Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

The days of intense negotiation had taken their toll on the Egyptian president. After seeing off Hussein and Arafat on September 28, 1970, Nasser returned home, where he suffered a massive heart attack and died at 5:00 P.M. that very evening. Cairo Radio interrupted its regular programs to broadcast a solemn recital of verses from the Qur’an. After a suitable delay, Vice President Anwar Sadat announced the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. “The effect was both instantaneous and fantastic,” Mohamed Heikal recalled. People poured out of their houses into the night and made their way to the broadcasting station on the banks of the Nile to find out if what they had heard was true.... First there were little groups to be seen in the streets, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands and then the streets were black with people and it was impossible for anybody to move. A group of women outside the broadcasting station were screaming. “The Lion is dead,” they cried, “The Lion is dead.” It was a cry that came to echo round Cairo and it spread through the villages until it filled Egypt. That night and in the days to come he was mourned with a wild and passionate grief. Soon people began to move into Cairo from all parts of Egypt until there were ten million in the city. The authorities stopped the trains running for there was nowhere for the people to stay and food supplies were running short. But still they came, by car, by donkey, and on foot.⁵³

The grief over-spilled Egypt’s borders to spread across the Arab world. Mass demonstrations filled the major cities of the Arab world. Nasser, more than any other leader before or since, embodied the hopes and aspirations of Arab nationalists across the Middle East. Yet Arab nationalism had already died before Nasser. Syrian secession from the United Arab Republic, the inter-Arab war in the Yemen, and the massive defeat of 1967 and the loss of all of Palestine had dealt Pan-Arab aspirations successive blows from which it would not recover. The events of Black September cast the deep divisions between Arab states in sharp relief. Only Nasser seemed to transcend the fault lines growing between the Arab states, increasingly divided along Cold War lines into allies of the United States and partisans of the Soviet Union. By 1970 the Arab world was firmly divided into distinct states with their own interests to uphold. There would be further high-profile unity schemes between Arab states after 1970, but none ever challenged the integrity of the states involved, and none endured. The unity schemes of the 1970s and 1980s were public relations exercises designed to confer legitimacy on Arab governments that knew that Arab nationalism still held a strong appeal to their citizens. Governments continued to pay lip service to common Arab themes of fighting the Zionist enemy and liberating the Palestinian homeland. But they were all looking out for their own interests. And a new force was taking hold of the Middle East, as the region’s oil resources began to generate tremendous wealth and give the Arabs influence over the world economy.

CHAPTER 12

The Age of Oil

The Arab world was shaped by the power of oil in the eventful years of the 1970s. Nature spread oil unevenly among the Arab states. With the exception of Iraq, where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers have supported large agrarian populations for millennia, the greatest oil reserves are to be found in the least densely populated Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Persian Gulf states, Libya, and Algeria in North Africa. Token discoveries have been made in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, though not enough to meet local demand. Oil was first discovered in the Arab world in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For four decades, Western oil companies enjoyed unfettered control over the production and marketing of Arab hydrocarbons. Rulers in oil-producing states grew wealthy and in the 1950s and 1960s initiated development schemes to bring the benefits of oil wealth to their impoverished populations. It was only in the 1970s, however, that a convergence of factors turned oil into a source of power for the Arab world. Growing global dependence on petroleum, the decline of American oil production, and the political crises that jeopardized the export of oil from the Middle East to the industrial world combined to generate unprecedented oil prices in the 1970s. Increasingly over the course of that decade, the Arab states took control of their oil, and the power that came with it, from the Western oil companies. Oil more than any other commodity has come to define Arab wealth and power in the modern age. Yet oil represents an illusive sort of power. The great wealth that oil confers also makes a state more vulnerable to outside threats. The wealth of oil can be used for development, or, through arms races and regional conflicts, for destruction. Ultimately, oil conferred little security on the Arab states to enjoy its mixed blessing, and even less on the region as a whole, during the tumultuous 1970s. