by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
Outside of government circles, British interest groups and individual experts continued to use the term “Near East” more often than they used the term “Middle East,” despite a Royal Geographical Society resolution in 1920 that prescribed that the “Near East” should denote only the Balkans, whereas the lands from the Bosporus to the Indian frontiers should be named “Middle East.” The publications of the Royal Central Asian Society and the more commercially focused Near East and India made little use of the term “Middle East” through the 1930s.21
The United States was not completely alienated from the post–World War I contexts throughout the region, and although it had declared war against Germany in 1917, it did not do so against the Ottoman Turks. This disappointed the British no less than the U.S. refusal to ratify the Versailles Treaty in June 1919 did. In addition, although the Americans rejected the British invitation to take up mandates for Armenia and Palestine, they were eager to compete with British oil claims in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. Like the British, few Americans used the term “Middle East,” although “Near East” was used by some scholars and groups. American Protestant missions continued in Syria as did charitable work on behalf of the Armenians through the Protestant’s Near East College Association, Near East Relief, and Near East Foundation. Furthermore, academic programs in Near Eastern studies, with a strong focus on the ancient world, such as the one at the University of Chicago, were inaugurated around this time.22
The term “Middle East” came into its own just before World War II, a war that was truly more global than the 1914–18 war, or the Great War as it was first named. In that earlier war, the greatest and most decisive campaigns took place in Europe, and the British campaigns against the Turks were considered sideshows by Western strategists who opposed them. The Middle East mattered so much more in World War II mainly because of the oil required for mechanized warfare at sea, on the ground, and especially in the air. These war machines multiplied the demand for oil not only for Britain and the Allies but also for their enemies. Adolph Hitler’s need to import oil helps explain the Nazi drive into southeastern Europe and Russia. Likewise the demand for oil explains Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor: the Japanese planned to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet before they moved to seize the oil-producing regions in Southeast Asia.23
Historians now recognize that extensive war preparations took place in Britain before 1939 and that the British prewar calculations affected their mandate in Palestine, where large numbers of their forces on the ground and airplanes were required to put down the Arab revolt of 1936–39. By the mid-1930s, even nonmilitary departments in Whitehall were making elaborate plans for war in Europe, such as determining how to provide the British Isles with sufficient food, which it mostly imported. Meanwhile, the Foreign Office initiated a wide variety of diplomatic activities in light of Mussolini’s ambitions for a great Italian empire in northeastern Africa; his seizure of Abyssinia combined with Italy’s military occupation of Libya since 1911 demonstrated these ambitions. Looking for potential allies to oppose Mussolini and Hitler, the Foreign Office renegotiated more liberal treaties with Turkey and Egypt.
The British military made extensive preparations for war in the Middle East. The Royal Air Force reorganized the Middle East Air Command, which originally was comprised of the squadrons from Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya before the Abyssinian War of the mid-1930s. In 1938, the Middle East Air Command’s authority was extended over the previously independent Royal Air Force (RAF) squadrons in Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Aden, and Malta. In 1939, the British army followed in the footsteps of the RAF. The British army consolidated all the separate military commands of Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine-Transjordan, and added Cyprus, British Somalia, Aden, the Persian Gulf, Cyprus, Iraq, and Iran to this conglomeration. General Archibald Wavell, charged with this consolidation of British air and military power, was designated the commander in chief, Middle East. Based in Cairo, he was responsible for vast parts of northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia. He had spent most of his career in the regions of his new command, and he was writing a biography of General Edmund Allenby, the successful commander of the British campaigns in Palestine and Syria during World War I who served as high commissioner of Egypt afterward.24
By June 1940, a month after Churchill had succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, Britain stood virtually alone in Western Europe confronting the Nazis, who had taken the Low Countries and occupied northern France. The south of France was left to Vichy collaborators with Hitler, and the fall of France meant that the French colonies in Northwest Africa were tied to the Vichy regime, and thus could threaten British access to the western Mediterranean. Nazi successes on the continent convinced Mussolini that he should ally Italy with Hitler, which had the effect of cutting off British access to the central Mediterranean, with British Malta caught in the crossfire between Britain and the Axis. The closing of the western and central Mediterranean to British shipping meant that the British had to transport supplies around the vast African continent, which then raised concerns about Britain’s ability to hold Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. Early in 1941 colonial troops from the British Empire managed to defeat the Italian soldiers breaking into western Egypt, although the British and the Italians continued to battle in parts of the Horn of Africa in that year. Mussolini’s forces needed to be stiffened, so Hitler sent one of his best, General Erwin Rommel, “the desert fox,” to take charge of the Axis drive into western Egypt.
