Is There a Middle East?
Page 8
In addition, since the 1970s, the oil-rich states have become increasingly important international players. The Gulf states came to have a pronounced effect on the world disproportionate to the diminutive size of their population. The “Middle East” became more and more strongly identified with petroleum and the oil wealth of the Gulf. Scholars have written extensively about the founding of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the late 1960s, as well as its Arab spin-off, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), and the Arab oil boycott that started in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. What merits more historical emphasis is the fourfold increase in oil prices that occurred at that time and another threefold increase in oil prices after the crisis the United States faced in Iran. The sevenfold increase in oil prices during the 1970s resulted in the largest and fastest transfer of wealth that had ever been recorded in history. The oil-producing countries now had vast amounts of money to spend. Oil revenues obviously went much farther in the sparsely populated Arabian Peninsula than they did in the more populated countries of Iraq and Iran, which helps explain why the shah was an enthusiastic backer of increased oil prices. The newly oil-rich expended their wealth both wisely and foolishly on the sacred and the profane. They spent huge sums on religious publications as well as on the construction of mosques, schools, and clinics (and ski slopes!) at home and around the world. Of course, there was still plenty left to throw away on casino tables in Las Vegas, London, and Cairo or to spend on the purchase of expensive weaponry.30
The oil-rich Gulf became an economic magnet for legitimate and illegitimate business. Entrepreneurs, salesmen, and hucksters from across the globe rushed to provide oil-rich customers with whatever they wanted, including arms. Similarly, many skilled and unskilled workers from the Middle East and beyond eagerly catered to the needs of the oil-rich regimes. By the time the price of oil declined in the early 1980s, the oil-rich Gulf had become economically as well as strategically vital to the United States for reasons only indirectly connected to oil. The manufacturers and suppliers of arms profited from the long Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s and the Gulf War in the early 1990s, just as U.S. arms dealers and others have profited from the Arab-Israeli conflicts since the 1960s.31
By the 1990s, the U.S. government and the media often added Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as the five “stans” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) of the former Soviet Union into an even larger (Greater) Middle East, which is depicted on the larger areas represented on the covers of Middle East Abstracts. The volumes have also grown in number and size. In the late 1970s, all Middle East Abstracts were published in a single large annual volume; by the early 1990s, there were two volumes annually, not counting the years with special volumes on oil, women, minorities, and refugees; by the 2000s, there were four annual volumes, not counting all those on terrorism. The growth in interest in the region and the expansion of its conceptual dimensions also have been reflected in the range of material covered in newspaper editorials since the 1970s and in the newspapers collected by Facts on File.
The establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts that have persisted since that time have also been reported and discussed in the context of the Middle East. The importation of arms into the Middle East heated up the Suez Crisis of 1956, which arose from Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and led Britain, France, and Israel to occupy parts of the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt until Washington ordered them to withdraw. The Cold War intensified during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. In 1973, President Richard Nixon put all U.S. armed forces on the highest strategic alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which has received too little historical investigation.32
Since the early 1970s, every U.S. president since Richard Nixon has recognized the Middle East to be strategically the most contested region of the world. Jimmy Carter’s administration was so overwhelmed by the Iranian hostage crisis that his wife ended her White House memoirs by summarizing her husband’s electoral defeat in 1980 in one four-letter word: “Iran.” The Reagan administration, playing up the Cold War and playing down the oil wars, trained fighters from Pakistan to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and kept up a double game during the eight-year-long Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s. George H. W. Bush’s administration concentrated over half a million troops in the Gulf War early in 1991 in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Most U.S. and Allied troops were withdrawn in 1991, but the remaining presence of so much U.S. power at sea, on land, and in the air provoked negative reactions in the Gulf, particularly among those Saudis who take the protection of Mecca and Medina seriously. Unlike the Americans, the British tried to keep their power in the Gulf as invisible as possible.33
The gap between the specialists and the generalists, already wide in the Cold War, has widened further during the period of the oil wars. Little of what specialists have learned about different parts of the Middle East has had much influence on the generalists, who view the region as a battleground over oil, against Muslim militants and Islamo-fascists. The changing technology in the media since World War II has also played a part. News coverage changed from government-inspired radio reports and movie newsreels in the late 1940s to fifteen- or thirty-minute network broadcasts on television during the 1950s. The independence of the U.S. media peaked during the conflicts over Civil Rights and Vietnam. In the 1970s, the sixty-minute television specials of hard news turned into the softer news magazine, with talk radio and twenty-four-hour broadcasting becoming forces of their own. Another great change occurred in the early 1990s, when most Americans followed the Gulf War through cable television. Since the 1990s, the emergence of the Internet has allowed images of Middle Eastern oil and conflict to be projected globally. Unedited blogs on the Web provide even cruder stereotypes of Arabs, Iranians, and other Muslims of the Middle East than Hollywood did in the 1970s.
