Rashid Khalidi: Sowing Crisis

Rashid Khalidi: Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (2009, Beacon Press)

(pp. 12-13):

This was the meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi king 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn Sa'ud (known variously as 'Abd al-'Aziz and Ibn Sa'ud) in Egypt on February 14, 1945. Roosevelt, infirm and only two months from death, was on his way home from the Yalta conference. Why did the weary president of what had just become the most powerful country on earth spend the better part of a day meeting with this apparently minor Middle Eastern potentate? The answer is that this encounter was arranged because of Saudi Arabia's importance in the eyes of the State Department, the military, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, established by Maj. Gen. Bill Donovan -- who were already planning for the postwar era. [ . . . ]

Saudi Arabia was only one link in this vast wartime chain, which stretched right around the globe, but the kingdom had one crucial characteristic, besides its strategic position and its possession of vast reservoirs of oil and gas beneath its soil: it was one of only two fully independent states in this crucial Middle Eastern region that had never been occupied by the troops of European colonial powers, and it had no foreign bases on its soil. Moreover, Ibn Sa'ud had twelve years earlier signed an exclusive agreement for the exploration and exploitation of its oil reserves with an American consortium of companies that became the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO). This consortium had thereby managed to secure the first major exclusive American oil concession in the Middle East, an area that had heretofore been virtually an exclusive British preserve.

(p. 20):

Saudi Arabia's employment of Islam as an ideological tool thus proved useful to the United States and its allies among the conservative forces in the Arab and Islamic worlds, which at this time, in the mid-1960s, seemed largely on the defensive in the face of the Soviet-backed "progressive" Arab regimes. Indeed, Islam eventually became an important part of the American ideological arsenal in the Cold War, used by U.S. intelligence services not only in the Arab countries but also in Pakistan and South Asia, in Southeast Asia, in Soviet Central Asia, and in other parts of the Islamic world. It may seem hard to believe today, given the current demonization of radical, militant, political Islam in American public discourse, but for decades the United States was in fact a major patron, indeed in some respect the major patron, of earlier incarnations of just these extreme trends, for reasons that had everything to do with the perceived need to use any and all means to wage the Cold War.

(p. 21):

While the Soviet Union generally aligned itself with authoritarian nationalist regimes, American policy backed absolute monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Arab Gulf states (with the exception of Kuwait), and other nondemocratic, authoritarian regimes in Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan, and elsewhere from the late 1940s until the 1970s as part of this same Cold War strategy. In doing so, the United States laid little or no stress on the promotion of democracy, constitutionalism, or human rights in the Middle East. Indeed, the United States had previously helped to subvert Middle Eastern democracies by actions such as supporting the Husni Zaim group against the constitutionally elected president Shukri al-Quwatli in Syria in 1949, organizing with Britain the overthrow of Iran's democratically chosen prime minister Mohamnmad Mosaddeq in 1953 and imposing an autocratic regime under Mohammad Reza Shah, and providing Lebanese president Camille Chamoun with the funds to bribe his way to achieving a parliamentary majority in the 1957 elections.

(pp. 27-28):

Policymakers in the Johnson and Nixon administrations were obsessed by a scenario in which they saw the USSR and China as pinning the United States down in Southeast Asia at little cost to themselves, via what they myopically perceived as their Vietnamese proxies. They looked to Israel to even the score against the Soviet Union's proxies, Egypt and Syria, at little direct cost to the United States. The Soviets in turn could not allow themselves to be left behind. They upped the ante further after the 1967 war by writing off most of Egypt and Syria's debts for military equipment destroyed or captured by Israel during the war, and by delivering to them massive amounts of new arms, among them advanced new weapons systems, notably surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), including SAM-2, SAM-3, and the new SAM-6. [ . . . ]

Finally, in the 1973 war, Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger (originally Nixon's national security advisor but by 1973 secretary of state) ordered an airlift of massive quantities of military equipment to Israel when its stocks were in danger of running out. This escalatory sequence from 1967 until 1973 was driven, incidentally, as much by the clients on both sides as by the competition between their superpower patrons, as Israel refused to negotiate seriously with Egypt in spite of American remonstrance, and the Egyptians insisted on a military option in spite of the deep reluctance of the Soviet military.

