The New Penguin History of the World (210 page)

However, by 1980, there had grown even stronger the most compelling tie between the two superpowers. For all the huge effort by the Soviet Union to give themselves greater nuclear striking power over the United States, superiority at such a level is a somewhat notional matter. The Americans, with their gift for the arresting slogan, concisely summed up the situation as MAD; that is to say, both countries had the capacity to produce ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or, more precisely, a situation in which each of two potential combatants had enough striking power to ensure that, even if a surprise attack deprived it of the cream of its weapons, what remained would be sufficient to ensure a reply so appalling as to turn its opponent’s cities into smoking wildernesses and leave its armed forces capable of little but attempting to control the terrorized survivors.

This bizarre possibility was a great conservative force. Even if madmen (to put the matter simply) are occasionally to be found in seats of power, Dr Johnson’s observation that the knowledge that you are to be hanged wonderfully concentrates the mind is applicable to collectivities threatened with disaster on this scale: the knowledge that a blunder may be followed by extinction is a great stimulus to prudence. Here may well lie the most fundamental explanation of a new degree of cooperation, which had already been shown in the 1970s by the United States and the Soviet Union in spite of their specific quarrels. A 1972 treaty on defensive missile limitation had been one of its first fruits; it owed something to a new awareness on both sides that science could now monitor infringements of such agreements (not all military research made for an increase of tension). In the following year talks began on further arms limitations, while another set of discussions began to explore the possibility of a comprehensive security arrangement in Europe.

In return for the implicit recognition of Europe’s post-war frontiers (above all, that between the two Germanys), the Soviet negotiators had finally agreed in 1975 at Helsinki to increase economic intercourse between eastern and western Europe and to sign a guarantee of human rights and political freedom. The last was, of course, unenforceable. Yet it may well have had more importance than the symbolic gains of frontier recognition to which the Soviet negotiators had attached much significance. Western success over human rights was not only to prove a great encouragement to dissidents in communist Europe and Russia, but side-stepped old restraints on what had been deemed interference in the internal affairs of communist states. Gradually there began to arise public criticisms that were in the end to help to bring about change in eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the flow of trade and investment between the two Europes began almost at once to increase, though also very slowly. It was the nearest approach so far to a general peace treaty ending the Second World War, and it gave the Soviet Union what its leaders most desired, assurance of the security of the territorial settlement that was one of the major spoils of victory in 1945.

For all that, Americans were very worried about world affairs as 1980, the year of a presidential election, approached. Eighteen years before, the Cuban crisis had shown the world that the United States was top dog. It had then enjoyed superior military strength, the (usually dependable) support of allies, clients and satellites the world over, and the public will to sustain a world diplomatic and military effort while grappling with huge domestic problems. By 1980, many of its citizens felt the world had changed and were unhappy about it. When the new Republican president, Ronald Reagan, took office in 1981, his supporters looked back on a decade of what seemed increasing American powerlessness. He inherited an
enormous budgetary deficit, disappointment over what looked like recent advances by Soviet power in Africa and Afghanistan, and dismay over what was believed to be the disappearance of an American superiority in nuclear weapons enjoyed in the 1960s.

MIDDLE EAST ISSUES

In the next five years President Reagan surprised his critics; he was to restore the morale of his countrymen by remarkable (even if often cosmetic) feats of leadership. Symbolically, on the day of his inauguration, the Iranians released their American hostages (many Americans believed the timing of the release to have been stage-managed by the new administration’s supporters). But this was by no means the end of the troubles the United States faced in the Middle East and the Gulf. Two fundamental difficulties did not go away – the threat posed to international order in that area while Cold War attitudes endured, and the question of Israel. The war between Iran and Iraq was evidence of the first danger, many people thought. Soon, the instability of some Arab countries became more obvious. Ordered government virtually disappeared in the Lebanon, which collapsed into an anarchy disputed by bands of gunmen patronized by the Syrians and Iranians. As this gave the revolutionary wing of the PLO an even more promising base for operation than in the past, Israel took to increasingly violent and expensive military operations on and beyond her northern borders. There followed in the 1980s a heightening of tension and ever more vicious Israeli–Palestinian conflict. More alarming still to Americans, Lebanon descended into an anarchy in which, following the arrival of United States marines, bombs exploded at the American embassy and its marines’ barracks, killing over 300 people in all.