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when oil exploration in the Middle East began in earnest, relations between oil companies and oil-producing states had been governed by concessions—licenses issued by governments to companies to explore for and exploit petroleum resources in return for a fee. Commercial quantities of oil were discovered in Iran (1908) and Iraq (1927); beginning in 1931, Western oil men turned to the Arab shores of the Persian Gulf. Initially, cash-strapped local rulers sold rights to British and American firms that assumed the full risk and expense of prospecting for oil. The risks were very real for the oil pioneers in the Persian Gulf. Some companies drilled for years without so much as an oily rag to show for their efforts. Yet, increasingly in the 1930s the oil men struck it big in Arabia. Standard Oil of California discovered oil in Bahrain in 1932. CalTex found major reserves in Kuwait in 1938, and Standard Oil of California had its first strike after six years of disappointment in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, also in 1938. When they did strike oil, the companies paid royalties to the host nation and kept the rest of the profit for themselves. Arab rulers had no complaints, for oil money came without any toil on their part. Revenues from petroleum soon exceeded all other sources of national income in the Gulf states, while the oil companies themselves bore the enormous costs of transporting and refining Arabian oil for global markets. Extracting oil from the Arabian Peninsula was a massively expensive undertaking, particularly in the early years: pipelines had to be laid and fleets of tankers had to be commissioned to carry the oil, while new refineries had to be built to convert Arabian crude to marketable products. It seemed perfectly fair to the oil companies that they should enjoy full control over the production (how much oil to extract) and marketing (setting the price in an increasingly competitive market) of a resource that they and they alone had extracted at great risk, expense, and effort. By 1950, however, the oil-producing states had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the terms of the original concessions. Now that the infrastructure for extraction, transport, and refining was in place, the oil companies reaped tremendous profits from their investment. Aramco, the consortium of four American firms (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco) that enjoyed exclusive rights to Saudi oil, reaped three times the profits enjoyed by the Saudi government in 1949. Worse yet, the taxes Aramco paid to the federal government exceeded the Saudi take by some $4 million—meaning the U.S. government made more off Saudi oil than did the Saudis themselves.¹ The Arab Gulf states demanded a greater share of those profits. After all, it was their oil and the main source of wealth for their growing economies. The oil men had recouped their original outlay and had been handsomely rewarded. Arab leaders now felt it was time the producing states got their fair share of the profits—both for their increasingly ambitious development plans and to provide for the future in anticipation of the day when oil would run out. There was precedent for their demands: in South America, Venezuela had managed to secure a 50:50 division of oil returns with its concession holders in 1943. The Arab states were determined to achieve the same division of oil revenues. The Saudis negotiated a 50:50 deal with the Aramco consortium in December 1950, and the other Arab oil states were quick to follow suit. There was a tidiness about this division of royalties, suggesting an equal partnership that both sides were willing to accept. But the oil companies resisted any effort to break the 50-50 split for fear that the producing nations would gain the upper hand over them. The oil producing states of the Arab world would gain increasing power by dint of their massive oil reserves. Over the 1950s and 1960s, the Persian Gulf eclipsed the United States as the greatest oil-producing region in the world. Middle Eastern output expanded from 1.1 million to 18.2 million barrels per day between 1948 and 1972.² Though the oil-producing states now enjoyed an equal share of revenues with the oil companies, the oil companies remained sovereign in all matters relating to production and pricing. In the early days of oil exploration, the Western oil men could rightly claim to have a better understanding of the geology, chemistry, and economics of oil than their Arab interlocutors. But by the 1960s this was no longer the case. The oil states were now sending their best and brightest to study geology, petroleum engineering, and management in leading Western universities. A new generation of Arab technocrats returned with advanced university degrees to government jobs and chafed at the power exercised by the foreign oil companies over their natural resources and national economy. Abdullah al-Turayqi was one of the first Arab oil experts. Born in Saudi Arabia in 1920, al-Turayqi spent twelve years in school in Nasser’s Egypt, where he also received an education in Arab nationalism. He went on to study chemistry and geology at the University of Texas, returning to Saudi Arabia in 1948. He was placed in charge of the Directorate of Oil and Mining Affairs in 1955, which made him the highest-ranked Saudi in the oil industry. From this position, al-Turayqi had privileged access to the decision makers from other oil-producing states. He pressed his fellow Arab oil men to protect their interests through collective action.