A History of the Middle East (56 page)

Initially, the prospects for Pax Americana looked good. In the absence of superpower rivalry, regional conflicts were widely predicted to crumble away. North Africa’s Cold War rivals, Algeria and Morocco, embarked on a United Nations-administered peace process to end a twenty-five year conflict over control of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara (with the expectation that Morocco’s sandwall dividing the territory would wither as fast as the Berlin Wall). Arab and Israeli leaders took their seats round a negotiating table in Madrid. And across the Middle East, cafés bubbled with talk of the onward march of democracy, state accountability and human rights. But Middle Easterners quickly discovered that the readjustment from a bipolar to a unipolar world would not inaugurate the promised utopia. And from 1995 onwards, the history of the Middle East is of a clear pattern of uncoordinated but manifest dissent at US hegemony – from defiance in Iraq and resistance in Palestine, to the wildfire spread of militant Islam across the Sunni world.

Humbling Iraq

To the evident relief of Iraq’s neighbours, the United States immediately set about neutering the Arab world’s most powerful military.
Before the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had presided over a million-man army and an arsenal that outstripped Egypt and Turkey. Some 30,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the 1991 allied air bombardment. Tens of thousands more were slain as the Iraqi army retreated on the road back to Basra. The bulk of the country’s oil infrastructure, its refineries and pipelines, was pulverized by air strikes. Iraqi oil production plummeted from a high of over 5 million barrels a day prior to its war with Iran in 1980 to a few tens of thousand barrels after its retreat from Kuwait. The Arab Monetary Fund put the damage caused by the US-led bombing at $190 billion.

What war left unfinished, the armistice was designed to complete. One month after Iraq’s surrender, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 687 assigning a UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to search out and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and stipulating that sanctions should not be lifted until its mission had been completed. Fear of the Iraqi weapons programme was not without foundation – Iraq had repeatedly dropped chemical bombs on both its Kurdish rebels and Iranian troops. But the effects of sanctions on a country dependent on oil revenues to buy food were appalling. All imports, including food, were subject to a blockade by land and sea, as were pesticides and the fertilizer Iraq required to grow its own basics. Within months, inflation in Iraq had reached 2,000 per cent and average earnings had collapsed to a tenth of their pre-war level, roughly equivalent to the wages of Bangladesh. A teacher’s monthly salary was barely enough to buy a kilo of meat. The UN reported that ‘the majority of the population live on a diet of semi-starvation’. Because of a ban on chlorine, sewage was discharged untreated into the Euphrates. Cholera and typhoid, diseases Iraq had stamped out in the 1970s, returned.

At first, the pressure proved effective. The day UNSCOM began work, Baghdad admitted to a stockpile of over 1,000 tons of liquid nerve gas, and 11,000 chemical warheads. Anticipating UNSCOM’s mission would be over in a matter of months, Iraq stood aside as the weapons inspectors uncovered the existence of an advanced nuclear programme replete with several kilograms of highly
enriched uranium. One year into its work, UNSCOM declared it had destroyed all Iraq’s medium- and long-range missiles (most of them supplied by Europe), and plentiful stocks of mustard gas. The problem was that the more UNSCOM’s scientists exposed, the more questions their revelations begged: indications of a biological weapons programme, for instance, posed the possibility that Iraqi medical laboratories were doubling as plants to nurture germ warfare. And as the investigations became protracted, Iraq used armed protestors to block UNSCOM’s work: on occasion Iraqi soldiers fired over their heads. Sometimes the shots were merely intended as delaying tactics to give Iraqi officials enough time to scurry documents away. Other times, they forced the UN’s biologists and chemists to scarper altogether.