The next shock to the British came in the Balkans during the spring of 1941, when the Nazis occupied all of southeastern Europe and even the island of Crete, where German paratroopers defeated the British troops and the superior Luftwaffe pounded the British navy. Many Britons feared that the Nazis might dominate the eastern Mediterranean with help from the Vichy regime running Syria and press on into Iraq and Iran and their oilfields. In April, when junior Iraqi army officers staged a coup against the pro-British monarchy in Baghdad, the British sent forces from Basra and Palestine, defeated the insurgency, and put a friendly general back in charge. The British navy then bombarded Lebanon and the British military defeated the Vichy in Syria, putting de Gaulle’s Free French in charge. When Rommel gained more ground in Egypt on the British, Cairo buzzed with rumors: “Rommel is coming! Rommel is coming!” Churchill replaced Wavell with General Claude John Eyre Auchinleck from India, whom he expected to take the offensive against Rommel.
An even greater concern to the British came in June 1941, when Hitler launched his massive invasion against the Soviet Union. The security of the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf seemed in such jeopardy that Churchill’s new commander publicly stated that he expected Russia to fall as quickly as the rest of Europe. But if Russia fell, what should be done about Russia’s oil wells? Should the British blow up Baku as they had blown up French ships in port? The Nazi advance in Russia reverberated throughout the Middle East and encouraged Britain’s enemies. Britain replaced Iran’s shah, friendly to the Axis, with his son, Muhammad Reza Shah, in the summer of 1941. When shortages of food that winter led to riots in Cairo and Egypt’s king wanted to name an anti-British prime minister, Churchill in early 1942 ordered British tanks to surround Abdin Palace and instructed the British ambassador to inform the king he would lose his throne unless he cooperated more fully with the British. The king complied. The British rounded up more political and religious activists in Egypt, just as they had imprisoned Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Indian National Congress.
Churchill was relieved at the end of 1941 by the United States’ entry into the war, which was precipitated by Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war against the United States. Each of Churchill’s successive campaigns had to be executed in step with United States, including his operations in the Mediterranean region and North Africa. With various operations extending from Northwest Africa, across North Africa through the Horn of Africa, and east to Iran, General Harold Alexander, the new commander in
chief in Cairo, was barely able keep track of all his commanders in the field. Churchill now sent to Cairo a minister of state for the Middle East as well as the director for the new Middle East Supply Center, which coordinated all British political and economic wartime policies throughout the vast area.25
So, as the war progressed throughout the early 1940s, the term “Middle East” began to be used more frequently, and Churchill’s wartime centralization of British military, political, and economic operations in Cairo gave greater coherence to a region referred to as the Middle East. The Americans sometimes disagreed with the British over operations in North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and Iran, but Churchill’s views prevailed throughout the region, part of which was often referred to as the “Middle East” and part of which was referred to as “North Africa.” In 1942, Churchill tried to divide the Middle Eastern Command between Cairo and Baghdad, identifying the former as the “Near East” and the latter as the “Middle East.” When he pressed for such a division, the British War Cabinet and General Staff insisted that the Middle East Command remain intact. Caught by the wartime centralization he had initiated, Churchill in his memoirs of World War II regretted the British lumping together the Near East’s Turkey and Levant with the Middle East’s Iraq and Persia.26
World War II propaganda machines on both sides of the Atlantic controlled most print and broadcast media, which quickly latched onto the term “Middle East” in their coverage of the war. The term met journalistic needs to cover North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean in ways that made sense to the public at home. British newspapers too adopted the term “Middle East,” as did the British Broadcasting Company.
The war in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean posed special problems for U.S. journalists. Stories of the determination of Churchill and the British home front were told frequently, but Allied accounts of Near and Middle Eastern campaigns ignored the wartime hardships faced by the British military and the peoples of these regions. The war on these fronts was simplified on maps to keep up Allied morale at home. The term “Middle East” was used more and more often, even though the public did not always know exactly where it meant. Defeating Hitler and Japan were still the main war goals, and the Americans had many more family and friends fighting in the Pacific or in Europe than in the largely unknown territories extending from Morocco to Iran, where British service personnel far outnumbered American personnel.27
By the end of World War II, for both the British and Americans, the term “Middle East” had eclipsed the “Near East” in popular usage. Only some older individuals and institutions inside and outside official London and Washington continued to use “Near East” or to distinguish between the Mediterranean-based Near East and the Persian Gulf-based Middle East, although the term “Near East” continued to be used by scholars and some university departments with interests in the ancient (pre-Islamic) world.28 A new think tank founded in 1946 in Washington, D.C., the Middle East Institute, began to publish the Middle East Journal, the first U.S. journal focused on this region.
THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE COLD WAR
After World War II there was no peace conference as there had been after the Great War in Paris in 1919. By 1945, the European continent was already divided into armed U.S. and Soviet camps. The United States held sway throughout most of the world, owing to its monopoly of atomic bombs, overwhelming superiority in the air and at sea, and gigantic economy serving American consumers who had been spared the horrors that Europeans and Asians had endured. The United States also dominated the newly inaugurated United Nations, although the Soviets were able to put up some resistance with the use of their veto in the Security Council. Despite its global supremacy, the United States worried about the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and after 1949 the new Communist regime in China that mobilized millions of peasants against the U.S.-backed Chinese Nationalists also caused alarm.
