Guardians of the Gulf

A History of America's Expanding Role in the Persion Gulf, 1883-1992

Michael A Palmer

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780684871066
• eBook ISBN: 9781439105801
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History Reference
• Index: History

From the nineteenth century through the 1991 war with Iraq, this study of America's expanding role in the Persian Gulf traces the development of American commercial interests in the region and the resulting growth of military and political involvement.

CHAPTER ONE
AN OPEN HELD FOR AMERICAN CAPITAL AND INDUSTRY

1833-1939

The origins of American involvement and interest in the gulf are to be found in the early history of the United States. Over two hundred years ago, commercial necessity, revolutionary political passions, and missionary zeal carried representatives of “God’s American Israel” to the four corners of the globe.¹ Commercial interests (greed, if one prefers) combined with a drive toward political and spiritual proselytizing to shape American foreign policy. The United States sought not an economic or political imperium, at least not beyond the confines of the North American continent, but open, reciprocated access to markets unencumbered by diplomatic and military responsibilities, as well as an opportunity to preach the American message—both civil and religious—to those peoples of the world who still had the misfortune to labor under the political and economic domination of European powers.

Commercial and political policies were (and remain) inextricably linked in the American mind. Commercial expansion was a necessity as an emerging American nation confronted old, established imperial systems. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 secured the political, but not the economic independence of the United States. Americans, no longer part of the British mercantilist system, now had to make their own way in a harsh world, seeking opportunities in those corners of the globe not entirely controlled by the established European powers. Americans believed that the Old World’s imperial systems had to be undermined if the United States was to survive and prosper. That goal could be accomplished by Yankee merchants and missionaries revolutionizing the world with the message of American economic and political freedom. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, asked, “Could stupid heathens, or hardened Jews, sit silent and unmoved, under such mighty interpositions as these, by which Providence hath distinguished this land?”²

American policy was thus simultaneously pragmatic and naive. Americans correctly understood that to survive they had to break open the European powers’ imperial systems. But American expectations that their commercial activity could crack European-dominated regional power structures without the entire edifice collapsing on their heads, or without the United States having to accept any diplomatic or military responsibilities, were ingenuous. So, too, was the belief that the peoples of the world would be so astounded by American political and economic achievements that they would rise up against European domination and cast aside culture and religion in a headlong effort to emulate the example of the United States.

Such interests and ideals motivated the Americans who first entered the waters of the Indian Ocean in the years after the Revolution. For most Yankee merchants, that ocean was just an obstacle to be crossed on the way to the Orient, but a few saw opportunities, albeit limited, for trade.³ By the end of the eighteenth century American merchants, sealers, and whalers were active in the Indian Ocean basin, though few chose to pursue commercial opportunities in the Persian Gulf itself.⁴

This trade was substantial enough that during the undeclared “Quasi-War” with France (1798-1801) the United States dispatched a pair of frigates to protect American commerce east of the Cape of Good Hope.⁵ A winter gale dismasted one of the men-of-war, but in 1800 Captain Edward Preble’s frigate Essex became the first U.S. Navy warship to enter the Indian Ocean. In his journal Preble noted the evidence of the growing American presence in the region. While sailing past the nominally French islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam, he saw the American flag flying from the huts of Yankee sealers.⁶

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, American trade in the Indian Ocean continued to expand, prompting the United States government to consider the establishment of a formal commercial relationship with the sultan of Muscat.

The sultanate harked back to an era when the Arabs had dominated the trade of the Indian Ocean, a period that had lasted until the arrival of the Portuguese in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Portuguese, in fact, had ruled Muscat from 1507 until its capture by the Omanis in the mid-seventeenth century.⁷

The British, who helped drive the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean and were somewhat less imperious in their policy, allowed the coastal Arabs to resume their traditional commercial activity. Muscat, which had not been a port of note before the Portuguese conquest, became a major Indian Ocean trading center and the sultan’s power expanded to such an extent that he controlled much of what had comprised the Portuguese empire in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, and the eastern coast of Africa.