Several times it seemed that UNSCOM inspectors were on the verge of declaring their mission accomplished. After four years, UNSCOM informed the UN Security Council that Iraq’s nuclear and chemical arsenal had been destroyed, but that the elimination of its biological weapons programme remained incomplete. Lured by the prospect of a speedy lifting of sanctions, Iraq confessed to concealing production of nearly half a tonne of anthrax and 1.7 tons of VX nerve gas, a poison ten times more potent than the sarin it had unleashed against Iranian troops. Baghdad claimed all its stockpiles of biological weapons had been destroyed in the Gulf War; UNSCOM demanded proof. The UN agency’s doubts proved well-founded when in August 1995 Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law defected to Jordan armed with crate-loads of military documents, which he promptly delivered to his UNSCOM and CIA interrogators. Hussein Kamil Hassan had variously served as Iraqi minister of oil, defence, arms procurement, and commander of the presidential guard, but most importantly, he was widely believed to be the architect of Iraq’s biological weapons programme. He further testified that since his Gulf War defeat, Saddam Hussein had assigned his second son, Qusay, to conceal his weapons of mass destruction.

Hussein Kamil’s defection was motivated less by a belated pang
of conscience, than by a family feud. His standing as Saddam Hussein’s most decorated relative had spurred the Iraqi leader’s jealous eldest son, Uday, to fits of pique – following the Mamluke custom of eliminating family rivals he had shot his uncle, the minister of the interior, earlier that summer. Faced with the implosion of the presidential family (Hussein Kamil had also absconded with Saddam Hussein’s two daughters), the Iraqi leader admitted that at the time of the Gulf War Iraq had twenty-five warheads primed with biological weapons with a range of 360 miles, and had embarked on a fast-track programme to manufacture a nuclear bomb within a year.

Despite the setbacks, five years after the Gulf War Saddam Hussein’s grip on Iraq seemed firmer than ever. Immediately after the Gulf War, he had thwarted simultaneous popular uprisings by Shiites in southern Iraq and Kurds in the north after President Bush called on Iraqis ‘to take matters into their own hands’. Shiites, who comprised a majority of Iraq’s population, rose up with all the pent-up fury of decades of Sunni subjugation and seized control of the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, butchering their Baath party officials in the process. As testimony to their Iranian sympathies, if not outright support, the rebels tore down murals of Saddam Hussein and pinned posters of the late Ayatollah Khomeini in their place. Meanwhile, Kurdish militiamen, or
peshmergas
(literally, ‘those who face death’) swept in an arc from the north towards Baghdad. Together the rebels controlled fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Sandwiched in central Iraq between Kurds and Shiites, Saddam Hussein sent his Republican Guard in helicopter gun-ships to re-establish central control.

That Saddam Hussein was defending his own rule was not surprising. That the Kurds and Shiites were left to his mercy after President Bush had called on them to revolt was. From the first the United States had declared that ‘regime change’ would be its price for the lifting of sanctions. But it soon became apparent that Washington was less than ready to see the immediate fall of its foe. State Department strategists in Washington warned that without the ‘iron
fist’ of Saddam Hussein, Iraq would fragment into three: a Kurdish north, a Sunni middle and a Shiite south. Added to such concerns was pressure from Washington’s two regional allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, chary of the United States’ apparent penchant for dismemberment of Soviet satellites in the aftermath of the Cold War (in the USSR, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia). Ankara, already engaged in a guerrilla war with its own Kurdish rebels, the PKK, feared the emergence of the nucleus of a Greater Kurdistan on its southern flank. The prospect of democracy – which would hand power to a pro-Iranian Shiite majority – was even less appealing to the staunchly Sunni Saudis, whose own marginalized Shiite population bordered Iraq. Asked what he thought of the uprising, the US National Security Advisor, Brent Snowcroft, was unambiguous. ‘We would have preferred a coup,’ he said.

Accordingly, the US watched while Saddam Hussein counter-attacked. Some US troops used force to deny the rebels access to the arms depots in southern Iraq. Some 100,000 Iraqis died in Saddam Hussein’s onslaught. Seventy thousand Shiites took refuge in Iran and 1.5 million Kurds – a full half of the Kurdish population – fled into the snow-capped mountains on the borders.

