Government Security News January 2017 Digital Edition

vealed when Little states,
“To fuel the European
Recovery Program that
Secretary of State George
Marshall unveiled in June
1947, the Truman administration
intended to rely
not on the oil fields of east
Texas or Venezuela but,
rather, on the 300,000
barrels of Saudi crude…”
(Little, 53). Indeed, rather
than looking to their own
secured resources in order
to help the recovery effort, the US
government decided to impose itself
by taking oil from Saudi Arabia in addition
to other Middle Eastern countries
such as Kuwait and Lebanon.
The book goes on to say that they did
this in order to maintain their status
as auto-manufacturing giants. It’s
not surprising given the context that
under the ideas of Manifest Destiny,
the Saudis are uncivilized barbarians
and that it is justifiable to take from
them as a result. While it may seem
relatively harmless to take resources,
oil is the livelihood of Middle Eastern
countries as it is their single most
profitable export. To take this from
them would be to threaten their way
of sustainability. It’s no wonder as to
why they would resent such a thing.
However, the taking of their resources
is relatively tame when we look
further and see that the US, along
the other Allied Powers, stirred civil
unrest in the Middle East after establishing
the Jewish nation of Israel by
taking the holy city of Jerusalem from
Palestine in the post-World War Two
era.
The establishment of Israel in 1948
was backed by the Allied Powers and
came as a grave insult to Palestine.
The holy and ancestral lands of Jerusalem
were taken from them and given
to their sworn enemies, the Jews.
This almost immediately caused a
massive conflict known as the Israeli
War in which Israel emerged victorious
and had taken yet more land. The
textbook Major Problems in American
Foreign Relations, Volume II:
Since 1914, a series of documents
and essays on US foreign relations
gives us a glimpse into the predicament
that the Arab nations such as
Palestine were in before Israel came
to be when it states, “The Arabs, no
less than the Jews, are victims of history.
Four centuries of Turkish rule
hurt them at least as badly as a decade
39
of Naziism hurt the Jews.
Now, in their morning of
independence, the Arabs
have suffered defeats
at the hands of a small,
despised people” (Major
Problems, 319). As this
quote eloquently shows
us, the Palestinians and
other Arabs were also
victims of oppression
just as the Jews were. The
seizing of their lands was
kicking them back down
as they were getting back up. With
such blatant encroachment and arrogance,
further resentment from the
Middle East toward the US and the
West undoubtedly developed. One of
the final series of acts that solidified
this hatred is seen after we look into
the overthrowing of rulers in order
to create pro-American regimes that
would allow for further meddling.
Not only has the United States government
meddled by leeching resources
and usurping ancestral lands,
they made matters worse by overthrowing
governments in order to insert
pro-American regimes that would
be willing to resist the Soviet Union
during the Cold War. With the backing
of the US government, countries
such as Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and
Egypt underwent political coups that
overturned the ruling government.
All of this went relatively unknown to
neighboring nations until the Iranian
Revolution that overthrew the pro-