(pp. 58-59):

Although many troops were withdrawn as the size of the U.S. armed forces shrank after the war's end, numerous new American military bases spanning the globe, which were originally established to prosecute World War II, were kept in place, and base rights were requested in a host of new areas. The shrinkage of the size of the U.S. military at war's end, especially the army, was not paralleled by the removal of U.S. forces based in far-flung places like South America, Morocco, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Korea, and China, not to speak of Western Europe and the territories of the defeated enemy powers that remained under occupation. And the navy and the air force, although reduced from inflated World War II levels, retained much of their strength.

Suddenly, starting with World War II, the United States began to behave in every way like a traditional great power on the world stage, and not just in the Western Hemisphere and in the Pacific. It had the wherewithal to do so. At war's end American production constituted half of world GDP. The United States had "almost doubled its GNP during the conflict: by 1945, it accounted for around half of the world's manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and almost all of its financial reserves." By contrast, all of the traditional Western European powers and Japan, as well as much of the rest of the world, were economically prostrate, the military establishments of most had been smashed, and vast swaths of the Soviet Union had been devastated by the war. Given these facts, and given the vast size, reach, and potency of the American armed forces, particularly those elements most suited to power projection, the navy and the air force, not so speak of America's sole possession of atomic weapons, the attraction of wielding such immense power to those responsible for the task in Washington must have been great. Moreover, Roosevelt and other American policymakers took away from the slide into a second world war the determination to use American power to prevent the recurrence of another such catastrophe. The new activism was clothed in a rhetoric very much suited to a great power, suggesting that after fighting and winning two world wars, the United States had global "responsibilities" it could not shirk. And like every traditional great power with global capacities for nearly two centuries, the United States began to take an intensive interest in the strategic Middle Eastern region. That interest was greatly accentuated by the presence there of what were known to be vast unexploited deposits of oil, the heightened strategic importance of which had just been emphasized by wartime events.

(pp. 65-66):

In helping further to explain this major shift, some of the new evidence from the archives is quite revealing, particularly a lengthy dispatch from Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, to his superiors in Moscow in September 1946. The document has been compared to George Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" sent from Moscow several months earlier. Kennan's length dispatch deeply influenced thinking in Washington about the implacably hostile nature of Soviet behavior, and of the need to contain the Soviet Union. An anonymous version published in Foreign Affairs a year and a half afterward under the title "The Sources of Soviet Conflict," shaped and crystallized American elite perceptions of Soviet policy. Given the closed nature of the Soviet system, and the relative paucity of documentation, it is impossible to say with any assurance whether Novikov's cable had this kind of influence in the Kremlin. However, at least one historian has judged that a major shift in the Soviet approach toward the United States "was heralded by a confidential report from the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Novikov, on U.S. foreign policy trends."

In his cable of September 1946, Novikov is explicit in seeing the United States as "striving for world supremacy," as asserting that it had "the right to lead the world," as having "plans for world dominance," and as preparing "the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war." Novikov could not have been blunter: the United States was putting intense pressure on the Soviet Union in service of a plan for global hegemony. In his analysis Novikov stressed the significance of the expansion of the U.S. military and of its new global role. He noted the thirteen-fold expansion of the proposed military budget for fiscal year 1948-47 by contrast with that of 1938, the creation for the first time in American history of a peacetime army based on a draft, the postwar plans for the establishment of nearly five hundred new U.S. naval and air bases inside the United States and worldwide, and the maintenance of a fleet that was the largest in the world and far larger than that of Britain. He noted that all of this "indicates the offensive nature of the strategic concepts of the commands of the U.S. army and navy," and concluded that "a decisive role in the realization of plans for world dominance by the United States is played by its armed forces."

(p. 87):

There was relatively limited friction over the Middle East at the United Nations between the United States and the USSR at the very outset of the Cold War, except for early tensions concerning the northern tier of Turkey and Iran. At this early stage both superpowers often seemed more concerned (for different reasons) with eliminating the residual -- albeit still considerable -- British imperial presence in the region than with dealing with each other. It is often forgotten that the United States and the USSR were on the same side as far as the conflict over Palestine was concerned in 1947-49: they both opposed Britain and supported the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel. [ . . . ] Soviet military support, via arms supplied through Czechoslovakia, was essential to Israel's resounding ultimate victory during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49. The position of the superpowers was similar in 1956, when, in spite of the high tension between them over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both the United States and the USSR opposed the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt. Indeed, as we have seen, it was not until after the 1967 war that the superpowers became fully and rigidly aligned on opposite sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