There is growing skepticism about claims that 9/11 changed the world, that there is a global war against terrorism, and that fighting terrorists abroad keeps them out of the United States and Britain. Such statements, so often repeated by President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has ignored the resentments and rage that have developed over the British government’s conversion of the Gulf into a British lake before the 1970s and the United States’ domination not only of the waterways but also of the airways and the broadcast waves of the Gulf since the 1970s. Not surprisingly, this shared history has led some locals to be unsure about the differences between the British and the Americans. They speak the same language after all. It is perhaps equivalent to the fact that very few Americans make distinctions between Arabs of the various states. In that sense, the “sins” of the British “fathers” have been passed on to the American “sons.” Rage against the Englishman over so many decades has stirred much pride, and it cannot be dismissed.
As discussed above, the British did not use the term “Middle East” much until World War II, when they coordinated their war plans over a vast Afro-Asian landmass in order to fight the Axis powers. During World War II, Washington received most of its intelligence on the Middle East from London. With help from the United States, the British held on to most of the Middle East during World War II, but by the end of the war the British were “bankrupt,” to use Churchill’s word. In early 1947, the British announced they would pull all their forces from Greece in a few weeks, withdraw from India in a few months, and turn the Palestine Mandate over to the United Nations. Early in the Cold War, the British offered some advice and intelligence about the Middle East to the Americans, which helped put the shah back on the throne in the 1953. The British continued to influence Egypt until the mid-1950s, and they dominated Iraq until the late 1950s. All this happened before the British withdrew from all their bases east of Suez at the end of the 1960s. U.S. intelligence has not matched the human intelligence of the British about the Middle East, although there has been no shortage of funding and g
immickry. In the Middle East the British were quite able to set up and change regimes at their own whim during World War I and World War II. The Americans have not had the same success as the British. What worked for the British earlier in the twentieth century has not worked for the Americans in recent decades. Some scholars attribute this to the United States’ lack of the imperial will, tradition, and personnel that the British Empire could draw upon earlier in the twentieth century. Others fault the Americans for knowing even less about the Middle East than the British, often filling the ignorant void with ideology.
As the United States filled the power vacuum left by the final withdrawal of the British from the southern, predominantly Arab parts of the Middle East, U.S. policy makers tried to avoid another Vietnam by relying on the cooperation of Iran, Israel, and Egypt, all of whom depended on arms and/or subsidies from the United States. Saudi Arabia also bankrolled some of the more controversial and costly U.S. policies. The Americans, like the British, supported friendly regimes mostly by training Middle Eastern military forces and supplying them with weapons. With the increased oil wealth in the Gulf region, the United States first sold expensive weapon systems to the shah of Iran and then to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
U.S. ties to Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich states of the Gulf, along with U.S. leverage over Israel and Egypt, seemed to succeed through the Gulf War of 1991. However, the United States found no satisfactory solution for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that was acceptable to the Israelis and Saudis, much less to the Iraqis. One reason for the lack of U.S. effectiveness in the Middle East since the 1990s may stem from the fact that states of the region have grown more independent and less malleable than the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire early in the twentieth century. Whereas the British once dominated the external relations of countries of the Middle East, the oil-rich states of the Middle East now have their own resources and agendas throughout the entire world apart from the United States. Their strategic and economic autonomy has been profoundly affected not only by their enormous wealth but also by the revolutionary changes in communications in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Television brought the horrible events of 9/11 and the Iraq War into the homes and lives of Americans and the rest of the world. Whereas most of the world’s viewers can tune out reports about wars in the Middle East, the people in the region do not. As a consequence of the new media access, it is quite reasonable that people in the region are suspicious of U.S. statements about the Middle East. To borrow one of the phrases of President Richard Nixon, peoples in the Middle East have been paying less attention to what the U.S. government says than to what the U.S. government does.
CONCLUSION
Despite the contrasts between the Middle East during the first decades of the twentieth century, when British influence was greatest, and in the last half of the century, when the U.S. power has grown, there are continuities and similarities in British and U.S. uses of the term “Middle East.” The role of government policy makers in labeling the Middle East and intervening in the region has been no less important in Washington than it has been in London. In selling government policies to the public in Britain and the United States, the media has remained pivotal. The role of generalists, who neither know nor care much about the vast and varied parts of the Middle East, is no less great in the United States today than it has been for Great Britain. How often do U.S. and British specialists, much less politicians or commentators, admit that the Middle East is beyond the competence of any one person? Both the British and Americans should realize that there are great risks to conflating such vast areas, so diverse in geography, ethnography, and history, into one “Middle East.”
