The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (29 page)

The American strategic relationship with Israel, which had begun in 1962, became significant only after 1967 and was a consequence, not-as has sometimes been argued-a cause, of Soviet penetration and growing Soviet influence in the Arab world. By the early 1970s, the Soviets felt strong enough to repeat the policies that the British had followed a generation earlier and to sign "treaties of alliance" with Arab countries, whereby they were able to establish a military and naval presence and to acquire and use military, naval, and air bases with virtually extraterritorial status. At one time or another, Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, Libya, and Algeria seemed to be moving into the Soviet orbit, acquiring Soviet weapons, accepting Soviet instructors, adopting a pro-Soviet alignment at the UN and other international fora, and-most portentous of all-adopting a form of socialist, though not Communist, planning in their domestic economies.

There were always statesmen and even governments in the Arab world that believed in a policy of cooperation or association with the West. They could, however, pursue such a policy only by disregarding, misleading, or suppressing popular feeling, and did so at peril of their lives. On the other hand, the acceptance of Soviet favors carried no such risks to personal safety or political popularity and was far less suspect than any leaning toward the West. The same double standard toward the Soviets and the West could be seen in many things: in the silent, almost surreptitious pocketing of Western gifts and the loud welcoming of Soviet benefactions, and in the ceaseless harrying of the last retreating rearguards of Western empire while Soviet rule over vast Muslim territories in Asia passed uncriticized. A still more striking disparity may be seen in the responses to the involvements of the United States in Vietnam and of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. While America's intervention in the war between North and South Vietnam on the side of its South Vietnamese ally was greeted with almost universal and unequivocal condemnation, the Soviet Union's invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, a neighbor with which it was at peace, and the ruthless repression of the Afghan patriotic resistance evoked only the mildest expressions of disapproval in many Arab and Islamic states and even found defenders in some of them. Despite some subsequent improvement, the prevailing attitude toward the West remained one of deep mistrust and hostility. Collaboration with the West still needed to be excused or, better still, concealed. During the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990 and 1991, it was clear that although many Arab governments were glad to join the American-led coalition against Saddam Hussein, there was much less support for this policy among their people, for many of whom Saddam Hussein's angry defiance of the West more than atoned for his offenses against his Arab subjects and neighbors in Iraq and Kuwait. The coalition was possible only because by that date the Soviet Union was no longer a player in the game. From time to time, the West has foundor procured-regimes that were willing to collaborate with it, if only in secret and within narrow limits. The difficulty was that such collaboration was always uncertain, and the regimes that provided it were either untrustworthy or insecure, sometimes both.

We shall be better able to understand this situation if we view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations but as an encounter between civilizations. The "Great Debate," as Gibbon called it, between Christendom and Islam has been going on, in one form or another, since the advent of Islam in the seventh century. For more than a century and a half, Islam was subject to the domination of the West, a domination that was posed to the Muslim peoples, and continues to pose even after political control has ended, tremendous problems of readjustmentpolitical, social, economic, cultural, psychological-both in their dealings with others and in their own internal affairs. Even after liberation, the intelligent and sensitive Arab could not but be aware of the continued subordination of his culture to that of the West. His richest resource was oil, but it was found and extracted by Western processes and machines, to serve the needs of Western inventions. His greatest pride was his new army, but it used Western arms, wore Western-style uniforms, and marched to Western or Western-style tunes. His ideas and ideologies, even of anti-Western revolt, derived ultimately from Western thought. His knowledge even of his own history and culture owed much to Western scholarship. His writers, his artists, his architects, his technicians, even his tailors, testified by their work to the continued supremacy of Western civilization: the ancient rival, once the pupil, now the model, of the Muslim. Even the gadgets and garments, the tools and amenities of his everyday life were symbols of bondage to an alien and dominant culture, which he hated and admired, imitated but could not share. It was a deeply wounding, deeply humiliating experience.

In the twilight world of popular myths and images, the West was the source of all evil-and the West was a single whole, the parochial subdivision of which were hardly more important to the average Middle Easterner than were those of the Middle East for the average Westerner. Established sovereign states like Turkey and Iran and some of the older Arab states have developed consistent foreign policies based on national interests and rational calculations, but all too often the policies of Arab governments have been at the mercy of a popular mood of ethnic and communal collectivism, which treated the West as a collective enemy.

The Soviets for a while succeeded where the Americans had failed, in presenting themselves to the Arabs as something generically different from the West. They succeeded because they were something generically different, whereas America was not. America was inescapably part of the West, of which it has now become the leader. The Soviet Union was not part of the West but, on the contrary, was opposed to the West-in ideology, economics, and politics, in way of life, and in international affairs. For this reason alone the Soviets could command sympathy and support, as did the Nazis half a century earlier, often from the same persons. Many who once turned to Berlin later turned to Moscow as the new citadel of antiWestern power. Soviet colonialism was in areas remote from the Arab lands and in forms unfamiliar to the Arab peoples, who knew only the maritime, liberal, commercial empires of the West. Therefore, to a large extent it escaped notice. Even where such colonialism was intellectually apprehended, it had no emotional impact on the people comparable with that of the Western kind that they had personally experienced. The Turkish experience was different, and so too was the Turkish response.

Despite some impressive achievements in their worldwide competition with the United States, the Soviets were less successful in the Middle East than in most other parts of the Third World. There was no Vietnam or Cambodia in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua, not even an Angola or a Mozambique. Despite attempts first to browbeat and then to destabilize them, the countries of the northern tier held firm against Soviet pressures, and even the spectacular Soviet gains farther south proved to be limited, precarious, and ultimately useless. Apart from two brief interventions by the U.S. Marines in Lebanon, the Middle East, unlike Southeast Asia and Central America, for a long time required no American troops to defend it against attack or subversion. When finally, in the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991, American troops intervened, it was with Russian support and not against a Russian threat that they did so.

