Viewed on a large-scale map, Matar seems an illogical political entity, like so many American congressional districts, whose contorted outlines are the result of successive attempts to maximize incumbencies and to inconvenience challengers. One might suspect, contemplating
Matar
's bizarre physical configuration, that its borders had been drawn so as to deprive its much larger neighbor to the w
est, the Royal Kingdom of Wasabia
of access to the sea. One would be correct.
The account of
Matar
's cr
eation is described in David Vre
mkin's magisterial history of the creation of the modern Middle East,
Let's Put Iraq Here, and Lebanon Over Here: The Making of the Modern Middle East:
Churchill was
furious With
the French, in this case with reason, as
they
had been carrying
on separate negotiations with (
Wasabi king) Tallulah over
the
matter of saltwater ports. By the lime
the
conference convened.
he was in no mood lo dither with the French foreign minister. Delavall-Poolriere. He had stayed up until five in the morning with Colonel Lawrence. Glandsbury and Tuff-Blidgel. as well as Jeremy Pitt, miserable from the heat and another attack of gout. The next morning, as everyone filed in. Bosquet and Gaston Tazie both noticed that Tuff-Blidget's lingers were green, blue, yellow and magenta and signaled frantically to the French delegates. Too late. By the lime the fifty participants had taken their places around the green felt table in the Great Hall of Sala-al-din at Majma Palace, the British had their maps drawn and ready. The ink. Chomondelev observed, was "quite dry."
Siggot, Sykes's majordomo (who. two years later, would be killed during a freak tea-pouring accident at Kensington Palace with Queen Alexandra), described the sound of "Winnie unrolling his map over the conference table" as "like a suddenly unfurled topgallant sail snapping in a twenty-knot freshet
of
f Cowes." Vivid indeed. Realizing what was happening. Delavall-Pootriere tried to object on procedural grounds, but Churchill, pointing his cigar at the Frenchman "like a half eate
n breakfast banger" threatened t
o extend the Balfour Declaration, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, into Lebanon and Syria—that is, well into the French sphere of influence.
The last thing the French wanted. Meg-Wright noted in his cable that morning to Arthur Glenwoodie, was "wave after wa
ve of irrendendist
kibbutzim mucking about the Levant." Such a move would also have the effect of pitting the British branch of the Rothschild family against the French branch, which for some time had been eyeing the western slopes of the Bekaa and Xoosh valleys as potential vineyards for experimental sauvignon noir grapes. Delavall
-Pootriere could do nothing. H
e had been outmaneuvered.
King Tallulah,
livid over seeing his promised coastline vanish with several strokes of the British cartographical pen, denounced the conference as a "gathering of jackals and toads"
("jamaa
min etheeah w
eddqfadeah"),
stormed out of the hall and left Damascus with his bodygu
ard of two hundred Bedou and He
jazi. Picot observed to Gastin-Piquet,
"Sa
majeste est bien
fromage
e
("The king is well cheesed").
For his part. Gazir Bin H
az, the plump, pleasu
re-loving minor sharif of the W
azi-had—trailers and Fishermen along the Daiian littoral since the time of Alexander—now found himself emir of a territory that effectively blocked Wasabia from getting its oil to the sea. This had, of course, been Chur
chill's plan all along. What bet
ter way to repay King Tallulah for his obduracy ove
r the proposed tariff on unpitted dat
es, to say nothing of the endless arguments over who should enter Damascus first, and wearing what?
That
night over brandy
and cigars in the billiard room at the British Legation, Churchill told Glandsbury that he could not decide which had given him more pleasure, thwarting Delavall-Pootriere or "forcing that royal ass Tallulah to drink his own oil."
KING TALLULAH WAS LEF
T
with no choice but
to cut a deal with the emir of
Matar. Wasabia built it
s first pipeline through
Matar
to the Gulf shortly after the signing of the treaty. Over the wars, a dozen more pipelines followed. Wasabia simply
had no other means of getting it
s oil to market.
The E
mirate of
Matar
prospered magnificently from this steady black income stream through its territory. The emirs never released official figures, but annual revenues from the so-called courtesy fees paid by
Wasabia into successive Bin H
az exchequers were, by the
end of the century, estimated t
o run annually to the tens of
billions of dollars. The Bin H
az dvnastv continued to maintain the official face-saving fiction that the country's extraordinary wealth derived from fig oil, dates, fishing and tourism.
This last assertion was in some ways the boldest, given
Matar
's fierce sandstorms and average summer temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
Matar
could, however, legitimately boast that part of its abundant gross domestic product came from gambling. The present emir had developed Infidel Land, a complex of hotels, casinos and theme parks on an offshore archipelago accessible by a ten-mile-long causeway.
Matar
i residents were (officially) not allowed to cross the causeway and take part in the gaming—and collateral activities— but this law was rarely observed and never enforced. The emir had decreed it as a bit of window dressing for the local mullahs.
H
is handling of Matar's religious authorities had been, by unanimous con
sent, masterful. Matari mullah
s were the best fed in the Muslim world. Indeed, they were so prosperous that they had acquired the local nickname of "moolahs." They received a generous salary from the stale, luxury apartments, a new Mercedes-Benz every three years and an annual six-week paid sabbatical, which most of them chose to take in the South of France, one of Islam's holiest sites.