(pp. 132-134):

This irresponsibility in the pursuit of the narrowest form of unilateral interest complicated and deepened the conflict and contributed directly and massively to producing two of the most destructive of the Arab-Israeli wars: the nearly three-year-long War of Attrition ending in 1970, and the October 1973 war. One example during this period of the United States and the USSR placing Cold War advantage in the Middle East over the promotion of peace between Arabs and Israelis has already been described: the preference of Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971, for advantage vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, over the arrangements that were proposed by Sadat and were futilely brokered by UN mediator Gunnar Jarring and U.S. Secretary of State Rogers for a separate peaceful settlement between Egypt and Israel.

The period after the 1973 war witnessed perhaps the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, in the form of Henry Kissinger's vaunted Middle East shuttle diplomacy from the end of the October 1973 war until 1976. It is important to recognize that Kissinger had at least one important accomplishment on these exhausting trips: he defused the dangerous battlefield situation in the immediate wake of the 1973 war that had produced the October 1973 nuclear alert, and that threatened to lead to more war and to more superpower confrontations. He succeeded in doing this by negotiating first a disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel, then one to halt continued fighting between Syria and Israel, both in 1974, and then another Egyptian-Israeli Sinai disengagement agreement in 1975. However, at the same time, and perhaps even more important to Washington, his actions had the effect of delivering Egypt fully into the American camp and removing it definitively from the Soviet one. This was clearly the primary objective of Kissinger and the two presidents he served, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. However, there was a cost to this achievement, which came at the expense of the possibility, however slim, of an overall comprehensive peace in the region: at no stage did Kissinger engage in multilateral talks or any other form of negotiations involving all the Arab parties and the Soviets. Nor did Kissinger try to go any further with unilateral American efforts to make progress toward a final peace between Syria and Israel, or one between Jordan and Israel. He did not even contemplate dealing with the Palestinians. In all of these cases, unlike that of Egypt, no advantages for the United States at the expense of the Soviets could be expected. What the three disengagement agreements did, beyond the paramount achievement of winning over to American influence the largest Arab state, Egypt, was to calm the fighting and ease tension on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts with Israel: both have stayed almost entirely quiet in consequence for the subsequent quarter century. They did this without Kissinger even treating, let alone resolving, the core issues of the conflict, starting with the central issue of Palestine.

It has indeed been argued, with some reason, at the time and since then, that notwithstanding any benefits they may have produced, this series of three American-brokered bilateral disengagement agreements (followed by the separate bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty negotiated in 1978-79 under the aegis of Jimmy Carter) had the effect of intensifying the conflict on other Arab-Israeli fronts, and contributing measurably to the consequent devastation of Lebanon. While they quieted the Israeli-Syrian front,a nd brought about a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace, these steps clearly did not end the overall Arab-Israeli conflict or bring real peace to that region of the Middle East.

(pp. 142-144):

For by 1976 Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad had become concerned about the growing strength of the PLO-LNM alliance and its increasing independence of Syria. Most seriously, he feared the possibility that should the Palestinians and their Lebanese allies defeat the right-wing Lebanese parties (whose militias were organized as the Lebanese Forces [LF]), this might provide Israeli intervention in Lebanon, which Israeli leaders repeatedly threatened. Such an outcome was intolerable to Syria, which would then have had to confront Israeli forces both to its south and its west. thus Assad turned slowly against his former allies in the PLO-LNM alliance. He first ordered into action against this alliance Palestinian and Lebanese forces obedient to Syria. When that failed to stop the advance of Palestinian and leftist forces against those of the LF in the mountains east of Beirut, in June 1976 Assad finally ordered the intervention of Syrian troops to tip the balance against them. An important element in this major transformation of the Syrian position was the brokering of Syrian intervention in Lebanon by the United States, which perceived a golden opportunity to turn one Soviet client against another and thereby weaken the Arab front aligned with the Soviet Union and against the developing American-Israeli-Egyptian axis. Kissinger played a delicate game here, whereby he assuaged Israeli concerns about Syrian intervention in Lebanon and at the same time reassured the Syrians that there would be no negative Israeli or American reaction if Syrian forces intervened against the PLO and the Lebanese left and stayed north of an east-west line in Lebanon that came to be known as the Red Line.

