“God Help Us, If We Send Troops to the Middle East”
Photograph Source: U.S. Army SETAF-AF by Staff Sgt. Luke Wilson – Public Domain
President Donald J. Trump is ignoring this widely-held sentiment — including among his MAGA supporters — and has just ordered 2500 troops to the Middle East. In so doing, he is risking the survival of millions of civilians throughout the region, our soldiers, and the planet itself.
His appalling ignorance about the region, its diverse and ancient history, and the resolve of its inhabitants to say No More Wars — indeed, No Blood for Oil — has emboldened this writer to state plainly that her father uttered this warning over 80 years ago, in 1942, one year before he would be inducted into America’s first civilian-run intelligence agency, the war-time Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His code name was Carat. Prized for his scholarly knowledge of both European and Middle Eastern history, he would soon become America’s first master spy in the Middle East, only to die five years later, in March, 1947, in a mysterious plane crash following a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia.
It is my considered opinion that he was one of America’s first victims of what I call the Great Game for Oil. While not necessarily sharing in this opinion, the CIA in 2019 honored him as their first fallen star at its annual Wall of Honor ceremony at its Langley, Virginia headquarters. (He died before the CIA was created, but was belatedly honored due to the recommendation of a CIA historian.)
It was a tribute I shall never forget, resurrecting my father from obscurity while assuring me that he was now viewed as a role model for CIA officers to follow. But can they, in this Age of Oil?
Spare Us the disgrace
Never one to mince his words, he uttered his warning before an audience at Clark University, where he had been teaching Army personnel courses in the history, geography and economic life of Central and Southern Europe, Iran and the Middle East.
“I pray to God,” he intoned, “that wherever else we may choose to intervene, the United States will be spared the disgrace of intervening in the Near Est. The thought of what the well meaning but ignorant liberals of this country would probably accomplish if set loose to solve the enigma of the Levant is too dreadful even to contemplate. From an unholy mess, may we keep our hands clean and our garments unsoiled.”
How, you may wonder, did he come to this view? What was the enigma of “The Levant” [the region in the Eastern Mediterranean, so named by the French in reference to the rising sun in the East] who ruled there from WWI to WWII. I cannot answer what was in his mind. I was six weeks old when he died. But I have his letters home during the early 1930s when he taught English to Middle Eastern students of many different religions and ethnic backgrounds at the American University of Beirut.
So moved by the experience was he that he abandoned his focus on German language and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard [especially after witnessing a Nazi parade in Berlin that turned his stomach] and focused his graduate studies on Mediterranean History, Greek History, History of the Arabs, History of Islam, modern European history, and a language proficiency in German, French, Italian and Arabic.
Dennett worked on finishing his thesis while tutoring undergraduates at Harvard’s prestigious Elliott House. Invariably, he would lunch with Bernard Cohen, a graduate student in mathematics who was the librarian at Elliot House and was studying Arabic to read original sources on mathematical advances under the Arabs. The two talked politics, practiced their Arabic (with Dennett insisting that Persian was even easier) and shared stories, Dennett regaling Cohen with stories about his experiences in the Middle East. There was one, in particular, that he told more than once, a story about a particularly searing experience he had had while trying to teach Arab students about the virtues of ethical living.
A lesson in intolerance
The course title had been handed to him: “How to Live.” Ribbed by his colleagues, he nonetheless took on the assignment with all the fervor of a good New England Congregationalist liberal. Inevitably, he reached the subject of toleration. First, he gave some shocking examples of Christian intolerance: the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, the persecution of scientists. From there he went on to Jewish intolerance, citing from the Old Testament. So far, so good — his students enjoyed the exposition. But when he got to Muslim intolerance, he sensed restlessness in the classroom. Suddenly, one of his students stood up, and in a loud and trembling voice, protested his insulting reflections on Islam
Toleration, the student said, is a virtue that is possessed by people who don’t believe or are easy going in their faith, a virtue that only those who are rich and prosperous, strong and confident, unafraid of menaces, could afford. But if you believe, the student went on, and your faith is challenged, if you love your country and see its independence denied, if you have ideals and see them destroyed, then you have two choices: intolerance, or moral extinction.
Dennett accepted the explanation and vowed never to teach toleration again, but the exchange had shaken him profoundly, causing him to question what Westerners should be teaching in their schools to peoples of another culture. After pondering this for years, he had concluded that native political leaders who had been educated in American, British or French schools were far less appreciative of Western sermons on political and moral principles that had no resonance in their lives, than they were of two western gifts “and two alone” which would find ready acceptance: “nationalism — the desire for independence, and western science in all its practical aspects.”
When he entered the OSS in September, 1943, he joined other OSS recruits for espionage training in England by none other than Kim Philby, the notorious double agent who would become the most famous spy of the 20th century.
When my father landed in Beirut, Lebanon, he came with a State Department cover: Cultural attaché. His teachings at AUB had served him well, allowing him to mix easily with influential people in Beirut. The university was recognized by its president as the second most valuable American investment in the Middle East, next to oil.
As for oil, Dennett’s primary mission, as described in his 1943 declassified report titled “Analysis of Work” was to “control the oil [of Saudi Arabia] at all costs.” That meant protecting the route of the newly conceived (but not yet built) Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which would carry Saudi oil across the Arabian peninsula to a Mediterranean terminal point in either (Jewish-controlled) Haifa, Palestine, or (Christian-controlled) Sidon in southern Lebanon.
Muslims were not to be trusted, a fact made clear by an OSS man in Saudi Arabia who reported that American oil men were disparaging U.S. government officials as “towel heads,” i.e. for being too sympathetic with Arabs. In his last letter home, he fretted that the Arab American Oil Co (Aramco) had more influence with the Saudi king than government officials, comparing it to Britain’s colonial British East India Company. He may have been one of the first intelligence officials to discern corporate control of U.S. foreign policy.
My father died two years before Tapline was built and just months before the CIA was created. The man who replaced him was Archie Roosevelt, the 4th son of President Theodore Roosevelt, who would lead the CIA in its first coup — in 1949 — overthrowing Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatly (an Arab nationalist and Muslim) who had opposed Tapline crossing Syria and terminating in the newly created Jewish state of Israel. (Archie and his brother Kermit would also be involved in the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran’s oil, replacing him with the Shah of Iran.)
The pipeline would cross Syria’s Golan Heights (now under Israeli control) and terminate in southern Lebanon, less than 100 miles from Israel. Tapline would turn the US into a world power, and heavily-armed Israel would become the pipeline’s primary protector until it was closed in 1992 during the 15-year-old civil war in Lebanon.
My father’s early warnings about the folly of sending troops to the Middle East went unheeded in the interest of “controlling the oil at all costs.” Today, an American-created “unholy mess” is once again in full play, as southern Lebanon is now being pummeled by air strikes and invading Israeli forces and American marines are on their way to fight in Iran.
The information in this essay is documented in my book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil. My next essay will focus on what’s happening in Lebanon today, as some 100,000 Lebanese civilians are fleeing their homes for safety in what is now being called the Gazafication of Lebanon.
This first appeared on Charlotte Dennett’s Cui Bono? Substack page.