While the gulf Arabs no doubt resented the European presence, for the most part they never suffered direct colonial rule comparable to that experienced by their fellow Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East and in North Africa (a fact that helps explain the modern gulf Arabs’ greater willingness to cooperate with the West). Thus the Arabs the Americans contacted along the southern and gulf coasts of the Arabian Peninsula were not subject peoples living under the heel of European colonialism, but commercially oriented societies comprised of ruling families closely aligned with local merchant communities who governed successfully and profitably and were eager to expand their trade.⁸

While the Arabs had centuries of experience dealing with Europeans, the Americans who first reached the Indian Ocean, after tiring voyages that lasted several months, found themselves in a strange, climatically inhospitable region.⁹ Alfred T. Mahan, who visited Muscat in 1867 as a young naval officer, noted that conditions confirmed “the association of the name Arabia with scorching and desert.”¹⁰

While many people in the United States considered those of the Islamic world heathen barbarians living in darkness, the Americans who rounded the Cape of Good Hope found the Arabs to be shrewd businessmen whose societies were generally well ordered and civil. In the nineteenth century American naval officers considered “Mohammedan” ports unusually safe, if somewhat boring, venues for sailors. Mahan noted that when a party of men from his ship went ashore he “had the unprecedented experience that they all came back on time and sober.”¹¹

Muscat was situated on a mere cove, but was nonetheless a fine harbor with a natural breakwater. From a distance, one could make out the high cliffs and forts that encircled and protected the town, although Muscat itself, Mahan wrote, “was hardly to be descried, the gray color of the stone used in construction blending with the background of the mountains, from which it had probably been quarried.” Only when one neared the town did it appear “imposing … there being several minarets, and some massive buildings, among which the ruins of a Portuguese cathedral bear the mute testimony to a transitory era in the long history of the East.”¹²

In 1833 U.S. special agent Captain Edmund Roberts, a Salem, Massachusetts, merchant who represented the commercial community interested in the eastern trade, arrived in Muscat, accompanied by a small naval show of force—Master Commandant David Geisinger’s two-ship squadron, the sloop-of-war Peacock and the schooner Boxer. Americans had found ready markets for their cotton textiles, furniture, and the occasional cargo of rum in Muscat and Zanzibar, major Indian Ocean entrepôts controlled by the sultan. For their return voyages, Americans could purchase valuable cargoes of ivory, dates, and pearls from Africa and Arabia, as well as spices and other goods from the Far East. But the American market could absorb limited quantities of ivory, dates, and pearls, and many of the products transhipped from the Far East could be had more cheaply at their source. Indeed, until the development of the oil industry in the Persian Gulf in the twentieth century, the Arab states had little of value to sell. Roberts thus found the sultan eager to trade and the two men signed a treaty of amity and commerce on September 21, 1833, establishing the United States’ first tie to a Persian Gulf state and a diplomatic relationship still extant between the United States and Oman.¹³

The negotiations between Roberts and the sultan took place beneath the shadow of Great Britain’s eastern empire. Muscat was the strongest indigenous maritime power in the region, but both Roberts and the sultan understood that the latter’s far-flung commercial empire—which extended from the east African coast into the gulf—survived only because of British forebearance.¹⁴

In fact, the newcomer Americans, had they not been so quick to dismiss British colonial experiences, might have learned a lesson or two from the history of Great Britain’s involvement in the region. British merchants had reached the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf in the 1500s, seeking not the imperium of the Portuguese who had preceded them, but, much like the Americans two centuries later, commercial opportunity in the east.¹⁵ But the British had inexorably been drawn into the region’s affairs. In 1622 they joined the Persians in the successful assault on Hormuz island that broke the Portuguese grip in the gulf.¹⁶ France’s short-lived occupation of Egypt in 1798. seen in London as a threat to India, led Great Britain to establish formal diplomatic and military ties with strategically placed Muscat.¹⁷ Gradually, but steadily, the British found themselves ever more deeply involved in the affairs of the region, a trend that would continue throughout the nineteenth century.