The United States was not alone in being troubled by these enduring ills. When the Soviet Union sent its soldiers to Afghanistan (where they were to stay bogged down for most of the next decade), Iranian and Muslim anger elsewhere was bound to affect Muslims inside the Soviet Union. Some thought this a hopeful sign, believing the growing confusion of the Islamic world might induce caution on the part of the two superpowers, and perhaps lead to less unconditional support for their satellites and allies in the region. This mattered most, of course, to Israel. Meanwhile, the more alarming manifestations and rhetoric of the Iranian revolution made some think that a conflict of civilizations was beginning. Iran’s aggressive puritanism, though, also caused shivers among conservative Arabs and in the oil-rich kingdoms of the Gulf – above all, Saudi Arabia.
There were indeed numerous signs of what looked like spreading sympathy for the radical reactionaries of the Iranian revolution in other Islamic countries; some of them murdered the president of Egypt in 1981. The government of Pakistan continued to proclaim (and impose) its Islamic orthodoxy, and winked at assistance to the anti-communist rebels in Afghanistan (although uniquely among Islamic countries it had by the end of the decade accepted a woman as prime minister and even, in 1989, rejoined the British Commonwealth).

North Africa presented more alarming evidence of radical Islamic feeling as the decade advanced, less importantly in the bizarre sallies and pronouncements of the excited dictator of Libya (Colonel Gaddafi called upon other oil-producing states to stop supplying the United States, while one third of Libyan oil continued to find a market there, and in 1980 briefly ‘united’ his country to Ba’athist Syria) than in Algeria. That country had made a promising start after winning its independence, but by 1980 its economy was flagging, the consensus that had sustained the independence movement was crumbling, and emigration to look for work in Europe seemed the only outlet available for the energies of many of its young men. In the 1990 Algerian elections, an Islamic fundamentalist party won a majority of votes for the first time in any Arab country. In the previous year a military coup in the Sudan had brought a military and militant Islamic regime to power there that at once suppressed the few remaining civic freedoms of the people of that unhappy land.

Nonetheless, for all the attractions of Islamic radicalization, there were plentiful signs by 1990 that moderate and conservative Arab politicians were antagonized enough for indigenous opposition to the fundamentalists sometimes to be effective. It remains hard to believe that sufficient leverage is available to the would-be revolutionaries, even after setting aside both such political realities and deeper questions about the feasibility of successful Islamic revolution, when so many of its would-be supporters still seek, unknowingly, to realize goals of power and modernization systematically incompatible with Islamic teaching and custom. Libya could destabilize other African countries and arm Irish terrorists, but achieved little else. Because of preoccupations with changing circumstances elsewhere, the old Soviet–American rivalry was decreasingly available for exploitation. All that was left for the fundamentalists to look to were two potentially rich Muslim countries, Iraq and Iran, and for most of the 1980s they were fatally entangled in a costly struggle with one another.

There was also growing evidence that the ruler of Iraq, patronized by the Americans and the major troublemaker of the Middle East, was only tactically and pragmatically a supporter of Islam. Saddam Hussein was a
Muslim by upbringing, but led a formally secular Ba’athist regime actually based on patronage, family and the self-interest of soldiers. He sought power and technological modernization as a way to it, and there is no evidence that the welfare of the Iraqi people ever concerned him. When he launched his war on Iran, the prolongation of the struggle and evidence of its costs were greeted with relief by other Arab states – notably the other oil-producers of the Gulf – because it appeared at the same time to pin down both a dangerous bandit and the Iranian revolutionaries whom they feared. It was, however, less pleasing to them that the war distracted attention from the cause of the Palestinian question and unquestionably made it easier for Israel to deal with the PLO.

During nearly a decade of alarums and excursions in the Gulf, some of which raised the spectre of further interference with western oil supplies, incidents seemed at times to threaten a widening of armed conflict, notably between Iran and the United States. Meanwhile, events in the Levant embittered the stalemate there. Israel’s continuing occupation of the Golan Heights, her vigorous operations in Lebanon against Palestinian guerrilla bands and their patrons and her government’s encouragement of further Jewish immigration (notably from the USSR) all helped to buttress her against the day when she might once again face united Arab armies. At the end of 1987, however, there came the first outbreaks of violence among Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories. They persisted and grew into an intermittent but what would prove enduring insurrection, the
intifada
, The PLO, despite winning further international sympathy by officially recognizing Israel’s own right to exist, was nonetheless in a disadvantaged position in 1989, when the Iraq–Iran war finally ended. In the following year the Ayatollah Khomeni died and there were signs that his successor might be less adventurous in support of the Palestinian and the fundamentalist Islamic causes.

During the Iraq–Iran war, the United States had favoured Iraq, in part because of American exaggeration of the fundamentalist threat. When, nevertheless, the Americans found themselves at last face-to-face at war in the Gulf with a declared enemy, it was with the Iraqis, not the Iranians. In 1990, after making a generous peace with Iran, Saddam Hussein took up an old border dispute with the sheikhdom of Kuwait. He had also quarrelled with its ruler over oil quotas and prices. It is not easy to believe in the reality of these grievances; whatever they may have meant symbolically to Hussein himself, what seems to have moved him most was a simple determination to seize the immense oil wealth of Kuwait. During the summer of 1990, his threats increased. Then, on 2 August, the armies of Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in a few hours subdued it.