American policymakers killed a number of birds with this stone. First, they earned a certain measure of Syrian gratitude, in spite of Damascus's pique at the absence of American efforts to broker another disengagement deal with the Israelis along the lines of the second Sinai disengagement agreement of April 1975. Second, they broke up a coalescing bloc of Syria, the PLO, the LNM, and a number of Arab states like Iraq and Libya that were opposed to what were called "separate agreements" with Israel, meaning American-brokered deals that gained unilateral advantage for the United States while ignoring other fronts. Third, they benefited from helping to turn Syria against the PLO, seen as the most irreducible Arab opponent of American influence and of Israel. Finally, and in some ways most important to Washington, they deeply discomfited the USSR, which saw two of its prime remaining regional allies at each other's throat, and which was thereby put into a thoroughly uncomfortable position.

(pp. 147-148):

Moreover, having driven out the PLO [from Lebanon in 1982], which had carried out military operations against Israel relatively ineffectually from South Lebanon, Israel soon found itself facing sustained Lebanese armed resistance to its occupation of the Lebanese South. This proved far more tenacious than that of the Palestinians to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For unlike the Palestinians, the Lebanese groups resisting the Israeli occupation had the advantage of open borders with friendly allies, mainly Syria and Iran, which were able to supply copious supplies of weapons and other forms of support. After eighteen years of a bloody and futile rearguard action, Israel was ultimately obliged to withdraw its occupation forces unconditionally from Lebanon in 2000, leaving the south of the country in the hands of a far more formidable military foe than the PLO had ever been. This was Hizballah, an entirely new enemy dedicated to militant armed resistance, an enemy that Israel itself had called into being by its occupation.

(pp. 151-152):

Once the Ba'th Party took firm control in Baghdad in July 1968, dominating the country for the next thirty-five years with a fist of iron, Iraq's relations with Washington tended to be a function of the competition between the superpowers, and of the balance of power between Iraq and its traditional regional rival, Iran. Following the 1958 revolution, Iraq was generally aligned with Moscow against Iran, which as we have seen was closely linked to Washington until the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Under Ba'th rule from 1968 onward, this pattern generally continued. In the on again, off again confrontations between Iran and Iraq, therefore, there eventually developed the same kind of Cold War polarization that characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict from the 1960s onward, with Iran firmly aligned with the United States, and Iraq with the Soviets.

In supporting their clients against one another, both superpowers used all available means, as they did elsewhere. Thus, in the mid-1970s, the shah of Iran cynically exploited and covertly supported a rebellion against the Baghdad government by the Iraqi Kurds as a means of exerting pressure on his Iraqi rivals. As we saw in chapter 1, the United States supported this approach with its own covert assets (as did Israel), and then looked on coldly as the shah dropped the Kurds once he had achieved his aims with the 1975 Algiers agreement. Needless to say, this allowed the Ba'thist regime to extract its brutal revenge completely unhindered against Iraqi Kurdish civilians, whose leaders had mistakenly come to rely on their Iranian, American, and Israeli patrons.

(p. 153):

In a similarly callous fashion, the USSR never at any stage allowed the Iraqi Ba'th regime's deep anticommunism, or its almost unremittingly brutal treatment of Iraqi Communists, to interfere with Moscow's generally good relations with the Ba'th regime. Strategic Cold War imperatives that involved countering the United States were clearly far more important to the Soviet leaders than protecting their Iraqi comrades from Saddam Hussein's murderous henchmen. Such Soviet behavior was not, of course, restricted to Iraq. One can follow the contortions of Soviet ideologists who attempted in a whole body of ostensibly academic literature to demonstrate the "progressive" nature of regimes such as the Iraqi, the Egyptian, and the Syrian -- in spite of these regimes' often anticommunist domestic policies and sometimes savage repression of their respective communist parties -- in order to justify the USSR's Cold War-driven alignment with them. It is not a pretty picture. The wonder is that so many Communists in these countries were able to maintain their faith in Marxist-Leninist ideology and their loyalty to the USSR in spite of the cold, unideological realpolitik nature of Soviet policy.

