Beware the Ides of March: Connecting the Iraq War to a deadly event over 76 years old
To most people, at least those who pay attention to what’s going on in this increasingly insane world, March 20th marked the gruesome 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.
To me, it has a double meaning. On that very day, March 20th, 1947, six Americans perished in a plane crash after a mission to Saudi Arabia. One of them was my father.
These were no ordinary Americans. The pilot, aerial engineer, and radio operator had top secret clearance and were used to flying VIPs around the Middle East and Africa. The civilians were the Cairo-based petroleum attaché who had just completed a survey of Middle East oil resources, a communications expert, and the U.S. cultural attaché. The latter two worked under cover for the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), immediate predecessor of the CIA. The communications expert was tasked with transporting top secret radio equipment to Addis Ababa to set up an American-run but Ethiopian-owned airline to be called Ethiopia Airlines.
The cultural attaché was Daniel Dennett who was a Harvard-trained Islamic scholar recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944. Before he left for Beirut, he told an audience at Clark University, where he taught, “God help us if we send troops to the Middle East.” That warning was based on teaching Middle Eastern students at the American University of Beirut during the early 1930s.
Due to his extensive knowledge of both European and Middle Eastern history and culture, he went on to become America’s first master-spy in the Middle East. In 2019 he was acknowledged by the CIA as its first fallen star (on its wall of honor in Langley) and honored as a role model for young officers.
He was the father I never knew, (I was six weeks old when he died) but came to know over the course of decades investigating his death. Which prompts me to issue this warning, not just from his grave as one of the first American victims of the Great Game for Oil, but from millions upon millions of graves strewn across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe.
What unites that fateful day in 1947 with the US invasion in Iraq is the 70 plus years of oil wars in the Middle East, and the pipelines that have connected them through the ages, stretching over deserts and rocky terrains, some concealed under water to protect against sabotage, all delivering the oil (and now natural gas) to the energy-hungry nations of Europe.
Today, many suspect that oil has had something to do with the endless wars of the 21st century, but have not had the time to dig deeper. Given my personal interest, I made it my mission, especially after President Bush sent American troops to Afghanistan (the “good war”) and Iraq (the “war of choice”) What lessons, I wondered, could I derive from my father’s death on a mountain peak in Ethiopia that might serve as a lesson for future generations? As it turned out, the biggest lesson emerged from my father’s fateful mission to Saudi Arabia.
His task was to visit the American oil compound in Riyad to determine the best route of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPLINE) a subsidiary of the Arab American Oil Company (Aramco). Yes, the same, though now-Saudi owned Aramco that just posted a record profit of $161 billion or 2022. In 1947 TAPLINE was a multi-million dollar project of considerable significance. The oil it carried across the Saudi peninsula to a port on the Mediterranean Sea and from there on to Europe would help Europe recover from the war — and reduce Europe’s dependency on coal, which was largely controlled by Communist-run coal unions. The question was: would TAPLINE terminate in Palestine, soon to become Israel? Or in Lebanon, Palestine’s neighbor to the North? The New York Times reported on March 2, 1947 that “protection of that investment and the military and economic security that it represents inevitably will become a pivot of world politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and West.” (Emphasis added.)
From the very outset of my father’s posting to Beirut he knew his mission was to “protect the oil at all costs.” That one sentence had miraculously escaped a redactor’s pen when his 1944 “Analysis of Work” was partially declassified in response to my FOIA lawsuit against the CIA. One of his colleagues in Saudi Arabia would call TAPLINE “one of the great arteries of empire, the American Empire in the Middle East, I mean, which in fact it was.” Indeed, the American-controlled TAPLINE would catapult the US into becoming a major power in the Middle East (and soon, the world), overshadowing the British and French (much to their resentment) and posing a direct challenge to the Soviet Union, which fretted about the military base that was sure to follow.
“At all costs.” But what does that mean? I looked it up: “Regardless of the price to be paid or the effort needed.” (Could another, more recent example, be: “Whatever it takes?” as applied to US support for the war in Ukraine — which has the second largest oil reserves in Europe, the richest located in Eastern Ukraine where most of the fighting is taking place.)
So, driven by these haunting three words, I began to explore the role of protecting oil and the pipelines that carry it as a factor in the war in afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war in Yemen, the conflicts in Gaza and the West Bank, and then, going back in time and finding it a major cause of World War I and certainly a part of the Cold War. As for World War II, the lessons derived from that war also applied to World War I: Don’t let your forces run out of gas. That was Hitler’s bitter lesson in both wars. Every major power knows that oil continues to be the fuel of the military, and for this reason its role must be censored out of the public dialogue. Besides, what mothers would want to send their children off to war to protect oil companies and their profits?
This is why, when you read all the reflections on the 20th anniversary of the war in Iraq, you would not find many references to “protecting the oil at all costs” — or for that matter, “getting the oil at all costs,” Back in 1911, Winston Churchill, as Britain’s First Lord of Admiralty, predicted the conundrum facing the British Empire when he decided to convert the British Navy’s fuel source from coal (of which Britain had plenty) to oil (of which Britain had none.) He predicted that Britain would have to fight on a sea of troubles to get oil, and sure enough, seizing the oil of Iraq became a “first class war aim” in World War I. The British-owned Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline built in the 1930s and closed in 1948 during Israel’s war of independence was to be reopened or rebuilt if Benjamin Netanyahu had his way on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq.”Soon you will see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa,” he boasted to the Guardian in April 2003.. “It is not a pipe dream.” But due to increasing instability in the region, it still is.
We now know that oil companies have lied to us for decades about the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change. Maybe, just maybe, our earth will survive, although the war in Ukraine has emboldened Big Energy to convince energy-insecure nations to reverse building alternatives to fossil fuels. Then isn’t it incumbent upon us to look for a peaceful solution to what is now widely seen as a proxy war — with the poor Ukrainian people caught in the middle — before two nuclear-armed superpowers take us to Armageddon time? The very first sanction that the US imposed on Russia after its forces illegally invaded Ukraine a year ago was to halt the Nordstream II pipeline so that Europe would not become even more dependent on Russian natural gas and oil. What does that tell us, especially since that pipeline was recently sabotaged? I predicted a year ago that the war in Ukraine could become the Mother of All Energy Wars. I am sure there are many who now share my fears. If ever there were a time to heed the lessons of history and change our ways before it is too late, that time is now.
Charlotte Dennett is an attorney and author of Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil. She was featured in a New York Times article by Alan Feurer in 2007