³ Most of the other Arab oil ministers were reluctant to rock the boat. They faced an oil glut, as Soviet oil began to flood the market in the 1950s. If the Arab producers put too many demands on the oil companies, the companies might simply extract their oil elsewhere. After all, the major oil companies were global giants with extensive reserves in the Americas and Africa, as well as in the Middle East. Having recently extracted a 50:50 division of oil rents from the oil companies, most Arab oil states remained cautious about pressing for more. The Arab oil producers were rocked out of their complacency in 1959, when British Petroleum (BP) took the fateful decision to cut the posted price of oil by 10 percent. The glut of Soviet oil had put real pressure on the international price for oil, and BP’s decision simply reflected market realities. The problem with this seemingly rational decision was that BP had failed to give advance notice of its decision to the oil-producing states. Because oil revenues for both companies and producing states were based on the posted price of oil, this unilateral decision meant that the oil company had imposed a cut on the revenues—and thus the national budgets—of the oil-producing states without consultation or obtaining their consent. BP had inadvertently demonstrated how unequal the partnership really was between the companies and the states. The oil-producing states were furious. In the wake of the cut Abdullah al-Turayqi found his fellow oil ministers more open to the idea of collective action. In April 1959, on the sidelines of the first Arab oil congress, al-Turayqi met in secret with government representatives from Kuwait, Iran, and Iraq at a sailing club in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. The Arab oil men concluded a “gentlemen’s agreement” to form a commission to defend oil prices and establish national oil companies. Their goal was to break through the 50:50 barrier to achieve a 60:40 division of revenues with the Western oil companies, securing the principle of national sovereignty over oil resources. The resolve of Arab oil producers was stiffened in August 1960, when Standard Oil of New Jersey repeated BP’s mistake and unilaterally cut the posted price of oil by 7 percent. The move provoked outrage among oil states and convinced even the most cautious that the Arabs would be controlled by the oil companies until they asserted control over their own oil resources. Al-Turayqi went to Iraq to suggest making common cause with Venezuela against the oil companies. The Saudi oil minister suggested the creation of a global cartel to protect the rights of oil-producing states from arbitrary action by the oil companies. Muhammad Hadid, then the Iraqi finance minister, recalled al-Turayqi’s visit: “The Iraqi government welcomed the suggestion and convened a meeting of the oil producing states in Baghdad in which they agreed to establish this organization.” On September 14, 1960, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela announced the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC.⁴ By 1960, two new Arab oil states had emerged in North Africa. Oil had only been discovered in commercial quantities in Algeria in 1956 and in Libya in 1959. The advantages of late entry meant that the North African states could learn from the experiences of their Arab colleagues in the Persian Gulf and secure the best terms for exploration and export of their petroleum products. Libya was a poor and underdeveloped kingdom when oil was first discovered. Under Italian colonial administration until 1943, the Libyan territories passed under joint British and French rule following the Allied occupation of Italy. The three territories of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan were consolidated into the United Kingdom of Libya, which gained its independence in 1951. The British rewarded Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Sanussi (1889?1983), leader of the powerful Sanussi religious brotherhood, with the Libyan throne for his wartime services against Axis forces. He ruled as King Idris I from 1951until 1969 and saw his country pass from poverty to wealth through the discovery of oil. Even at the prospecting stage before any oil had been discovered, the Libyans were keen to make the most of their petroleum resources. Unlike the other Arab states, which had given concessions over vast expanses of territory to major oil companies, King Idris’s government decided to break up the target exploration areas into numerous small concessions and to favor independent oil companies. The Libyans reasoned that independent companies, with fewer alternative sources of petroleum, would have more incentive to discover and bring Libyan crude to market than the majors with their worldwide operations. Their strategy worked. By 1965, only six years after the discovery of oil, Libya had already emerged as the sixth largest oil exporter in the non-Soviet world, responsible for 10 percent of all petroleum exports. By 1969 the country’s petroleum exports had reached parity with Saudi Arabia.