Arabs (92 page)

The international system was transformed as the balance-of-power politics of the two superpowers gave way to a unipolar age of American dominance. Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush captured the sense of hope engendered by the end of the Soviet-American antagonism, promising a “new world order.” For the Arab world, one of the central theatres of the Cold War, the new era of American ascendancy held great uncertainties. Once again, Arab leaders were forced to come to terms with new rules in the international arena.

The conservative Arab monarchies were disconcerted by the specter of popular movements overturning long-standing governments, but they did not mourn the collapse of communism: Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states had placed their trust in the West, and, fortunately for them, the West had emerged victorious from the Cold War.

Not so the left-leaning Arab republics like Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Algeria, which had more in common with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe: single-party
states, they were all headed by long-term dictators with large armies and centrally planned economies. The video images of Ceausescu’s corpse broadcast around the world provoked deep disquiet in some Arab capitals. If it could happen in Romania, what was to prevent similar events in Baghdad or Damascus?

Clearly, the Soviet Union could no longer be counted on to stand up for its Arab allies. For the past four decades, Arab republics had turned to the Soviet Union for military hardware, development assistance, and diplomatic support to counterbalance the forces of Western domination. Those days were finished. In autumn 1989 Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, pressed Gorbachev for more advanced weapons to help Syria achieve strategic parity with Israel. The Soviet president rebuffed him, saying: “Your problems are not going to be solved through any such strategic points—and anyway, we’re no longer in that game.” Al-Asad returned to Damascus devastated.

The factions of the PLO were also worried. George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, criticized Gorbachev’s policies on a visit to Moscow in October 1989. “If you go on like this you are going to hurt us all,” he warned. Veteran analyst Mohamed Heikal witnessed the confusion among the Arab leadership. “Everyone sensed that a shift from one phase of international relations to another was taking place, but they still clung to the old familiar rules. On all sides there was a failure to anticipate the new ones correctly.”
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The old Arab conflicts of the Cold War-era burst to the fore in the new unipolar age of American dominance. Iraq, weakened economically by its eight-year war with Iran (1980–1988), still had sufficient military resources to assert its bid for regional ascendance. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait proved the first crisis of the post–Cold War world. The invasion of one Arab state by another polarized the entire Arab world, with some countries opposing foreign intervention and others participating in an American-led coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule. The Kuwait crisis also divided citizens from their governments, as Iraqi president Saddam Hussein emerged as a popular hero across the Arab world for standing up to America and for his cynical promises to liberate Palestine from Israeli rule.

It was not enough to drive Iraq from Kuwait to restore order in the Arab region. Saddam Hussein had linked Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait to Syria’s position in Lebanon and Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestinian territory. In the aftermath of the war to liberate Kuwait, the Arab world was forced to address the Lebanese Civil War, then in its fifteenth year. The United States for its part convened in Madrid the first meeting of Arabs and Israelis to address their differences since the 1973 Geneva Peace Conference. It was unclear to contemporary observers if Iraq’s invasion and subsequent expulsion from Kuwait was the harbinger of a new age of conflict resolution, or just an escalation in a long history of regional disputes.

One of the first Arab leaders to recognize the realities of the post–Cold War world was the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. As early as March 1990, Hussein had warned his fellow Arab leaders that “for the next five years there would be only one true superpower”—the United States.
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In many ways, Iraq was better positioned than the other Arab republics to make the transition from the old rivalries of the Cold War to the new realities of American predominance. Although Iraq had enjoyed particularly close relations with the Soviet Union, confirmed in their 1972 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) had led to a thaw in U.S.-Iraqi relations. American hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran drove the Reagan administration to support Iraq in order to prevent an outright Iranian victory. Even after the war ended in stalemate, Washington had continued its rapprochement with Baghdad.

The new American president, George H. W. Bush, had every intention of building better relations with Iraq when he came to office in January 1989. In October of that year the Bush administration issued a national security directive that set out U.S. policies toward the Persian Gulf that put a high premium on closer ties to Iraq. “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East,” it read. “The United States should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq.” The directive also encouraged an opening of the Iraqi market to American companies. “We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy.” This extended to “non-lethal forms of military assistance” to enhance American influence over the Iraqi defense establishment.
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Saddam Hussein could be forgiven for believing he had guided his country well through the turmoil of the end of the Cold War.

Yet Saddam Hussein still faced daunting challenges ruling his country—challenges stemming from disastrous decisions taken since he came to power in 1978. The Iraqi president’s unprovoked and ultimately fruitless war with Iran had taken a terrible toll on the country—and his own support base among the Iraqi populace. Half a million Iraqi men died in the course of the eight-year conflict, provoking domestic opposition to Hussein’s rule. As the war dragged on, the opposition to Saddam Hussein grew violent. In 1982 Hussein survived an assassination attempt in the village of Dujail to the north of Baghdad. The Iraqi president responded with overwhelming violence, ordering his security forces to kill nearly 150 villagers in retaliation.

