman

SUSRIS: In your book about US-Saudi relations, “Inside the Mirage,” in the chapter called "Little America," referring to the period of the 1950s you wrote, "To the Saudis of the Eastern Province, the development of Dhahran and the other villages of the oil settlement was part of their astonishing single-generation crash course in modernization. Although they were excluded from living among the Americans in those days, they could see what the Americans had, and it changed their way of thinking." For Americans who might have a limited knowledge of this history can you describe the importance of Aramco in regard to the modernization of Saudi Arabia?

Thomas Lippman: Imagine a landscape of virtually complete arid bleakness. There are a few clusters of trees where you could water your animals but which are malarial and mosquito infested. There are no forms of public sanitation for the people who gather there. Imagine a landscape where the people, through no fault of their own, had been so cut off from technology and development that there is no electricity, no telephones, no running water, virtually no roads and no machinery. Imagine a landscape that doesn’t sustain much life for the few people who live there – either those in the few oasis settlements or the nomads who have only what they carry on their persons or their animals. They have no knowledge of what every American kid in the 1950s took for granted – when American kids were growing up building Heathkit radio kits and growing up with Erector Sets.

You’re talking about people who lived outside the technological age. And then -- really beginning in the late 1930s but accelerating after World War II as the oilfields became more fully developed -- you suddenly had the appearance in the midst of this bleakness a modern town. It more or less looked like a town in Missouri, I suppose, or Oklahoma.

There were houses, electricity, running water, paved streets, bicycles, movies, even television and motor vehicles. In the oil patch itself there was the full panoply of whatever was the latest oil exploration equipment. There were pipelines, new port facilities, and giant oil tankers coming in.

This was within less than a lifespan, within about twenty years of the lives of people there. It completely changed the way they interacted with the world and with the technological age.

SUSRIS: In your book you quoted a high school teacher from Illinois, Evadna Cochrane Burba, who accompanied her husband to Dhahran in 1948. She said that by the 1970s, "With unbelievable speed, al-Khobar [in the Eastern Province] leaped from fifteenth century somnolence into the jet age."

You commented that, "The Westernization -- indeed Americanization -- of Saudi Arabia, so improbable when Krug Henry and Bert Miller waded ashore in 1933, was in full flight." How did the modernization that accompanied Aramco and the oil industry shape what emerged as the partnership between Saudi Arabia and the United States that has lasted to today?

Lippman: Once King Abdul Aziz in the early 1930s decided to give an oil exploration concession to Standard Oil of California a few Americans went over to look for oil and set up the oil camp. At that time virtually the only interaction between Saudi Arabia and Americans and the United States was through the oil company.

There were no resident, official U.S. Government Americans in Saudi Arabia until ten years later, in World War II. Even then they were all the way on the other side of the country in Jeddah, which was the diplomatic capital.

So Aramco was the first point of contact with the United States for the King, not just the oil business but with America. The work that Aramco did, such as their support to local start up businesses and contractors in the Eastern Province, led to the United States in the person of Aramco, being intertwined with the economy and educational development in Saudi Arabia. It was in ways that made the two almost inseparable.

SUSRIS: On the 75th anniversary of Aramco what occurs to you about the significance of the company to the relationship?

Lippman: Aramco has been fully state-owned for several decades, but I have heard Abdullah Jum’ah and Ali al-Naimi, and many other Saudis who constitute the entire senior management of Aramco say that they’re proud of the heritage of the American company and still a lot of Americans work there.

You may recall that Aramco was gradually nationalized over a decade through negotiation. Saudi Arabia didn’t just take it over as happened in Iran, Iraq and Libya and other countries. That was partly due to the mutual respect that developed between the Americans and the Saudis. This is not to whitewash all the difficulties they had. There was a lot of unhappiness. There was labor unrest. There were such issues like there are in any giant industrial enterprise. But I think the record is clear that by and large this was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

SUSRIS: Thank you for sharing your insights.

ABOUT THOMAS W. LIPPMAN

Thomas W. Lippman is a former Middle East correspondent and a diplomatic and national security reporter for The Washington Post (1966-1999, 2003). He covered the war in Iraq for The Washington Post’s online edition in 2003. He appears frequently on radio and television as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.

He is the author of several books about the Middle East and American foreign policy, including "Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia" (2004), "Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy" (2000), "Egypt After Nasser" (1989) and "Understanding Islam" (1995). He has also written on these subjects for several magazines, including The Middle East Journal, SAIS Review and US News and World Report.

His latest book on the Middle East, "Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy, USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East," will be published in 2008. Lippman is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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