British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd faced the House of Commons with an air at once portentous and embarrassed: for the second time in a year British armed forces were on the shooting move in the Middle East. At the request of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, he said. British forces were being called upon to help put down a revolt in the desert.
As two companies of Cameron Highlanders were airlifted from Kenya to Persian Gulf bases, two British frigates slipped into the Sultan's coastal waters and four R.A.F. jet fighters roared up from a Persian Gulf sandstrip to fire rockets and cannon into the mud-brick-walled rebel citadels in the mountains of Oman. Cairo's press and radio filled the air with shouts about "a British attack on Arab nationalism." Actually it was not much of a war; only the current state of Middle East nerves made it front-page news.
Up the Imam. Some of the headlines made it appear that the British were once again shooting up primitive desert tribesmen, defending a despotic ruler and creating a "second Suez." But in fact this was a case when the British were going to the help of a Sultan who, in the London Economist's words, "is not contending against an electorate of the future—a nationalist movement of young and educated men—but against a reactionary rival." The British showed their might almost hesitantly. They acted in Oman, fearing that if they did not, their position would be weakened along the whole uneasy Persian Gulf coast. British preponderance on the oil coast, first created in the days when Britain wanted to protect its passage to India, rests on protective arrangements made long ago to safeguard minor sovereigns and sheiks around the gulf from wild tribal attacks out of the hinterland. The discovery of oil—or the hope of it—made this game of sand-dune diplomacy suddenly twice as important. What if the sheikdom of Kuwait, now the world's richest known oilfield, should sever its connections with Britain and the sterling area? Or if the same idea should occur to oil-rich Qatar and Bahrein, or those shadowy Trucial* Oman sheikdoms, whose rulers, like the Sultan of Muscat and Oman himself, reign over barren sand and hope for oil strikes?
Muscat and Oman (pop. 600,000) is a Kansas-sized land of racing camels, frankincense, lush oases and forbidding highlands that has had treaty ties with Britain for more than 150 years. In the center of it lies Oman, the most isolated part of Arabia, a place of fiery tribal rivalries and religious idiosyncrasies, bounded by the sea on one side and a wall of desert peaks on the other. The first Imam of Oman set himself up in the 8th century as chief of the Ibadhiya, a Moslem sect so ascetic that it still bars minarets around its mosques as too ornamental. The present ruling house descended from the wild peaks and established its capital at Muscat two centuries ago. Its dynasts turned from theocratic to temporal rule, and with the title of sultan instead of imam, built up a trading and slave-running empire that once extended from Zanzibar to Iraq.