Not surprisingly, given their position in the region, the British were fully aware of the American overture to Muscat. When British representatives questioned the sultan about the arrangements, he offered to tear up the treaty. But since the accord was purely a commercial arrangement and the Americans had displayed no interest in involving themselves in the sultan’s affairs, the treaty survived. American trade continued to expand and in short order the United States had achieved a virtual monopoly of trade with Zanzibar. The American presence was so extensive that when in 1841 a British consul arrived in Zanzibar, he found the sultan’s palace decorated with prints of the U.S. Navy’s victories over the men-of-war of Britain’s Royal Navy in the War of 1812.¹⁸

Americans thus continued to expand their commercial opportunities in the Indian Ocean, in part, at least, at the expense of the British, while at the same time benefiting from the order Britain brought to an unstable region. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans watched passively as the British struggled to prevent the entire region from descending into chaos. Trading patterns underwent dramatic change as European steamers and commercial companies gradually displaced Arab dhows and traders. Britain’s well-intentioned and successful campaign to end the slave trade also disrupted established commercial patterns and threatened the old order of the region. Dynastic instability led to internal strife, economic decline, disorder, and frequently the establishment of a British protectorate. The ebb and flow of Wahabism—fundamentalist Sunni Islam later championed by the Saudis—threatened the maritime Arab chieftains around the periphery of the Arabian Peninsula and intensified the piracy that generally troubled the gulf’s waters. Nineteenth-century expeditions to suppress gulf piracy, and diplomatic and military support to the imperiled states, led Britain into ever deeper involvement in the affairs of the gulf.

British imperial success in the Indian Ocean and the gulf allowed Americans to further expand their commercial operations in the region. By the mid-1850s, American trade in the gulf itself had become substantial enough that the United States sought a commercial treaty with the Persian empire. The Americans, who already had reached a similar accord with neighboring Turkey in 1830, were anxious to gain a consulate at Bushire in the upper gulf.¹⁹

The negotiations between representatives of the United States and the Persian monarchy were far more difficult, and the issues involved far more complex, than had been the case in Muscat in 1833. In Istanbul in October 1851, Persian and American negotiators signed a commercial treaty. The U.S. Senate ratified the agreement but in Teheran “the influence of England at the Persian Court” allowed the accord to die a slow death.²⁰

The treaty fell victim to the “Great Game” then already underway in the Near East and Central Asia between Britain and Czarist Russia. As the British had been steadily expanding their position in the gulf, around the periphery of the Arabian peninsula, and in India, the Russians had been pushing south from the steppe. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russian southern expansion came primarily at the expense of the Ottoman Turks and the khanates of Central Asia. But in 1722-23, during the reign of Peter the Great, the Russians first waged war against the Persians, gaining, temporarily, a foothold on the Caspian Sea. Between 1804 and 1813, the Persians fought their northern neighbor again, this time for control of Georgia. Once more, the Russians triumphed. The Treaty of Turkmanchai, which ended a third Russo-Persian struggle—1826 to 1828—secured the Russian position in the Caucasus.²¹

The Russian threat from the north drove the Persians temporarily, and begrudgingly, into the arms of the British. In the early 1850s, Shah Nasir ud-Din, and especially his chief adviser Mirza Taki Khan, were unwilling to do anything that might put at risk future British support against a Russian attack from the north. The British, anxious to preserve and expand their position in strategically located Persia, viewed American commercial penetration of the country as a potential threat.

But in the mid-1850s, relations between Persia and Britain soured because of the latter’s domination of the region’s trading routes and disputes over the border between Persia and Afghanistan. Moreover, the outbreak of war in 1854, and the concentration of both Russian and British military forces in the Crimea, gave the Persians much greater freedom of maneuver.

In the fall of 1854, at the instigation of the Czar of Russia, the Persians reopened negotiations with the United States. The shah was now eager not only to establish a commercial relationship with the Americans, but also “to buy or have constructed in the United States several vessels of war and to procure the services of American officers and seamen to navigate them.”²²

As the negotiations began, once again in Istanbul, the American representative, Carroll Spence, soon realized that the shah hoped to draw the United States not only into commercial, but also political and military relationships. The first draft treaty advanced by the Persians included articles that called for the United States to protect Persian merchant vessels and “ports and isles” in the gulf from attack.²³ In a subsequent draft, the shah’s representatives requested American assistance for Persian attacks against Muscat and Bahrain and included an article t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE TO THE VALLEY OF THE EUPHRATES
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
• MAPS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Index