⁵ While King Idris ruled over a newly prosperous country, he faced strong domestic criticism as a conservative, pro-Western monarch. A group of Arab nationalist officers in the Libyan army, headed by a young captain named Muammar al-Qadhafi (b. 1942), saw the king as a British agent. They believed they needed to overthrow King Idris for Libya to achieve its complete independence from foreign domination. In the early morning hours of September 1, 1969, they toppled the monarchy in a bloodless coup while the elderly king was abroad for medical treatment. In his first communiquй to the Libyan nation, broadcast by radio at 6:30 that morning, Qadhafi announced the fall of the monarchy and declared the establishment of the Libyan Arab Republic. “People of Libya! Your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened and horrified us all.” His message was replete with historical allusions. “By a single stroke [the army] has lightened the long dark night in which the Turkish domination was followed first by Italian rule, then by this reactionary and decadent regime, which was no more than a hotbed of extortion, faction, treachery and treason.” He promised the Libyan people a new age “where all will be free, brothers within a society in which, with God’s help, prosperity and equality will be seen to rule us all.”⁶ Libya’s new ruler was a devoted admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Upon seizing leadership of Libya, Qadhafi assumed the rank of colonel (Nasser’s rank at the time of the 1952 revolution in Egypt) and, following the Egyptian model, established a Revolutionary Command Council to oversee the government in the new Libyan Republic. ?Tell President Nasser we made this revolution for him,? Qadhafi told Mohamed Heikal in the immediate aftermath of the coup.⁷ Upon Nasser’s death in September 1970, Qadhafi declared himself Nasser’s ideological successor. Henceforth, anti-imperialism and Arab unity would be the hallmark of Libyan foreign policy. The new Libyan government promoted the Arabic language (foreign street names were Arabized), imposed Islamic strictures (alcohol was prohibited and churches closed), and advanced the “Libyanization” of the economy by expropriating foreign-owned property in the name of the Libyan people. British and U.S. military bases were closed and all foreign troops expelled. It was in this spirit that the new Libyan regime took on the Western oil companies, believing the control they exercised over petroleum production and marketing to represent the greatest threat to Libyan sovereignty and independence. For advice on oil policy, Colonel Qadhafi turned to the Arab nationalist oil expert Abdullah al-Turayqi (who had lost his job as Saudi oil minister to a bright new technocrat named Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani upon King Faysal’s succession to the throne in 1962). Al-Turayqi, who argued in 1967 that “it is only just that those oil producing countries who rely on oil as their primary source of revenues have the right to set the fair price for its prime natural resource,” shared Qadhafi’s determination to break the power of oil companies over the Arab oil-producing states.⁸ In 1970 Qadhafi embarked on a series of policies to assert Libya’s full sovereignty over its oil resources—at the oil companies’ expense. In January 1970, Qadhafi summoned the heads of the twenty-one oil companies working in Libya to a meeting to renegotiate the terms of their contracts. The Western oil men sat uneasily in their chairs. They were still coming to terms with the new military rulers of Libya. The executives declared their resistance to any change in the way they did business in Libya. Qadhafi rounded on the oil men and made it clear that he would sooner cut oil production altogether than let his country be exploited by Western interests. “People who have lived without oil for 5,000 years,” he warned, “can live without it again for a few years in order to attain their legitimate rights.” The Western oil men shifted uncomfortably under Qadhafi’s baleful gaze.⁹ Qadhafi decided to force the issue and to impose his price on the oil companies. That April the Libyan government requested an unprecedented 20 percent increase ($0.43) in the price per barrel of oil, which was then trading at $2.20 per barrel. The oil major Esso (the European affiliate of Exxon) responded with an offer of only five cents a barrel and held firm. With all their alternate sources of petroleum, Esso and Exxon were immune to Qadhafi’s threats. In response, Libyans put the squeeze on the smaller independent companies. As Libyan oil expert Ali Attiga recalled, “The government of Libya learned to use—and to use very well—the independents to raise the price of oil.” The Libyans chose their target carefully. Occidental Petroleum had emerged from total obscurity to become one of the largest oil firms in the West on the strength of its discoveries in the Libyan desert. The only problem for Occidental was that it had no other source of oil outside Libya and so was entirely reliant on Libyan oil to meet its contracts. The Libyans imposed massive production cuts on Occidental. As the government-imposed reductions began to take effect, Occidental scrambled to find alternate sources to cover its commitments to its European customers. Yet none of the oil majors would extend a helping hand to the vulnerable independent as its daily production was trimmed by the Libyan authorities from 845,000 to 465,000 barrels. Cuts were imposed on the other oil companies as well, but none was so adversely affected as Occidental. ?Now the cut in production contributed to two things,? Attiga claimed. ?It made the independents accept the increase in price because they had no alternative supply sources from which to meet their commitments, and it contributed to the beginning of a shortage in oil supply,? which exerted an upward pressure on oil prices.