America's Troubled Moment In The Middle East

Chapter 25

America’s Troubled Moment in the Middle East

In placing America at the center of a chapter on recent Middle East history, the aim is not to separate the subject from regional developments and internal power struggles. Rather, it is to examine the potential of American policies to redirect established historical patterns of Middle Eastern politics and society in new and troubling directions. The chapter also seeks to place these developments in their proper historical context, and so considers the legacy of certain American policies in the 1990s. The main topics examined in this section are as follows: the policy of dual containment in the Gulf through the imposition of a sanctions regime during the 1990s; the artacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001; the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq; and the nuclear impasse with Iran. Although America’s role has introduced new dynamics to the Middle East, it has also served to identify previously existing currents that are part of the connecting threads referred to in the conclusion of Chapter 26.

Just as the post-Ottoman era opened in the 1920s with Britain and France attempting to shape the Arab Middle East to serve their own interests, so did the post-cold war period begin with the United States seeking to do the same. The three pillars of US cold war policy toward the Middle East since the 1950s had been ensuring access to the petroleum resources of the oil-producing states. Although there may be much to criticize about the assumptions on which this policy was based and the ways and means through which it was pursued, there could be no question that in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991, America had emerged triumphant in its goals. With its dominance unrivaled, the question of how the United States would conduct itself and what it would consider to be its primary interests and responsibilities in the region became critically important. The basic parameters of post-cold war policy were set forth by President Bush senior in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991 and were consolidated during President Clinton’s two terms in office (1993-2001).

Yet the first term of President Bush the younger (2001-2005) brought about an unprecedented enthusiasm for a political transformation of the Middle East. This shift, in part due to the composition of the younger Bush’s administration and in part due to the post-September 11 environment, was a dramatic one. In 2003 George W. Bush embarked upon regime change in Iraq, and in 2005 his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, denounced a sixty-year-old American foreign policy toward the Middle East that had “pursued stability at the expense of democracy” but achieved neither: “Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people. But Bush’s insistence at the same time on the prism of the “war on terrorism” through which all conflicts were understood became a source of much resentment. In the view from Washington, terrorists were simply terrorists, with minimal distinctions between al-Qa’ida and those groups involved in regional conflicts, such as Hizbullah and Hamas, who were more widely seen in the region as legitimate national resistance movements or as contenders in constitutional processes and who, however reprehensible their tactics, needed to be engaged rather than defeated or excluded. The younger Bush administration’s determination to ignore or sideline the Israeli-Palestinian conflict terrorism only added to the resentment-and confusion.

The defining moment of the Bush administration was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Intended as a massive show of American power, the invasion removed one dictator from the region and sought to intimidate rival authoritarian regimes, with a focus set squarely on Iran and Syria. Instead of Iraq becoming a springboard from which to engineer the political transformation of its neighbors, however, the debacle of the occupation drained American foreign policy of credibility and respect as well as resources and attested to America weakness, not strength. By 2008, Bush’s last year as president, America’s moment initiative in the Middle East looked to be on the wane.

THE POLICY OF DUAL CONTAINMENT

One of the primary objectives of the Gulf War of 1991 was to maintain access to Middle Eastern oil. The United States continued to pursue policies designed to secure that access throughout the 1990s, but in manner that differed markedly from the late cold war years. Instead of relying on a local power to serve as a surrogate enforcer of US Gulf policy, as it had done with the shah’s Iran before the revolution of 1979 and with Saddam Husayn’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States appointed itself as the protector of the Gulf. US ships patrolled the waters east of Suez, its warplanes made daily surveillance flights over Iraq, and its troops remained permanently stationed in the region.

This was part of a policy called dual containment, which represented US efforts to isolate both Iraq and Iran through tough economic sanctions against the former and more modest restrictions against the latter. In Washington’s opinion, Iran represented a destabilizing force in the region, and until it modified its conduct it was to be economically isolated. To keep Iran’s revenues down, the US government barred American companies from undertaking any trading and investment activities in the country. This step was taken just as the political climate in Iran was changing (see the discussion of Iran in the section “Turkey and Iran: Nations at a Crossroads” in Chapter 24) and the country was emerging from its self-imposed isolation and actively seeking foreign investment. US containment efforts against Iraq were much more aggressive than those used against Iran. Washington insisted on maintaining the crippling economic sanctions imposed in 1990 until Iraq was deemed to be in full compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 687, which called for the destruction, under international supervision, of Iraq’s entire arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them (see chapter 22). The United States insisted that Iraq continued to possess undiscovered stores of weapons of mass destruction and that if the sanctions were lifted, Iraq would use its oil revenues to rearm and again become a threat to American stability in the Gulf.

Despite Iraq’s lack of full cooperation, the United Nations Special Commission on Disarmament (UNSCOM) had managed to set up an elaborate monitoring system and had made substantial progress in its disarmament efforts. This all came to an end in December 1998, when one of the periodic crises over UNSCOM’s right of access escalated into armed conflict. The United States and Britain launched a concentrated three-day bombing campaign that was intended to weaken the Iraqi regime and produce the overthrow of Saddam Husayn. What had begun as a quick-strike mission turned into a destructive war of attrition that continued up to the US invasion of 2003. Although these air strikes severely crippled the Iraqi air defense system, the bombing campaign as a whole appeared to negate much of what the US sought to achieve in the region.

For one thing, the UNSCOM monitoring system was destroyed, and Iraq refused to allow arms inspection units back into the country. This had serious implications for the future. The lack of reliable information-gathering devices on the ground opened the way for the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence by exaggerating the extent of Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in its attempts to justify the invasion of 2003. In addition, the bombing of Iraq was an embarrassment to America ‘s Arab allies, particularly as Arab popular opinion openly reflected anger over the prolonged suffering of the Iraq people. Dual containment was in itself a poorly conceived strategy, and its manifestation in the ceaseless bombing of Iraq revealed a bankrupt US policy that substituted force for diplomacy. However much Washington tried to blame Saddam Husayn for the confrontation, Arab public opinion saw little more than an imperious superpower unilaterally deploying its vast military arsenal against an Arab country while ignoring Israel’s ongoing violations of the peace accords signed with the Palestinians.

AL-QA’IDA AND THE ATTACK OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

September 11, 2001-0r 9/11, as it is also known-has entered public discourse as an infamous benchmark of a changed world. On that day, nineteen men hijacked four commercial airliners and turned them into flying bombs. One of the planes crashed into de Pentagon, a second crashed into a field, and the other two smashed into the upper floors of the two World Trade Center towers in New York City. The final death toll for the day was more than 3,200, including the passengers of the four aircraft.

Shock mixed with outrage as the US public struggled to come to terms with the magnitude and significance of the events of that day. President Bush vowed to wage an all-out “war against terrorism” and to bring to justice the organizers of the mass murders. But who were they, and how were they to be discovered? Fifteen of the hijackers were of Saudi origin, the other four were Egyptian, and all were connected with a shadowy Islamic terrorist organization known as al-Qa’ida, which was headed by a wealthy Saudi expatriate, Osama bin Laden. Angered by what he perceived as an anti-Islamic foreign policy on the part of the United States and by the un-Islamic policies of the ruling elite in most Islamic countries, bin Laden had turned from a wealthy Saudi youth to austere and radical Muslim terrorist. Number two in the al-Qa’ida political

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