The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  All fingers pointed to the Middle East, this time with justification. A few years earlier, in 1995, when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, many Americans had suspected a Middle East connection, only to discover that the attack had been the work of domestic terrorists. But this was no Oklahoma City. The September 11 events had all the hallmarks of earlier attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 (this one with very limited success) and on American targets abroad—in Somalia in 1993, in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and in Yemen in 2000—which had all been linked to a wealthy Saudi national named Osama bin Laden. Attacked so callously, the American public demanded retribution and revenge. Whoever the culprits were behind the attacks—whether bin Laden or the people who gave him shelter and refuge, or anyone else directly or indirectly involved—had to be brought to justice.

  With American patriotism at an all-time high, the new administration in Washington had to act quickly and decisively. President George W. Bush had come to office following a questionable election the previous November. The “accidental president,” for whom some 75 percent of the American electorate had either actively or passively not voted, could now ill afford to be seen as weak.58 Almost immediately, the president declared that the United States was engaged in a “war on terrorism.” Within a month, American military forces and equipment had been deployed in efforts to defeat the network of terror that had wreaked such havoc in September. The primary targets were bin Laden, his organization, called Al-Qaeda, and his hosts in Afghanistan, the Taliban. The war in Afghanistan, code-named Operation Enduring Freedom by the U.S. Central Command, was to start a new chapter in the political history of the Middle East.

  The shape of the world order to emerge in the aftermath of September 11, and more specifically the roles of the United States and the Middle East within that order, are still not fully clear, at least as of this writing. Nev-ertheless, some of the more noticeable trends that point to an emerging global order in relation to the Middle East are highlighted below. For now, it is important to ask why the attacks of September 11 occurred. In particular, why was the United States the target? To blame the attacks on Islamic fundamentalism is, at best, simplistic. The culprits were, of course, Islamic fundamentalists. In chapter 7 we examine why and how Islamic fundamentalism has spread in the Middle East over the past couple of decades. But why did the fundamentalist disciples of bin Laden choose to attack the United States?

  The answer is found in the exercise of American foreign policy in relation to the Middle East, both historically and especially after the Gulf War. By virtue of its position as a global superpower, and after the end of the Cold War the only superpower, the United States provoked the anger and resentment of many Middle Easterners by its policies and agendas throughout the world, especially in the strategically important Middle East. Following the Gulf War, American involvement in the Middle East became more pervasive than at almost any other time in the past, with the U.S. Navy maintaining a seemingly permanent presence in the Persian Gulf and American troops stationed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. This new “pax Americana” was sure to inflame the simmering anger of the economically frustrated, politically repressed Middle Easterners. They channeled this anger toward local rulers and their powerful patron, the United States. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the deepening penetration of the Middle East by the United States provoked increasing anti-Americanism. As the scholar Fouad Ajami has keenly observed, “From one end of the Arab world to the other, the drumbeats of anti-Americanism had been steady. But the drummers could have hardly known what was to come. The magnitude of the horror that befell the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, appeared for a moment to embarrass and silence the monsters. The American imperium in the Arab-Muslim world hatched a monster.”59

  America’s role in the Middle East after the Gulf War was an outgrowth of its pursuits in the region as far back as the late 1940s. American policy toward the Middle East since World War II has all too often been incoherent, reactive, and inconsistent. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern three primary objectives or guidelines that have generally informed U.S. policy toward the Middle East: maintaining the region’s territorial status quo in terms of the post-1948 boundaries; securing relatively easy access to the region’s vast oil resources; and containing the threat posed to U.S. interests by regional or global rivals, whether that threat came from the former Soviet Union during the Cold War or from Iran and Iraq afterward. The degree to which successive administrations in Washington have succeeded in defending U.S. interests in the Middle East has varied greatly from president to president or, in volatile Middle Eastern politics, from year to year. The Carter administration, for example, started off on a high note in terms of its Middle East policy, thanks to the Camp David Accords, but it ended badly with (and because of) the Iran hostage crisis. The one factor that has remained almost always consistent throughout each of the U.S. presidencies, however, has been the resentment that American policies have caused among many average Arab and Muslim Middle Easterners. These individuals by no means have been a majority of the population, but they have often been vocal and determined, and at times violently radical.

  To better understand the causal relationship between American foreign policy and the prevalence of anti-American sentiments in the Middle East, we should look more closely at the consequences of each American policy objective in the region. Let us begin with the goal of maintaining the Middle East’s territorial status quo. For American policy makers, this has basically meant unqualified support for Israel, whose international boundaries have been subject to the most recent changes. To be certain, some American presidents and policy makers have adopted a more balanced, less lopsided policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli question.60 Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and George H. Bush at one point or another in their presidencies tried to initiate policies that were sensitive to Palestinian and Arab aspirations. By and large, however, attention to the predicament of the Palestinians has paled in comparison to the amount and nature of the support that the United States has provided to Israel, which by some accounts hovers around $3 to $4 billion a year in assistance.61

