"Oh, but South America is not the power behind this business," Nolan said gently. "I'll admit that the evidence seems to point to South America, but I have reasons to believe that another power is behind this."
"But which one could it be?" asked Roger.
"Indications point to the League of Islam," replied Nolan. "They are clever, but a student of political history can get some insight into their plans if he looks carefully enough. If you're interested, I can give you some background."
"Go ahead," Roger said. "I'd like to find out what's behind this."
"Well," the historian began. "I guess that you could say that this story goes back 4000 years. The hatred between the Jews and the Arabs goes back that far, and it plays an important part in the present situation. Actually the seeds of the present trouble were planted more than a hundred years ago, when the United States helped the Jews set up a republic on land that the Arabs considered theirs. When the republic of Israel was established, many Arabs were driven from their homes. Added to this, American economic aid to Israel didn't help our relations with the Arab world. As a result, the fifties and sixties of the last century were a time of unrest throughout the Middle East.
"A short war between Israel and the Arab States lasted from 1946 to 1949. The Arabs lost out, but border incidents occurred intermittently until 1969. After the United States and Russia were involved in the Two Week Chaos, the Arab League moved against Israel. The Arabs had grown in strength during the preceding twenty years and were able to push the Jews out of Palestine or put them under their control.
"Under agreements made in the United Nations, the United States sent an expeditionary force to the Holy Land. The whole affair was a debacle. America had been weakened by the atom bombing of many of her cities and military establishments. Russia was also out of the running. After the death of Malenkov in 1968, one of the party leaders had tried to bring union by starting a war. After American retaliation with hydrogen and atom bombs, the growing resentment of the Russian people against an undesirable system exploded into open revolt. The Soviet Union became a disorganized crazy-quilt pattern of small, constantly warring states.
"On top of the destruction of atomic war, came the great economic collapse of 1970. The financial structure of the United States and her allies fell apart, and with it the United Nations went down into oblivion. The states of the Arab League could now do much as they pleased without outside interference.
"The Two Week Chaos and the great collapse incapacitated the western powers for nearly thirty years. The Arab States prospered and formed the League of Islam in 1990. The League covered the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the coast of North Africa. During this period, South America had formed the South American Republic and became a world power.
"The North American Union, which was formed in 1997, wished to take up where the United States had left off in the development of Arabian oil. The Arabs, who had developed the fields themselves with help from South America, had no desire for North American intervention. The Americans, who had a long term lease signed in the late fifties, were not willing to give up so easily, and hard feeling developed. The Suez incident of thirty years ago and the American control of the moon and the satellite stations didn't help matters any.