The rollback of the Soviet advance began in Egypt when President Anwar Sadat, after having signed a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union in 1971, changed his mind and ordered Soviet military personnel to leave the country. Lacking territorial contiguity, the Russians could not respond as they did to acts of insubordination by other "allies"-Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968-by moving in troops and tanks. Instead, they meekly departed. Thereafter, Egypt pursued a more genuinely neutral policy, and when President Sadat decided that the time had come to make peace with Israel, he sought and obtained American encouragement and help in his peace initiative. On that occasion, the Soviets did not help, and failed in their attempt to obstruct the peace process. The lesson was not lost on other Soviet allies in the Arab world, which, while still relying on the Soviet Union as a source of weaponry and generally toeing the Soviet line in international relations, nevertheless began to adopt a somewhat more independent attitude in national and regional affairs. At the same time, the United States, which throughout had retained an imposing diplomatic, economic, and cultural presence in the region, began to pursue more active political and strategic policies and to cultivate, not without success, a number of Arab governments.

This warming up of relations between the Arab governments and the West was accelerated by another development, roughly contemporaneous with the Israel-Egypt peacy treaty-the Iranian revolution of 1979. To the conservative regimes of the Arab world, this appeared to offer a double threat of subversion and invasion and was the more dangerous in that it came not from an alien outsider, but from a Muslim movement within the region that held immense appeal to the downtrodden and the discontented.

The impact of the West in the Arab lands created real problems through the economic, social, and political dislocations to which it gave rise, and the cultural tensions that it engendered. These were in the long run far more important than the various specific political issues as a source of discontent and resentment. They were not, however, easy to formulate and discuss on a political level, especially in countries that had no tradition of such discussion, nor could the blame for them readily be thrown on nameable and recognizable culprits. It was, therefore, the surface political issues that were most to the fore, as both a focus and a manifestation of anti-Western feeling. It was not always easy to tell whether one or another of these issues was an irritant or an outlet-a cause of tension or a relatively harmless way of releasing it. The events of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to show that as the successive veils of political distraction are stripped away, the tension becomes greater and not less.

Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of Kuwait in August 1990 confronted the world with its first major crisis since the eclipse of Soviet power and the end of the Cold War. Despite the many difficulties and dangers of the Cold War era, there was a kind of bipolar stability to which both superpowers contributed, the one by maintaining cooperation and the other by imposing discipline among their allies, their satellites, and their proteges. With the abandonment by the Soviet Union of its previous commanding role, this discipline disappeared, and the states on the periphery were no longer primarily influenced in their policies and actions by the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. The United States as the surviving superpower, Europe and Japan as the new economic powers, and the regional powers most directly affected all faced a new situation with little experience to guide them.

The invasion and annexation by Iraq of a peaceful neighbor, a sovereign state, and a fellow member of the United Nations placed that body, and with it the world community, before a terrible dilemma. Should it treat this merely as a local squabble in a notoriously troublesome part of the world, to be resolved if at all by a so-called Arab solution, in which outsiders would be wise not to get involved-or should it see and deal with this as a major challenge to world order and international law, confronting the United Nations with an awesome choice: either to act against Saddam Hussein and restore Kuwaiti sovereignty or to accept the facts and let him have his way? In the Middle East, as elsewhere, those old enough to remember, or wise enough to learn from history, could recall an earlier sequence of events: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the German seizure of Austria and then Czechoslovakia. These events led directly to the collapse of the international order and to the outbreak of the Second World War. If Saddam Hussein had been allowed to succeed in his gamble, the United Nations, already devalued, might well have followed the defunct League of Nations into well-deserved ignominy. The world would have belonged to the violent and the ruthless and would have been on the way to universal anarchy or a third world war. The choice gained added urgency from Saddam Hussein's well-known determination to acquire unconventional weapons and his demonstrated willingness to use them, even against his own people.

The choice was for action-to halt aggression and to restore its victim. The successes and failures of Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq illustrate two profoundly important changes that had taken place in the Middle East, the second of which is still not fully understood. The crisis followed, and was in part a consequence of, the decline of Soviet power and influence. The aftermath of the crisis revealed, in many different ways, the second change-the self-imposed reduction in the role of the surviving superpower, the United States.

For as far back as living memory can reach, and a while further, the countries of the Middle East were disputed among rival, more developed, outside powers. There were times-as in the great days of the Arab caliphs and the Turkish sultans-when Middle Eastern powers competed for the domination of the known world. But those times are long past, and for many centuries these countries have, variously, enjoyed and endured the attention of outside powers: first the commercial and diplomatic rivalries of mercantilist European states; then the successive clashes of the British, French, and Russian empires, of the Allies and the Axis; and, most recently, the superpower rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union. In wartime, the Middle East sometimes became the battleground of these powers. In both peace and war, the governments and on occasion the peoples of the Middle East were the object of intensive efforts by outside powers to win their hearts and minds so as to gain access to their communications and resources.

Since the beginning of their careers-indeed, for many countries since the beginning of their national independence-Middle Eastern statesmen have known no other situation, and their foreign policies were in large measure determined by the need to avoid the dangers and, where possible, take advantage of the opportunities of these rivalries. The same, or rather its equivalent, was true of the professional experts in the services of the outside powers whose business it was to deal with these countries. All these now faced a totally transformed situation, in which, for the first time ever, there was only one power, with overwhelming wealth and strength and no real rival to challenge it.