It makes for chilling reading: Staff Statement No. 16 for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the "9-11 Commission" (http://www.9-11commission.gov/).
"Outline of the 9/11 Plot" recounts the conception, development, and initial steps in executing the attack on major symbolic structures in the US on Sept. 11, 2001, and killing as many US citizens as possible.
Events of that day remain traumatic for many Americans. But what makes reading this account particularly unsettling for an Oil & Gas Journal editor is the litany, page after page after page, of the Middle Eastern and Arab names of the planners and attackers.
OGJ editors, you see, travel to and around the Middle East. It has not always been easy, as OGJ Executive Editor Bob Williams recalled last week in this space (OGJ, June 21, 2004, p. 15). For a publication based outside the area, however, its editors have spent considerable time there. Since the first of this year, in fact, three editors have visited three different Persian Gulf states.
And, as Bob's column showed, that time also has been spent learning to appreciate the area, its unique geography and history, and certainly its people. Indeed, it's our experience with the people that makes reading the 9-11 Commission's Staff Statement No. 16 so unsettling.
A culture of courtesy
Although based in the US and written in American English, OGJ is international in its mission: It covers the petroleum operating industry wherever it works. Working for OGJ has afforded many of us opportunities to travel in areas we might never have visited.
In these travels, we have always had the same mission: to learn as much as possible about petroleum industry operations and report those findings to OGJ's international readership among the world's operating oil and gas companies.
The "extra," however, has been the experience, a chance to be on the ground in a part of the world whose civilization is millennia older than the US: the Middle East, a region for most of us that is foreign in culture, language, and history.
In our travels to Middle Eastern countries, we have met and talked with many locals and grown accustomed to the non-Western phrasing and sounds of Arabic names and the Arabic language. For me, in fact, the regular calls to prayer that echo five times daily across Muslim cities convey a certain comfort, an ordering to the day, rarely found in Western cities.
This comfort is also particularly grounded in a Middle Eastern culture that welcomes and accommodates visitors and guests. It is a tradition centuries old and evident in routine, daily contact with shopkeepers, cabbies, and hotel and restaurant staffs, as well as in contacts with local oil and gas company employees.
It's true: In many parts of the world, even of the US, the average person a foreign visitor meets is likely to be helpful. And it's also true that in some of these regions such a cultural demand goes back centuries.
OGJ editors who have traveled in the Middle East, however, have consistently commented on how polite and helpful they found people. In Qatar, I was cautioned not to refuse the offer of drink; the host would continue to offer until I accepted something and he could feel he had performed his duty.
An unwelcome change
The murderous deeds of Sept. 11, 2001, by 19 terrorists, 15 from Saudi Arabia, make a jarring context for sounds that have come to be associated with such gracious, welcoming, respectful people.
Listening to the repetition of Arab names—Khalid, Mohammed, Jarrah, Binalshibh, Hazmi, Abdullah, Omar, Al-Hijra, Ahmed, Salem, Waleed, Saeed—rattles an editor's confidence and undermines his sense of well being, when he travels in a land that is central to the industry he covers.
Old certainties, comfortable assumptions, pleasant associations—all are shaken. And barriers between peoples grow higher and harder.
The political issues in the Middle East are complex and certainly predate 2001 or 1948 or even 1914. And now, a new pivotal year must be added: 2003, when yet another Western army invaded yet another Middle East state.
OGJ editors should and will continue to travel this region for their readers. In doing so, however, the old comfort among the people and the cultures is now alloyed by an unpleasant wariness.