¹⁰ Libya’s strategy met with full success, and Qadhafi’s young regime could claim victory over the oil companies. In the end, the chairman of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, was forced to accept Libyan terms in a landmark deal concluded in September 1970. Occidental agreed to raise the posted price of Libyan oil by an unprecedented thirty cents to $2.53 per barrel. More significant yet was Occidental’s agreement to concede a majority of profits to Libya, breaking the 50:50 agreements that had prevailed for the past twenty years and introducing a new ratio of 55 percent profit to the producing state and only 45 percent to the oil companies. For the first time in the history of petroleum, a producing state gained the majority share of its oil revenues. The Occidental precedent was applied on all of the oil companies working in Libya, and the Libyan precedent was followed by Iran and the Arab oil-producing states. In February 1971 Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia concluded the Tehran Agreement, which secured a minimum 55 percent of profit for the oil states and raised the posted price of oil a further $0.35. On the back of the Tehran Agreement, the Libyans and Algerians negotiated a further hike in oil prices of $0.90 per barrel in Mediterranean markets in April 1971. These agreements set two trends in motion: regular increases by the oil-producing states in the posted price of oil, and regular decreases in the oil companies’ share in profits. It was the end of the era of the Western oil barons and the beginning of the age of the Arab oil shaykhs.

The year 1971 marked the last of the Gulf states’ emergence from British protection to full independence. The Trucial States had preserved their special treaty relationship to Great Britain through all the turmoil of decolonization and Arab nationalism. Independence for Bahrain and Qatar and the establishment of the United Arab Emirates represented the end of the British Empire in the Middle East, which had begun in the Persian Gulf in 1820, finally coming to an end in the same region a century and a half later. The Gulf shaykhdoms were not technically British colonies, but independent ministates whose relations to Britain were governed by nineteenth-century treaties. The external relations of the shaykhdoms had remained under British control in return for British protection from external threats—primarily from the Ottoman Empire, which sought to extend its influence over the Arab Gulf states at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1968 there remained nine Gulf states under the British protectorate: Bahrain, which since 1946 had served as the seat of the British Political Residency for the Gulf, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaima, Um al-Qaiwain, Fujayra, and ’Ajman. Britain had exploited its privileged position in the Gulf to secure valuable oil concessions for British companies, particularly in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and continued to exercise influence in that region transcending its reduced global status. The rulers of the Gulf states were perfectly happy with the arrangement, which enabled them to survive as ministates against the menace of powerful neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Iran with ambitions on their oil-rich lands. It was the British rather than the ruling shaykhs of the Trucial States who initiated the process of decolonization in the Gulf. In January 1968, Harold Wilson’s Labour government caught the Gulf rulers completely by surprise when they announced their intention to withdraw from Britain’s commitments East of Suez by the end of 1971. Britain’s decision to withdraw from the Gulf was prompted by domestic economic troubles. In November 1967 Wilson had been forced to devalue the pound to address trade and balance-of-payment deficits. Against such austerity measures, the government could not justify the cost of maintaining British military bases in the Persian Gulf. These economic concerns were compounded by the culture of the ruling Labour Party, which was openly hostile to the practice of Empire twenty years after the withdrawal from India. The shaykhs’ first reaction was to refuse to allow the British to go—or more precisely, they refused to discharge Britain from its treaty commitments to protect the region from outside aggression. They had good grounds for concern. Saudi Arabia laid claim to most of oil-rich Abu Dhabi, and Iran declared sovereignty over the island state Bahrain and a number of smaller islands straddling major offshore oil fields. Over the next three years Britain applied all its diplomatic acumen to resolve the different claims on Gulf territories and to encourage a union of the Trucial States that would give them the critical mass to survive the treacherous waters of the Persian Gulf. In 1970 the Shah of Iran