Whether you’re firmly in Michael Moore’s camp or steadfastly avoiding Fahrenheit 9/11, you're no doubt aware of Uncle Sam’s pretty unusual relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudis by birth - as is ringleader Osama bin Laden, yet the Kingdom is the top supplier of crude oil to the United States, and Saudi airbases were key staging sites for American military forces in the recent Iraq War. It's a muddled marriage between a liberal super power and an isolated fiefdom.

In Inside the Mirage, Thomas Lippman, former Washington Post reporter, does us all a favor by explaining how two such divergent nations became oddly cozy bedfellows over the course of the last seventy years. Lippman begins by tracing the roots of Saudi Arabia's petroleum boom as far back as the 1930s, describing the cowboy-like American surveyors who first gained entrance to the insular kingdom and started the search for crude. He continues into the post-war years, when American corporations initiated the glory days of oil-drilling and U.S. workers began building suburban oases in the desert.

Lippman's depiction of American communities in Saudi Arabia is one of the book's most fascinating sections. Through interviews with dozens of former oil-industry workers, he reconstructs the almost surreal company towns of air-conditioned modern homes and well-scrubbed nuclear families set amidst the sand and squalor of a pre-industrial kingdom. It's a slice of hometown life unlike any you've seen before.

The author goes on to detail the rise of U.S.-Saudi relations through a thick web of economic cooperation and diplomatic tap-dancing. The two countries differed on much, but they found common ground in resisting communist encroachment into the Middle East and in pushing ahead development of Saudi Arabia's infrastructure and industrial base – both virtually from scratch. (Many Wichitans and Kansans may be especially intrigued by the chapters dealing with the heavy U.S. involvement in creating a national airline and kick-starting the kingdom’s agricultural sector). These collaborations, Lippman recounts, form the background for the increasingly rocky relations that have emerged in recent years with the escalating terror attacks plaguing both nations. 

Inside the Mirage reads quickly and offers a balanced view of the unique and precarious partnership between two countries that remain bound by oil and security concerns. It’s well-written and extraordinarily timely, capable of filling many holes in public knowledge about one of the United States' most important Middle East allies. It’s been one of my best history reads of the year.

Review by Mark Bradshaw

Check here for another review treating America’s foreign policy with illiberal yet promising nations: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0404-005.html