(pp. 156-158):

Even as it was massively arming Iraq, the USSR also supplied arms to Iran, notably replacements for those purchased under the shah, as well as some new weapons systems. Equally cynically, and perhaps even more surprising, the Reagan administration secretly supplied Iran with American weapons and spare parts, including TOW antitank missiles, Hawk antiaircraft missiles, and spare parts, both directly and via America's ally Israel. This harebrained scheme was part of the amateurish arms-for-hostages diplomacy run out of the White House basement by Lt. Col. Oliver North and his coconspirators. The entire sordid and illegal scheme was later exposed and developed into the Iran-Contra scandal, when it was revealed that the proceeds from these sales were used to finance covert operations in Nicaragua against the express intent of legislation passed by Congress. At the same time as the CIA was providing similar information to the Iraqis, it also offered Iran "battlefield intelligence for the war against Iraq" as part of the Iran-Contra deal.

In the case of both the USSR and the United States, a similar hostility toward what they saw as the destabilizing radicalism of the new Islamic regime in Tehran drove their policies, in particular the basic support of both for Iraq. At the same time, the contradictory policies that led both to extend some support to Iran were also driven by their obsessive rivalry with each other, and by the fear of each that the other might secure a decisive advantage with either of the two combatant powers. In fact, a reported remark of Henry Kissinger's, that the ideal outcome for the United States would have been for both powers to lose, may best have reflected the true basis of the tortuous policies of Washington and Moscow.

The duplicitous support of both superpowers for both sides in this savage eight-year war was a particularly sordid result of the uncompromising rivalry that finally ended with the demise of both the USSR and the Cold War, only a couple of years after the Iran-Iraq War came to an end. In the Middle East, the superpower rivalry had significant direct and indirect consequences, exacerbating, sharpening, and intensifying regional conflicts, and fueling them with massive amounts of sophisticated and deadly armaments. Most of the estimated 1 million casualties suffered by both sides in the Iran-Iraq War were inflicted by weapons delivered by the two superpowers, in sales from which both profited handsomely. [ . . . ]

The harm inflicted by the weapons they manufactured and sold was only one indication of the cost of the superpower rivalry, a cost that is rarely weighed when either the Cold War or these conflicts are analyzed.

(pp. 162-163):

Moreover, Middle Eastern countries have witnessed precisely the same processes whereby war has led to the strengthening of the executive authority at the expense of other branches of government and at the expense of the citizenry and its rights, which is well known to have operated in countries in other regions. For examples, one need only think of the governments of Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau in World War I, or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II, or of George W. Bush after September 11, 2001. Of the Middle East, as of any other region of the world, one can say with James Madison that "war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement."

(pp. 185-186):

In the case of Lebanon, at the end of World War I, France, which since 1861 had been the traditional great-power patron of the autonomous Ottoman administrative Governorate of Mount Lebanon, inhabited mainly by Maronite Catholics, had desired to expand the area dominated by its Maronite allies. Seeing the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, France sought to further its "divide and rule" strategy by adding to the area of the Mount Lebanon Governorate those regions it desired to separate from the rest of Syria, thereby at the same time turning the governorate into a Greater Lebanon, or Grand Liban. [ . . . ] These areas contained primarily large Sunni and Shi'a Muslim and Greek Orthodox populations, and some Druze. None of these groups had the slightest reason to desire being brought as minorities into a Maronite-dominated Greater Lebanon, or to become "Lebanese." Needless to say, they were not consulted by French colonial planners, who were no more accommodating of the voices of inconvenient natives than had been Lord Balfour.

(p. 200):

Speaking at a public event at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., toward the end of the Cold War, a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst who had served as national intelligence officer for the Middle East and vice chair of the National Intelligence Council stated retrospectively that throughout the Cold War, policymakers and analysts in the U.S. government paid attention to only one thing in the Middle East: the Soviets and their local allies. Once the USSR ceased to be a factor in a Middle Eastern country, he noted, that country almost ceased to be of interest in Washington.

(pp. 218):

In fact, for all the oversimplifications and all the falsehoods that are embodied in the concept, there can be little doubt that for these and other Republican (and some Democratic) politicians who have made it the centerpiece of their early-twenty-first-century foreign and domestic policy, this conflict is very real. For many of them it has a quasi-religious significance, much as had the crusade against "international communism" fifty years ago. In certain senses, driven by this partisan agenda, Americans have simply exchanged communism for terrorism as an all-encompassing, terrifying threat to their well-being.