Robert Vitalis

I wish this book had been better written. The content and thesis are worth it. As the author claims, his book fills in many of the details behind the US-Saudi patron-client relationship that have been kept hidden by the oil business and the governments of each country. As long as the oil has kept coming, the US public prefers not to know--even when it was mostly Saudis who perpetrated 9/11.

The author sets out to demolish some impressions deliberately spun by the oil companies, particularly ARAMCO in the period from World War 2 to the 1970s: that the US oil men were technical and commercial heroes of an undeveloped desert frontier; that the Saudi monarchy was a progressive and well-meaning institution; and that the oil company was putting an extraordinary effort into developing Saudi Arabia as a modern nation. The glossy ARAMCO magazine was the kind of PR work that supported this kind of spin.

As the author shows, the American oil company set up labor-exploitative work camps similar to those of mineral extracting companies of the US and Europe for the past several decades. The US camps were moreover racist and segregated, following the same pattern as the Jim Crow culture of the US. And ARAMCO and the US State Department often worked together to ply the Saudi monarchy with money and favors in order to maintain their preferential treatment. This relationship continued to wax strong in spite of that monarchy's anti-Jewish bigotry and obvious anti-democratic attitudes.

Unfortunately the text reads poorly. It is as if the author dictated the text and was so enchanted with his own way of phrasing things that he neglected to empathize with how the reader would cope with his many long self-interrupted sentences, where the subject and verb have been separated by miles of interjected after-thoughts. The tone is often one of a gossip columnist dressed as a scholar. And what is one to make of the final words of his Acknowledgments, where he thanks Brian Wilson and Neil Young, the two inspirations for the book?

At any rate, we are indebted to the author for his thesis and evidence.… (meer)