The enemy underground: geostrategic intelligence and the war in Algeria

During the Algerian war (1954–1962), beside the war events proper, another conflict took place: a diplomatic and technocratic battle for the possession of Saharan oil resources in the name of national energy security. Its main actors were France, Italy, the US, and Algerian independence fighters. In the case I analyse in this paper, I show that the three Western-block countries used their local knowledge of the subsurface given by the collaboration of the three elements of: (1) geoscientists, (2) their national oil companies, and (3) their respective diplomatic bodies, in order to carve out a prominent place for themselves in the exploitation of Saharan resources. Algerian nationalists also succeeded in benefiting from this knowledge. I argue that this struggle for natural resources in a post-independence scenario, and the corresponding role of the geosciences in it, significantly contributed to influence the final configuration of the postwar Algerian hydrocarbon sector.     

Gideon's Band: America and the Middle East since 1945

The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them….
If ever those children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gideon's Band went through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more and finished. It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal eyes, perhaps.
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
On a rainy Saturday in June 1867, Mark Twain scurried down Wall Street and boarded the S.S. Quaker City , a first-class steamer bound for the Holy Land, where he would witness one of America's earliest and best publicized encounters with the Middle East. Expecting to find a blend of Old World splendor and Christian asceticism in a setting as familiar as the nearest Bible, Twain's fellow travelers—self-styled pilgrims who hailed from Boston, St. Louis, and points west—stumbled instead into terra incognita. Appalled by scenes of oriental squalor, harried by constant demands for baksheesh, and astonished by how little nineteenth-century Arabs and Jews resembled idealized biblical figures, Twain's innocents abroad scrambled back aboard the Quaker City and steamed home, leaving the Middle East to the handful of American missionaries and merchants for whom the exotic region remained a life's work.