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Belgrave did not do this alone. Bahrein's little Sheik, Sir Sulman bin Hamad al Khalifah, who came to the throne in 1942, is a good ruler. He looks like Jordan's late King Abdullah, has the same dignified mien and dancing eyes. Sulman's memory is phenomenal: he remembers which oil driller's wife is having a baby. He takes all the newspapers, listens regularly to the Arabic radio broadcasts. When the Moscow radio calls Belgrave a "dictator" Sulman chuckles, twits his $9, 600-a-year adviser. From time to time, in his Rolls-Royce with a coat of arms designed by Belgrave, he drops by Belgrave's office, wants to know all that's going on.
Sheik Sulman has a palace, neat but not gaudy, overlooking the oilfields. He collects falcons, saluki dogs and fast Arabian race horses. He has a private preserve of black buck gazelles imported from India, and is the only one allowed to shoot them. Like Kuwait's Abdullah and most of the sand-dune sheiks, he has never traveled beyond the Middle East and doesn't intend to.
IRAQ
Iraq's oil is a big IF. The oil is there, all right, and has been since recorded history. Noah caulked his Ark "within and without with pitch" taken from bitumen springs in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley. Just a few hundred yards from where Nebuchadnezzar, "full of fury," cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into the fiery, oil-fed furnace, Iraq Petroleum (then called Turkish Petroleum) in 1927 blew in its first well with a gush that could not be controlled for three days. Iraq's proven reserve (7.5 billion barrels in the Kirkuk field alone) is within respectable distance of the great Kuwait and Saudi Arabian holdings.
Yet Iraq's past output has been paltry compared to its potential. And its future is hazy and filled with portents.
The jinx of Iraqi oil is an incredible series of political double-dealings. The British first tried to develop Iraqi oil before World War I, but the Germans cut in and both were stymied. They made a deal and were about to start work when the war interfered. In 1920, with the Germans ousted, the French insisted on getting into the act; then the Americans set up a clamor. Turkish Petroleum was renamed Iraq Petroleum and was divided between Britain, France, the U.S. and The Netherlands, with each holding 23.75%. The remaining 5% went appropriately to the wily old Armenian influence-peddler who got them together: Calouste S. Gulbenkian, another candidate for richest man in the world.
Now I.P.C. had plenty of oil, capital and cooks (too many). But its trouble was not over. Its fields are smack in the middle of nowhere, and the two pipelines to the Mediterranean were greatly inadequate. I.P.C. began building new lines. One, through Palestine, was stopped by the Arab-Israeli war, and has never been completed. Another, through Lebanon, was finished but quickly proved too small. A third, through Syria, ran afoul of Syrian government scheming.