The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

The war had been sparked by a host of rivalries: ethnic and religious, political and economic, ideological and personal; by a struggle for primacy in the Gulf; by the insecurities of national cohesion; and by the arbitrary way in which “nations” had been created and borders in the Middle East overlaid on the map of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Indeed, geography was decidedly at the heart of the conflict. The Shah had been at loggerheads with the secular Ba’thist regime in Baghdad since it first came to power in 1968. One of the most important issues between the two countries was the Shatt-al-Arab, a meandering river and delta created by the confluence of the two Iraqi rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, with several rivers from Iran. The Shatt-al-Arab served as the boundary for 120 miles between the two countries. It was crucial to Iran as its most important avenue to the Gulf—the Abadan oil refinery was built on a mud flat in the river delta—but certainly not its only one. The Shatt-al-Arab, however, was critical to Iraq as its only avenue to the high seas. Iraq’s entire coastline was only twenty-six miles or so in length, compared to Iran’s fourteen hundred miles of coast. Basra, Iraq’s principal port city, was actually almost fifty miles up the Shatt-al-Arab, which had to be frequently dredged owing to its shallowness and the buildup of silt. Sovereignty over the Shatt-al-Arab had, thus, assumed great symbolic significance. To make matters worse, a considerable part of bot...