Specialists on the Middle East are usually aware that they only have limited knowledge about specific peoples, parts, and periods of the Middle East. The scholars and writers with the most knowledge about the region have had to learn the language(s), conduct primary and field research there, and focus their careers on only one part of a vast and complex region. Arab specialists, for example, may be able to read modern literary Arabic in newspapers, but only a few know local Arabic dialects well enough to understand what is taking place among a small number of the more than 200 million Arabic speakers in Africa and Asia. Scholars tend to think in local rather than regional terms and focus on their discipline; policy makers, however, are easy prey to those who claim to know the entire region. Specialists and academics should be critical of the facile generalizations about the Middle East that continue to be made in politics and the media.
The pundits and politicians who theorize about geopolitics and terrorism have been all too willing to generalize about the Middle East as well as Islam. How much longer will such views be projected upon the Middle East and how much longer will they be accepted by governments and the general public? Given the long history of the British and U.S. use and misuse of the term “Middle East” during the twentieth century by policy makers, generalists, and specialists, the prospects for the twenty-first century do not seem encouraging.
3
OF MAPS AND REGIONS
Where Is the Geographer’s Middle East?
Michael E. Bonine
OVER THREE DECADES AGO, in 1976,I wrote an article titled “Where Is the Geography of the Middle East?” which was published in The Professional Geographer.1 In that piece, I examined how the study and teaching of the Middle East were rather sparse in American departments of geography, particularly in comparison with the study and teaching of other world regions. That situation, unfortunately, has not necessarily changed in the field of geography in the United States, despite the obvious growing importance of the Middle East for the U.S. government as well as the average American. In this chapter, I focus on what constitutes “the Middle East” for geographers and, hence, ask the question: Where is the geographer’s Middle East? The answer requires an assessment of how regions have been conceptualized by geographers and how the Middle East fits into those frameworks. The field of regional geography has been a major focus of American geography since the beginning of the twentieth century, although the decline and even demise of this focus—as a specific field of study in geography—has been the case for several decades now. I examine the use of the term “Middle East” (and other terms used for this region as a whole and in part), particularly its use in world regional geography textbooks, as well as textbooks that focus specifically on the geography of the Middle East. I also provide some insights into the use of this term in maps and atlases—those essential tools of the geographer (although geographers certainly are not the sole proprietors, or producers, of such works).
REGIONS AND REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY
Is the Middle East a region? Even though there are various definitions and different shapes and sizes of the Middle East, what assumptions and what criteria are used to define this region? But first, what is a region? One of the more recent (and popular) world regional geographies, World Regions in Global Context by Sallie Marston, Paul Knox, and Diana Liverman, notes that “regional geography is about understanding the variety and distinctive-ness of places and regions, without losing sight of the interdependence among them. Geographers learn about the world by finding out where things are and why they are there and by analyzing the spatial patterns and distributions that underpin regional differentiation and regional change.”2 They go on to say:
Regional geography, which combines elements of both physical and human geography, is concerned with the way that unique combinations of environmental and human factors produce territories with distinctive landscapes and human factors produce territories with distinctive landscapes and cultural attributes.... What is distinctive about the study of regional geography is not so much the phenomena that are studied as the way they are approached. The contribution of regional geography is to reveal how natural, social, economic, political, and cultural phenomena come together to produce distinctive geographic settings.3
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nbsp; Regions can vary in sizes and scales, but generally they range from an area within a country that has a particular landscape and/or human characteristics, which may be identified by location and/or name (e.g., northern Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan; southwestern Iran, Khuzistan), to larger areas, which are usually today conceived of as various groups of nation-states (e.g., Maghreb, North Africa, Southwest Asia, Arabian Peninsula). The largest regions are what geographers (and others) refer to as world cultural regions, and it is the use of these conceptual units that is relevant to our discussion of our region: the Middle East. For instance, in Marston, Knox, and Liverman’s textbook, mentioned above, there are ten separate world regional chapters. In the order they occur in the book, they are: (1) Europe; (2) the Russian Federation, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus; (3) Middle East and North Africa; (4) Sub-Saharan Africa; (5) North America; (6) Latin America and the Caribbean; (7) East Asia; (8) Southeast Asia; (9) South Asia; and (10) Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific (Figure 3.1).4
What is apparent from this division of the world—these world cultural regions—is that they are mainly defined by continents or parts of continents. Our region is named as part of a continent (North Africa), but also it is one of the few non-continental names: the Middle East. Yet, as I show when I examine a number of other textbooks on regions (and our region), the designation “Southwest Asia” is also a very common name—and, so, a continent sometimes becomes predominant in naming (part of) our region. These larger cultural regions almost always comprise a number of specific political nation-states and are defined by the borders of those states. However, national boundaries usually incorporate a variety of diverse peoples and landscapes, and “seldom is an independent political territory coterminous with the territory of a self-consciously united people.”5 Nevertheless, the building blocks of our region (and the continents it spans) are nation-states, and there is an assumption that cultural identities within them are similar and coincide with political entities. “[M]ost of our encyclopedias, textbooks, atlases, and almanacs portray states as holistic entities, unified and distinct.”6