The Cold War spilled over from Europe into the Middle East. Following World War II, Soviet forces stayed in northern Iran until 1946, several months longer than the British had agreed to in 1941, but this was a minor episode. A much larger confrontation occurred when Harry Truman granted Turkey and Greece $400 million in U.S. aid to offset Soviet influence. This had to do more with the containment of Soviet Communism than it did with events in the Middle East. The Cold War escalated with Moscow’s isolation of Berlin and Washington’s airlift to Berlin in 1948. The new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was set up to counterbalance the Warsaw Pact. In 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb and Communists defeated the Nationalists in China. This turned the Cold War in Europe into a global contest between the so-called free world and the Communist world. When North Koreans invaded the south, the United States, Britain, and the U.N. Allies, including Turkey, retaliated in a war that was waged in the name of the United Nations but run by Washington.
Truman’s ideological war against Stalin upstaged Franklin Roosevelt’s ideological opposition to European imperialism and colonialism that had been articulated in the Atlantic Charter early in World War II. Despite U.S.-Soviet antagonism in the Security Council, the U.N. General Assembly provided a forum for newly independent nation-states in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Eisenhower Doctrine in 1958, like the Truman Doctrine a decade earlier, sought to defeat Communism. The words became cruder, and the weapons commanded by Washington and Moscow became more lethal and expensive. There were no battles in Europe’s Cold War, but hot wars erupted in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, with Asians fighting Asians, Africans fighting Africans, and the peoples of the Middle East fighting each other. Most of the weapons used in these wars were manufactured in and supplied by the United States, although more and more began to come from the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. With the establishment of the Central Treaty Organization, the Anglo-American conflict with the Soviet Union was sold to the British and U.S. public as a struggle of the free world against world Communism.29
One way for Washington to counter the spread of Communism in what a French sociologist in the early 1950s referred to as the “Third World” was to fund area studies at some U.S. and British universities, including several Middle Eastern centers. Area specialists at various institutions met together in 1966, establishing the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), the last world cultural region to be so organized in the United States (see also the discussion in Bonine, Chapter 3). Even as the first issue of its flag-ship publication, International Journal of Middle East Studies, appeared in 1970, few U.S. programs offered much training in Middle Eastern languages or hired Middle East specialists.
While area specialists debated the boundaries and meanings of the Middle East, generalists in the media and politics continued to use this rather vague term uncritically. The Cold War ideological struggle, pitting Good against Evil, was reflected in much of the writing about the region. Thus, a view of the Middle East gained currency that tended to simplify the region’s diversity and complexity, often avoiding the use of foreign words and ignoring an array of Arab states that had been added to all the other new states from Asia and Africa now at the United Nations.
Only a small number of correspondents for wire services and the most established newspapers went to the Middle East and North Africa. These journalists often found their reports shortened to make room for more pictures as newspapers competed with glossy magazines and television for attention. The public wanted pictures more than they wanted words about the Middle East and elsewhere, and the commercially driven media responded. The gap between specialist and generalist uses of the term “Middle East” during the Cold War became wider.
The withdrawal of all British forces east of Suez in the late 1960s meant that the United States had to fill the power vacuum in the Persian Gulf and Suez at the same time that the country found itself bogged down in Southeast Asia. Wanting to avoid any military encounters akin to the stalemate in Vietnam, W
ashington began to rely more heavily on Israeli military power in the region. The United States also encouraged and underwrote the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, granting both countries substantial subsidies from the United States. Iran, too, served as a bulwark against perceived Soviet interests in the region, and the United States sold large quantities of arms to the oil-rich shah of Iran and then to Arab leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This strategy was beneficial for the United States through the Gulf War of 1991 (much of the cost of which was borne by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates).
Whereas most scholars argue that the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, some historians propose that a bipolar world had already been turning into a multipolar world during the 1970s. In that decade, the Vietnam War ended, the Sino-Soviet divide deepened, the United States engaged the People’s Republic of China and reached detente with the Soviet Union, and the United States started to trade with Asia more than with Europe. This is the global context in the 1970s for what some scholars refer to as the oil wars.
THE OIL WARS AND THE MIDDLE EAST
The abdication of the shah of Iran, the leading hawk among the oil-rich nations, in 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 upset U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf. Relations were further strained when Tehran abducted Americans from the U.S. Embassy and held them hostage, thus outraging the U.S. public, who were already harboring pent-up frustrations over Vietnam, the fuel shortages, and higher prices at the gas pump. The inception of the oil wars did not mean that the Cold War completely disappeared. In fact they overlapped when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, for it was feared that they might threaten the Persian Gulf and its petroleum production and reserves. These new contexts also fanned the flames of other social, economic, cultural, political, and religious fires in the region.
