“Tell me what I don’t know,” Ryan interrupted.
“Mr. President, we simply do not know the strength of any opposition group that may or may not exist. The current regime has been very effective at cutting the weeds down early. A handful of Iraqi political figures has defected to Iran. None are top-quality people, and none ever had the chance to develop a firm political base. There are two radio stations that broadcast from Iran into Iraq. We know the names of the defectors who use those transmitters to talk to their countrymen. But there’s no telling how many people listen and pay attention. The regime isn’t exactly popular, we know that. We do not know the strength of the opposition, or what sort of organization exists to make use of an opportunity such as this one.”
CIA nodded. “Bert’s right. Our friend was awfully good at identifying potential enemies and taking them out of play. We tried to help during and after the Persian Gulf War, but all we really managed to do was get people killed. For sure nobody over there trusts us.”
Ryan sipped at his coffee and nodded. He’d made his own recommendations back in 1991, and they hadn’t been exercised. Well, he’d still been a junior executive then.
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“Do we have any options to play?” the President asked next.
“Honestly, no,” Vasco answered.
CIA agreed: “No assets in place. What few people we have operating in that country are tasked to coverage of weapons development: nuclear, chemical, and so forth. Nobody on the political side. We actually have more people in Iran looking at the political side. We can rattle those bushes some, but not in Iraq.”
Fabulous, Jack thought, a country may or may not go down in one of the most sensitive areas of the world, and the world’s most powerful nation could do nothing more than watch television coverage of the event. So much for the power of the American presidency.
“Arnie?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” the chief of staff replied.
“We bumped Mary Pat off the schedule a couple days ago. I want her in today if we can work the schedule.”
“I’ll see what we can do on that, but–”
“But when something like this happens, the President of the United States is supposed to have more than his dick in his hand.” Ryan paused. “Is Iran going to make a move?”
10
POLITICS
PRINCE ALI BIN SHEIK HAD
been ready to fly home on his personal aircraft, an aging but beautifully appointed Lockheed L-1011, when the call came in from the White House. The Saudi embassy was located close to the Kennedy Center, and the ride correspondingly short in his official limousine, accompanied by a security force almost as large as Ryan’s and made up of American Diplomatic Protection Service personnel, plus the Prince’s own detail, composed of former members of Britain’s Special Air Service. The Saudis, as always, spent a lot of money and bought quality with it. AH was no stranger to the White House, or to Scott Adler, who met him at the door and conducted him upstairs and east into the Oval Office.
“Mr. President,” His Royal Highness said, walking in from the secretaries’ room.
“Thank you for coming over on such short notice.” Jack shook his hand and waved him to one of the room’s two sofas. Some thoughtful person had started a fire in the fireplace. The White House photographer snapped a few shots, and was dismissed. “1 imagine you’ve seen the news this morning.”
Ali managed a worried smile. “What does one say? We will not mourn his passing, but the Kingdom has serious concerns.”
“Do you know anything we don’t?” Ryan asked.
The Prince shook his head. “I was as surprised as everyone else.”
The President grimaced. “You know, with all the money we spend on–” His visitor raised a tired hand.
“Yes, I know. I will have the same conversation with my own ministers as soon as my airplane lands back home.”
“Iran.”
“Undoubtedly.”
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“Will they move?”
The Oval Office got quiet then, just the crackling of the seasoned oak in the fireplace as the three men, Ryan, Ali, and Adler, traded looks across the coffee table, the tray and cups on it untouched. The issue was, of course, oil. The Persian–sometimes called the Arabian–Gulf was a finger of water surrounded by, and in some places sitting atop, a sea of oil. Most of the world’s known supply was there, divided mainly among the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, along with the smaller United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar. Of these countries, Iran was by far the largest in terms of population. Next came Iraq. The nations of the Arabian Peninsula were richer, but the land atop their liquid wealth had never supported a large population, and there was the rub, first exposed in 1991, when Iraq had invaded Kuwait with all the grace of a schoolyard bully’s attack on a smaller child. Ryan had more than once said that aggressive war was little more than an armed robbery writ large, and such had been the case in the Persian Gulf War. Seizing upon a minor territorial dispute and some equally trivial economic issues as an excuse, Saddam Hussein had attempted at a stroke to double his country’s inherent wealth, and then threatened to double down his bets yet again by attacking Saudi Arabia–the reason he’d stopped at the Kuwait-Saudi border would now remain forever unexplained. At the most easily understood level, it was about oil and oil’s resulting wealth.
But there was more to it than that. Hussein, like a Mafia don, had thought about little more than money and the political power that money generated. Iran was somewhat more farsighted.
All the nations around the Gulf were Islamic, most of them very strictly so. There were the exceptions of Bahrain and Iraq. In the former case, the oil had essentially run out, and that country–really a city-state separated from the Kingdom by a causeway–had evolved into the same function that Nevada exercised for the western United States, a place where the normal rules were set aside, where drinking, gambling, and other pleasures could be indulged a convenient distance from a more restrictive home. In the
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latter case, Iraq was a secular state which paid scant lip service to the state religion, which largely explained its President’s demise after a long and lively career.
But the key to the region was and would always be religion. The Saudi Kingdom was the living heart of Islam. The Prophet had been born there. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina were there, and from that point of origin had grown one of the world’s great religious movements. The issue was less about oil than about faith. Saudi Arabia was of the Sunni branch, and Iran of the Shi’a. Ryan had once been briefed on the differences, which had at the time seemed so marginal that he’d made no effort to remember them. That, the President told himself now, was foolish. The differences were large enough to make two important countries into enemies, and that was as large as any difference needed to be. It wasn’t about wealth per se. It was about a different sort of power, the sort that grew from the mind and the heart–and from there into something else. Oil and money just made the struggle more interesting to outsiders.
A lot more interesting. The industrial world depended on that oil. Every state on the Gulf feared Iran for its size, for its large population, and for the religious fervor of its citizens. For the Sunni religious, the fear was about a perceived departure from the true course of Islam. For everyone else, it was about what would happen to them when “heretics” assumed control of the region, because Islam is a comprehensive system of beliefs, spreading out into civil law and politics and every other form of human activity. For Muslims the Word of God was Law Itself. For the West it was continuing their economies. For the Arabs– Iran is not an Arab country–it was the most fundamental question of all, a man’s place before his God.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Prince Ali bin Sheik replied after a moment. “They will move.”
His voice was admirably calm, though Ryan knew that inwardly he must be anything but. The Saudis had never wanted Iraq’s President to fall. Enemy though he was, apostate though he was, aggressor though he was, he had fulfilled a useful strategic purpose for his neighbors. Iraq had long been a buffer between the Gulf states and Iran.
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It was a case in which religion played second fiddle to politics, which thereby served religious purposes. By rejecting the Word of Allah, Iraq’s majority Shi’a population was taken out of play, and the dual border with Kuwait and the Kingdom was one of mere politics, not religion. But if the Ba’ath Party fell along with its leader, then Iraq might revert to majority religious rule. That would put a Shi’a country on the two borders, and the leader of the Shi’a branch of Islam was Iran.