Standard Oil and the Problems in the Middle East

From Paul Johnson's brief but excellent biography, Churchill...

"[Winston Churchill] now remodeled the Colonial Office to found a new and powerful Middle East department, which in the spring of 1921 organized a high-level conference in Cairo to refashion the areas in light of the Saudi triumph.  This was one of the highlights of Churchill’s career, and it gave him a taste for summit conferences he never lost.  It was highly productive.  Two new kingdoms were created, Iraq and Transjordan, for the two leading Hashemite princes, Emir Faisal, sharif of Mecca, and Emir Abdullah.  The role of the RAF was confirmed and a vast new base in Habbaniya in northern Iraq, still in use by the West, was created. 

This settlement lasted half a century and would have endured longer but for an unfortunate intervention by the world’s largest oil company, Standard Oil.  While Britain was using Anglo-Persian and Anglo-Dutch Shell to develop the fields in Persia, Iraq, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Gulf, Standard formed an alliance with the Saudis to develop fields on their territory, which proved the richest of all.  American policy almost inevitably backed Standard, and so the Saudis.  

Thus the Wahhabi fundamentalists became a great power in the Middle East, immune from attack because of U.S. support and provided with colossal sums of oil royalties with which to undermine the moderates everywhere and the Hashemites in particular."