  The “special relationship” between the United States and Israel arises from the “general familiarity with the Jews that exists in America.”62 More specifically, Jewish and non-Jewish Americans who support Israel have been quite successful in lobbying U.S. policy makers in the executive and legislative branches to ensure their sustained support for Israel. The power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is said to be unsurpassed by that of any other lobby group in Washington. According to a former U.S. congressman, “It is no overstatement to say that AIPAC has effectively gained control of virtually all of Capitol Hill’s actions on Middle East policy. Almost without exception, House and Senate members do its bidding, because most of them consider AIPAC to be the direct Capitol Hill representative that can make or break their chances at election time.”63

  The Palestinian cause may have been repeatedly exploited by Middle Eastern politicians for their own narrow political purposes, but it remains popular among the peoples of the Middle East at large. There is a widespread perception that the Palestinians have been wronged, that their rights and aspirations have been constantly trampled on by Israel, and that the United States directly contributes to the injustice meted out to them on a routine basis. With the spread to more of the Middle East of conventional and new media—the Internet and satellite television stations such as Al-Jazeera—more and more Middle Easterners see wrenching images of the conflict: Palestinian homes demolished, Israeli tanks and troops “mopping up” in the West Bank, Palestinians arrested en masse. According to recent public opinion polls, a consistently large percentage of Arabs believe that the United States and Israel have mutual interests in the region (from 2006 to 2009, on average 38 percent) or that Israel is a tool of U.S. foreign policy (25 percent).64

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sp; Worse yet, many Middle Easterners see the United States as directly responsible for the frustration of their own political aspirations. America’s other strategic objectives—checking the influence of adversaries and ensuring the open flow of oil to the West—have meant close support for and alliance with Middle Eastern leaders who have not always been terribly popular at home. The realpolitik calculations on which U.S. foreign and security policies have been based have seldom found congruence with the ideals and aspirations of the peoples of the Middle East. In fact, in the 2006 Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey, conducted in six countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), fully 72 percent of those surveyed saw the United States as the biggest threat to them, second only to Israel, seen by 85 percent as their biggest threat.65

  Ensuring the open flow of oil, for example, has meant supporting the corrupt and repressive royal family of Saudi Arabia and turning a blind eye to its blatant disregard for human rights. Up until the late 1970s, it also meant supporting the equally corrupt and repressive shah of Iran. Anwar Sadat, America’s “man of peace” in the Middle East, was hardly thought of in such terms in his own country. Most Egyptians feared and despised him.

  The patron-client relationships between the United States and pro-Western Middle Eastern leaders have cost the United States. When it works, patronage has its advantages. But when it fails, those who feel wronged by the client may turn on the patron. American political patronage in the Middle East has been additional fuel for anti-Americanism. In 2008, for example, 83 percent of those polled in the Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey expressed unfavorable attitudes toward the United States, though that percentage was lowered to 77 percent in 2009 with the coming to office of President Barack Obama.66

  U.S. foreign policy objectives toward the Middle East did not change in the aftermath of the Gulf War. In fact, they remained very much the same. What did change was the way the United States carried them out. With intraregional relations characterized by a “balance of weakness,” with the Soviet Union dead, and with the unpredictable Saddam Hussein still in power, U.S. involvement in the Middle East became far more direct and substantively deeper. In 1990, the United States secured access to naval and air bases in several of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, acquired the right to pre-position war matériel there, started frequent combined military exercises with GCC members, and was guaranteed access to Persian Gulf oil at “acceptable” prices.67 Also, as part of the “dual containment” policy, the United States spearheaded the imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq under the auspices of the United Nations. The sanctions did little to weaken Saddam’s hold on power but made life for ordinary Iraqis even harsher. Again, pictures of suffering Iraqis and the American armada “patrolling” the waters of the Persian Gulf were beamed into Middle Eastern living rooms. The expansive pax Americana only added to the already deepening feelings of anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden was the most radical and monstrous face of a pervasive, far less violent wave of resentment against the United States in the Middle East.

  Bin Laden’s journey to violent fundamentalism started back in 1980, when, at twenty-three, he joined the Mujahedeen Afghan guerrillas who were fighting against occupying Soviet troops. Soon after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, many young Arabs volunteered to join the Afghan Mujahedeen in their struggle against the “godless communists.” Initially, President Sadat encouraged Egyptian militants to go join the fight in Afghanistan, hoping to appear as a champion of Islam and at the same time get rid of potential troublemakers at home.68 In the mid-1980s, the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, also started to actively encourage Islamic militants from throughout the region to join the Afghan fighters in their increasingly bloody campaign against the Soviet occupation. By the time the Soviets withdrew in 1989, an estimated one hundred thousand militant Muslims from forty-three countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia, and the Far East had somehow been involved in the Afghan fight against Soviet forces.69

  Bin Laden was one of the so-called Afghan Arabs. Born to wealthy parents in Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s he settled in the Pakistani city of Peshawar near the Afghan border, from which, with CIA blessing, he oversaw the financing and construction of roads and tunnel complexes inside Afghanistan used for storage and as bases for military operations. He also established a shadowy group called Al-Qaeda (the Base). Initially, Al-Qaeda served as a service center and clearinghouse for many of the Arab fighters who found their way from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Soon, however, the organization became a military and guerrilla training camp and a base of support for bin Laden.

