Qaboos Quotes

According to Critchfield’s contacts, Sultan Qaboos came to the United States with no serious problems. He was interested mainly in meeting personally with President Ford and other U.S. government officials.

Qaboos was prepared to give the United States some kind of landing rights at Masirah Island and hoped to link this with a supply of TOW missiles, which he had requested but had not yet received, and a limited naval training arrangement. 7

A British expatriate, Philip Aldous, who was secretary of financial affairs in Qaboos’s father’s regime, represented the Omani government in its dealings with the British-and Dutch-run PDO. He had no backup staff of petroleum economists or engineers to assist him in this job.

When Philip Aldous left his position as secretary of financial affairs in 1973, he was not replaced, and Qaboos instead appointed Salem Makki, an Omani, to the newly created position of Director of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.

Akehurst was tremendously fortunate in having in Sultan Qaboos an unparalleled host for the counter-insurgency campaign. The new Sultan was utterly supportive of what Akehurst was trying to do, and brought statesmanlike qualities to the fight that saved his country from communist takeover. He compares very favorably with the host-nation leaders of the early twenty-first-century conflicts, such as Iraq’s Nouri al-Malaki or Afghan presidents Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. The only times that Qaboos frustrated Akehurst were during his occasional bouts of wariness of bad omens: the Sultan would refuse to embark on journeys or projects if his astrologers deemed them unpropitious. Nevertheless, Akehurst concluded that “It would have been folly to overrule the Commander-in-Chief’s premonitions.”110