As a result of the emir's attentions in this area, Matar was a veritable oasis of tolerance. Its mullahs were among the most contented and laissez-faire of their faith. As one scholar put it, "Here, truly,
is
Islam with a happy face." Clerical care
ers were avidly sought in Matar,
and strictly regulated.
This approach to matters religious stood in starkest contrast with that across the border in Wasabia. After Sheik Abdulabdullah "The Wise" came into power in 1740 (or 1742), he
struck a deal with Mustafa Q’um, imam of the N
ejaz, to consolidate his power throughout the territory. Mustafa preached an extremely austere version of Islam called
mukfe
llah.
Abdulabdullah agreed to make
mukfellah
the official religion of all Wasabia. if Mustafa would
pledge his allegiance to the H
amooj dynasty". Thus Wasabia united under one rule.
Alas, this doomed Wasabia to becoming—as one historian put it—the Middle East's preeminent "no-fun zone." Unless, as he dryly noted, "one's idea of fun includes beheading, amputation, flogging, blinding and having your tongue cut out for
offenses
that in other religions would earn you a
lecture from the rabbi, five H
ail Marys from a priest and, for Episcopalians, a plastic pink flamingo on your front lawn." A Google search using the key phrases "Wasabia" and "La Dolce Vita" results in no matches.
This disparity in religious temperament, added to the matter of the national border, made relations between the two countries predictably strained. King Tallulah's successors chafed over having to pay Matari emirs the so-called Churchill tax.
In 1957. King Talubadullah. Tallulah's grand
son, threatened to seize a twenty-mile
-long strip of Matar on the almost ostentatiously flimsy grounds that
Caliph Ibn Izzir (1034-1078 c.e.). a very remote H
amooj ancestor, had established
a summer fishing camp there. H
e went so far as to move a tank division up to the Wasabi-Matar border, and to dispatch Royal Wasabi Air Force
Mir
age lighter jets (supplied by W
asabia's great friend France) to fly "maneuvers" along the disputed area. This caused a few days of anxious hand-wringing at the United Nations, u
ntil the U.S. ambassador in Kaffa quietly told the W
asabi foreign minister to "cut it out."
The
United States maintained good relations with Wasabia—the unthinkable alternative being to use less oil—but it had always supported Matar's soverei
gnty as a means of containing W
asabian power in the region. The old lion Churchill might have been drunk, but he was shrewd. The U.S. tilt toward
Matar
also had the advantage, as Henry Kissinger noted in
Years of Genius.
Volume XXI of his memoirs, "of driving the Wasabis nuts."
Wasabia periodically rattled its scimitar at
Matar
and threatened to push through to the sea, but these episodes were not taken seriously by the emirati. Protected by Ameri
ca, its economy guaranteed by W
asabi oil,
the local religious fat,
happy and uncensorious,
Matar
was the Switzerland of the Gulf. The o
nly things it lacked were a Matt
erhorn and a chocolate-bar industry.
All in all, it was the ideal platform for Florence and her team. And there was this advantage: You could even order a drink at the bar.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Florence
had given a great deal of thought to
the emir's present. It had to b
e
expensive enough to get his attention, but she wanted it to be distinctive and conversation-starting, not just another gaudy bauble of gold to keep a drowsy emperor awake.
The emir was fond of hunting gazelle while sitting in a special seal mounted on the front of his Hummer. Bobby proposed a matched pair of gold-plated, engraved 30-06 rifles from Holland and Holland. George, who found the slaughter of gazelles grotesque, noted that the emir's gun collection already consisted of more than two hundred rifles. He counterproposed a twelfth-century edition of the Holy Koran that had been owned by the last sultan of Moorish Spain, bound in ivory and inlaid with Arabian sea pearls and Ceylonese emeralds—a steal at $3.4 million. Rick, ever with his eye on the PR aspect, said the fact that it had belonged to the
last
sultan of Spain could o
nly prove awkward. Why not, he said, a private submarine that he had seen in the Sharper Image catalo
g? "Arabs like water, right? Bet
they'd love the idea of being completely submerged in it." George complained that at $750,000, the sub wasn't nearly expensive enough for a man whose wealth ran to the tens of billions. There was some discussion about equipping the submarine with U.S. Navy to
rpedoes and missiles, to make it
more exciting.
Uncle Sam nixed that
on the grounds
that
there w
ere U.S. warships operating in the Gulf of Darius, and it wouldn't help matt
ers if one of them accidentally identified the emir's sub as an enemy and destroyed it.
In the end, Florence decided on a helicopter. It was a civilian version of the U.S. Army Blackhawk, specially fitted out so the emir could sit in a 270-degree plexiglas turret in front of the pilots and shoot gazelles through an ingenious Mylar port.
You
can't be too thin, too rich, or own too many helicopters. The emir was delighted with his present, and Florence shortly received a summons to the
royal palace in the capital city
of Amo-Amas.
The four of them were reg
istered at the Opulent, the city
's nicest hotel, overlooking the harbor. The lights of the tankers lying at anchor twinkled in the distance. In Churchill Square, the large marble statue of Matar's patron glowed in the spotlights. The present emir's grandfather
had erected it in the 1920s. T
he face bore an unmistakable smirk. The statue
faced west, toward W
asabia.
They
met in Florence's suite. George had ma
naged to contract a stomach bug,
no small feat, since most of the Opulent's room-service food was flown in daily from Paris. He sat clutching his bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
"E
njoyin' the Mid
dle Fast so far, are you?" Bobby
said.