In northern Iraq, Kurdish factions took advantage of the war with Iran to make a bid for autonomy. The Iraqi government responded with an extermination campaign dubbed
al-Anfal
, or “the spoils.” Between 1986 and 1989, thousands of Iraqi Kurds were forcibly resettled, 2,000 villages were destroyed, and an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children were killed in Anfal operations. In one of the most notorious
incidents, the Iraqi government used nerve gas against the village of Halabja in March 1988, killing 5,000 Kurdish civilians.
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Along with the Kurds, the Sunni and Shiite communities of Iraq also faced intense repression—arbitrary arrest, widespread torture, and summary executions—to stifle dissent. Only confirmed members of the ruling Ba’th Party were to enjoy confidence and advancement within Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Once celebrated for its secular values, high literacy rates, and gender equality, by 1989 Iraq had degenerated into a republic of fear.
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Besides a restive populace, the most immediate challenge facing Saddam Hussein at the end of the Iran-Iraq War was the reconstruction of his country’s shattered economy. Iraq’s wealth derived from its massive petroleum resources. For eight years, the country’s vital lifeline of oil had been cut by attacks on pipelines and port facilities, and a ruthless tanker war that took the Iran-Iraq conflict to the Gulf’s international shipping lanes. Deprived of oil revenues, Iraq had been forced to borrow billions of dollars from its Arab Gulf neighbors to sustain its war effort. By the war’s end in 1988, Iraq owed some $40 billion to the other Gulf states, and debt repayment consumed over 50 percent of Iraq’s oil income in 1990.
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Compounding Iraq’s difficulties was the steady decline in the price of oil. To pay off his country’s debts Saddam Hussein needed oil prices to remain in the range of $25 a barrel (at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, prices had reached as high as $35 a barrel). He watched in despair as the international price slumped to $14 by July 1990. The Gulf, at peace once again, was now able to export all the oil the world needed. To make matters worse, some Gulf states were producing well beyond their OPEC quotas. Kuwait was one of the worst offenders. Kuwait had its own reasons for breaking ranks with OPEC over production quotas. Earlier in the 1980s, the Kuwaiti government had diversified its economy by investing heavily in Western refineries and opening thousands of gasoline stations across Europe under the new brand name “Q-8,” a homonym for “Kuwait.” Kuwait’s crude oil exports increasingly went to its own facilities in the West. The more crude oil the Kuwaitis sold to their Western refineries, the higher their profits in Europe.
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These refining and marketing outlets generated higher profit margins than the export of crude and insulated Kuwait from variations in the price of crude oil. Kuwait was more interested in generating maximum output than seeking the highest price per barrel by hewing to OPEC’s guidelines.

Iraq, in contrast, had no such external outlets, and its revenues were inextricably linked to the price of crude oil. Every drop of one dollar in the price of a barrel of oil represented a net loss of $1 billion to Iraq’s annual revenues. In OPEC meetings, Iraq and Kuwait found themselves on the opposite side of the table, with Iraq pressing to reduce output and drive up the price of oil while Kuwait called for greater output. The Kuwaitis paid little attention to Iraqi concerns. In June 1989 Kuwait
simply refused to be bound by the quota it was assigned by the other OPEC members. Having supported Iraq’s war effort against Iran with loans totaling $14 billion, the Kuwaitis felt justified in putting their own economic interests first now that the war was over.

Saddam Hussein began to pin the blame for Iraq’s economic woes on Kuwait, and he responded by applying pressure and threats to the small Gulf shaykhdom. He called on Kuwait not only to forgive Iraq’s $14 billion debt but to make a further loan of $10 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. He accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil from their shared Rumaila oil field. He also claimed that Kuwait had seized Iraqi territory during the Iran-Iraq War, and he demanded the “return” of the strategic islands of Warba and Bubiyan at the head of the Gulf both for military facilities and to provide Iraq with a deep-water port.

Hussein’s assertions, though unfounded, reopened Iraq’s long-standing challenge to Kuwait’s frontiers and independence. Iraq had already claimed Kuwait as part of its territory twice in the twentieth century—in 1937, and upon Kuwaiti independence in 1961. Yet Iraq’s Arab neighbors took these new claims and threats to be no more than empty rhetoric.

The Arab states were mistaken: in July 1990, Hussein backed up his words with actions when he deployed large numbers of troops and tanks to Iraq’s border with Kuwait. The other Arab states were forced into action, now aware that a serious crisis was brewing.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia responded to the growing crisis by trying to broker a diplomatic solution. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and President Mubarak of Egypt arranged a meeting between the Kuwaitis and Iraqis in the Saudi Red Sea port of Jidda, scheduled for August 1. Saddam Hussein promised the Arab leaders before the meeting that all differences between Iraq and its neighbors would be settled in a “brotherly manner.”

Saddam Hussein had already made up his mind to invade Kuwait. Before sending his vice president to meet with the Kuwaiti crown prince in Jidda, Hussein requested a meeting on July 25 with the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to sound out Washington’s position on the crisis. Glaspie assured the Iraqi president that the United States had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
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It appears that Hussein interpreted Ambassador Glaspie’s remarks to mean the United States would not intervene in an inter-Arab conflict, and shortly after the meeting, he changed the scope of his invasion plans. Initially he had envisaged a limited incursion into Kuwait to seize the two islands and the Rumaila oil field. Now he called for a total occupation of the country. In a meeting with the governing Revolutionary Command Council, Hussein argued that if he were to leave the ruling al-Sabah family in charge of part of Kuwait, they would mobilize international—particularly American—pressure to force Iraq to withdraw. A
quick and decisive invasion that toppled the al-Sabah before they had a chance to call for American intervention would give Iraq the best chance for success. Moreover, were Iraq to absorb its oil-rich neighbor entirely, it could solve all its economic problems at once.