relinquished his claim over Bahrain. Shaykh ’Isa bin Salman, the ruler of Bahrain, withdrew from union discussions with the other Trucial States and declared his country?s independence on August 14, 1971. Bahrain?s neighbor and long-time rival, the peninsular state of Qatar, quickly followed suit on September 3, 1971. The differences between the remaining seven states were significant but not insurmountable, and as the deadline for the British withdrawal approached, six of the states came to an agreement to form a Union of Arab Emirates (later the United Arab Emirates) on November 25, 1971. The odd country out was Ras al-Khaima, which refused to join the union in protest against Iranian claims to two of its islands, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs. Ras al-Khaima did not want to release Britain from its duty to preserve what it held to be its sovereign territory in the disputed islands. Britain, in contrast, was convinced that it needed Iranian goodwill to preserve the territorial integrity of the Gulf states and was willing to sacrifice two of Ras al-Khaima’s smaller islands in the interest of preserving the independence of the union as a whole. The British had brokered an agreement between Sharjah and Iran to divide another disputed island, Abu Musa, between them and saw such concessions as a necessary evil to keep the shah from doing worse. In the end, Ras al-Khaima joined the United Arab Emirates, which was admitted to the Arab League on December 6 and to the United Nations on December 9, 1971. Ironically, Britain’s withdrawal from the Gulf strained relations with two of the states most committed to the ideals of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism. Iraq severed relations with Britain in protest against British complicity in the Iranian occupation of Arab territory—Abu Musa and the Tunbs. Libya went a step further and nationalized Britain’s oil interests on December 7, to punish the British for delivering Arab lands to Iranian rule. The West’s growing dependence on Arab oil made it vulnerable to such punitive action, and the Arabs began to view their oil as a weapon to attain their political objectives. It was not long before the Arab world began to consider ways to deploy the oil weapon in its conflict with Israel and its Western allies.

Colonel Qadhafi’s oil advisor, Abdullah al-Turayqi, saw early on how useful oil could be in reshaping geopolitics. Months after the June 1967 War, he published an essay with the PLO research center in Beirut in which he described Arab petroleum as “a weapon in the battle.” Setting out the just grounds for deploying oil strategically against Israel’s allies, al-Turayqi argued, “It is generally agreed that every state has the right to use all available means to apply pressure on its enemies. And the Arab states possess one of the most powerful economic weapons that might be used against its enemies.” The Arabs, he claimed, held no less than 58.5 percent of the world?s known petroleum resources, and the industrial world was increasingly dependent on the Arab world for its energy supplies. Why should the Arabs continue to supply the West while the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands supported their enemy, Israel? ?The Arab peoples call for the use of the oil weapon and it is the responsibility of each government to satisfy the will of its people,? al-Turayqi concluded.¹¹ Using oil as a weapon was easier said than done. Al-Turayqi knew better than most how ineffectual the oil weapon had proven in the June 1967 War. Arab oil ministers had met on June 6, the day war broke out, and agreed to ban shipments to the United States, Britain, and West Germany for their support of Israel. Within forty-eight hours both Saudi Arabia and Libya had closed down their production entirely. Arab output was reduced by 60 percent, putting tremendous pressure on Western markets. Yet the industrial world withstood this first use of the oil weapon. It is nearly impossible to track oil once it has entered the international market, allowing embargoed states to circumvent the ban on direct sales by purchasing oil through intermediaries not affected by the embargo. The United States and other non-Arab oil producers expanded production to make up the difference, and the Japanese deployed fleets of massive new “supertankers” to transport oil to global markets. Within a month, the industrial states were back to full supply, demonstrating the futility of a gesture that had in the meantime deprived the Arab oil producers of vital revenues. By the end of August 1967, the defeated Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—called on their oil-producing brethren to resume production to help them meet the terrible burden of postwar reconstruction. Not only had the oil weapon proven ineffectual in the 1967 War, but it harmed Arab economies long after the guns fell silent. The return of Arab oil to international markets produced a glut that drove prices down. The oil weapon had backfired and hurt the Arab states far more than Israel and its Western supporters. Yet such was the lack of confidence in Arab armies, in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat, that many policymakers still believed the Arab world more likely to achieve its objectives against Israel by economic than by military means.