  Following the Gulf War, bin Laden was incensed by the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil, offering the royal family to guard the kingdom with his own militia instead. His proposal was rejected, and, fearing his increasing militancy, the Saudi government forced him to leave the country in 1992 and stripped him of his citizenship in 1994.70 Bin Laden lived in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, when, after pressure from the Khartoum government, he left for Afghanistan. There he allied himself with one of the more fanatical factions of the Mujahedeen, called the Taliban. This happened to coincide with the Taliban’s steady advances in the Afghan civil war, which had erupted among the various Mujahedeen factions shortly after the Soviet departure. Hence was fostered the Al-Qaeda alliance with the Taliban. Meanwhile, having identified the United States as the primary enemy of the Muslim people everywhere, bin Laden embarked on his deadly terrorist campaign against American interests and targets around the world: the suicide bombing of the Khobar military tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998; the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000; and the September 11 attacks in 2001.

  The American response to the attacks of September 11 gave shape and direction to an emerging “Bush Doctrine.” Since President Bush had been in office for only eight months before the attacks, before September 2001 the main principles of the Bush Doctrine had been only loosely articulated: unabashed American unilateralism in global affairs; reliance on tactical nuclear weapons; and the creation of a national missile defense system.71 Following the attacks, U.S. national security strategy became much sharper and more focused on the interrelated concepts of “prevention” and “preemption.”72 Accordingly, the U.S. administration gave the international community a simple choice: “In the war on terrorism, you’re either with us or against us.” The following January, delivering his annual State of the Union address, President Bush outlined his vision in greater detail: “Many nations are acting forcefully [to combat terrorism]. . . . But some governments are timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: if they do not act, America will.” Branding Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil” that threatened American interests around the world, the president issued a clear warning: “All nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security.”73

  If Osama bin Laden thought that by attacking the United States he would force the Americans to withdraw their bases from Saudi Arabia, he was mistaken. In fact, the exact opposite took place. The pax Americana of the post–Gulf War era was geographically expanded and militarily deepened. The American-led war in Afghanistan did not take long to topple the Taliban regime in Kabul and to send Al-Qaeda running for cover in caves and mountains. But the American military presence has now expanded beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan and across the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. A 2008 report by the U.S. Defense Department puts the total number of overseas U.S. military facilities at 761, making it, according to the report, “one of the world’s largest ‘landlords’ with a physical plant consisting of more than 545,700 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,400 sites, on approximately 30 million acres.”74

  Of more immediate consequence for the Middle East has been the U.S. attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime and its occupation of Iraq beg
inning in March 2003. The war in Afghanistan, President Bush repeatedly told the American public, was only “the first phase” of the much larger “war on terrorism.” Iraq, the Americans were told, was next. The U.S. drive against Saddam Hussein was motivated by both ideology and practical considerations. Ideologically, the removal of Saddam was in keeping with the Bush Doctrine’s division of the globe into the binary worlds of good and evil. Saddam, President Bush repeatedly said, was an “evildoer.” From a more pragmatic standpoint, the policy of dual containment was taking too long to show tangible results. Meanwhile, Iraq’s alleged possession and continued production of chemical weapons were seen as a serious threat to U.S. strategic interests and to Israel. Closer to home, with American patriotism at an all-time high after September 11, President Bush’s popularity had reached levels unprecedented in American presidential history—as high as 84 percent.75 Only one other president had come close to reaching such a milestone before, the older President Bush, at the height of another patriotic time, the 1990–91 Gulf War. But his son did not forget that the older Bush had gone on to lose the 1992 election.

  Figure 17. Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled in Baghdad. Corbis.

  THE U.S. INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ

  The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 appears to have been caused by three primary, interrelated factors. The first was President George W. Bush’s strategic vision of America’s global role. Equally significant was the geostrategic importance of Iraq, in terms of both its location and its oil resources. Last, the dynamics at work in domestic American politics were highly influential in shaping U.S. foreign policy objectives before, during, and after the war.

  The attacks of September 11 gave the “accidental presidency” of George W. Bush the opportunity to articulate a grand vision of America’s role in the world at large and in the Middle East specifically. A presidency that was at first largely oblivious to international developments now suddenly began defining itself by its defense of the United States against the real threat of terrorism from the Middle East. It is unclear whether this “grand vision” had already been articulated before 9/11 or whether it came about somewhat haphazardly in response to emerging threats and opportunities in the aftermath of the attacks. There is credible evidence that suggests the plans for attacking Iraq had been made sometime before 9/11.76 But whatever its genesis, the grand vision was one of unabashed unilateralism and preemption. “You’re either with us,” President Bush said again and again, “or you’re against us.” When the United Nations and others expressed doubts about the wisdom of American action, they were brushed aside and their relevance was questioned. The president’s State of the Union speech before Congress in January 2003 is revealing: “All free nations have a stake in preventing sudden and catastrophic attacks. And we’re asking them to join us, and many are doing so. Yet the course of this nation does not depend on the decision of others. Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people.”77