In a bid to stem the outcry over the humanitarian tragedy, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 688, sanctioning a 16,000-man US-led force to carve out a Kurdish – though pointedly not a Shiite – safe haven. The US further demanded Iraq withdraw its troops from its Turkish border, and Saddam Hussein obliged by vacating three provinces, including the northern cities of Irbil and Suleimaniya. Without seeking UN authorization, the United States, Britain and France also declared a ban on Iraqi aircraft flying north of the 36th parallel. Shielded by the air umbrella, Kurds returned to re-establish a Kurdish autonomous zone and rebuild towns razed by Saddam Hussein’s military onslaughts over the previous two decades. Shiites had to endure a further year – and another cull of their clergy (reduced from 10,000 in 1979 to a few hundred by 1993) – before the Western powers declared a second air-exclusion zone in the south. Iraqis were not alone in suspecting that while the
justification for the no-fly zones was humanitarian, their purpose was distinctly strategic: to box Saddam Hussein into the provinces surrounding Baghdad. As its name suggests, Operation Southern Watch offered Saudi Arabia and Kuwait a protective shield, while to the north Operation Provide Comfort gave the CIA and Iraqi opposition groups a northern safe haven from which to scheme against Saddam Hussein.

Washington chose Ahmed Chalabi, a rotund London-based Shiite businessman convicted in Jordan of embezzlement, to lead the Iraqi opposition. In June 1992 Chalabi, under CIA tutelage, brought twenty opposition groups to Vienna to launch the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, which, modelled on the PLO, declared itself the sole legitimate representative of the Iraqi opposition. It was a motley, quarrelsome crew of intellectuals, Kurds and Shiites, but its most powerful component was the Iraqi National Accord, a movement embracing up to a thousand dissident army officers, including some Sunnis from Saddam Hussein’s home province of Tikrit. The INC’s only glue was a common desire to topple Saddam Hussein, but in Vienna its constituent parts agreed on a charter to form a liberation army to fight for democracy. The INC made a base in Salahuddin, a safe-haven town, and began broadcasting anti-Saddam Hussein propaganda across Iraq. At its height, its Salahuddin headquarters had a staff of some 5,000 Iraqis and was a magnet for deserters from the Iraqi army. The United States, in the words of Saddam Hussein’s highly critical biographer, Said Aburish, seemed intent ‘on turning the clock back and acting as arbiters of the fate of Iraq in the manner of the victorious powers in 1917’.

The defection of Hussein Kamil to Jordan could have landed American officials with just the military alternative to Saddam Hussein they seemed to be looking for. But Kurds and Shiites were loath to pay homage to a man remembered for his brutal suppression of the 1991 rebellion. Distrusted by his foreign patrons and fellow-Iraqis alike, a dejected Hussein Kamil incredibly fell for his father-in-law’s offer of amnesty, and in February 1996 donned military fatigues and drove back to Baghdad. Three days later he was
dead, in what Iraqi TV described as a family vendetta. ‘We have cut off the treacherous branch from our noble family tree,’ said his uncle General al-Majid beside footage of his bloodstained corpse.

As Saddam Hussein’s family recovered its unity, loyalty in the opposition ranks tottered. Their momentum was sapped by the failure of a series of clumsy coup attempts and a wave of inner-city bombings that backfired. An INC attempt in 1995 to co-ordinate an offensive while British and American jets patrolled the no-fly zones ended in failure with hundreds of deaths, and one of many army purges. In an attempt to re-energize the rebel force, the US Congress in 1998 passed the Iraq Liberation Act, injecting almost $100 million dollars into military training. But instead of fighting Saddam Hussein, the opposition increasingly fought itself. Kurdish elections in the safe haven exacerbated the rivalry between the landowning Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) led by Masud Barzani and its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a self-styled left-wing peasant-based movement under Jalal Talabani. Together, the two leaders could have mustered 40,000 troops, and constituted the main armed threat to Saddam Hussein. But rival external backers increasingly wedged them apart. Iran armed the PUK while Iraq and Turkey supplied the KDP both with weapons and smuggling dues from the supply of cheap Iraqi fuel trucked by road to Turkey. Pitched battles erupted in the late spring of 1994, igniting a Kurdish internecine war that was to rage for the next four years. Only in September 1998 did the US finally broker a truce.

But by then, Saddam Hussein had reaped the benefits of his bickering foes. When the PUK routed the KDP, Barzani solicited the help of an eager Baghdad. In mid-1996 400 Iraqi tanks forged into the safe haven and within thirty-six hours had replaced the PUK flag over the Kurdish parliament in Irbil with the two emblems of the KDP and the tricolour of Iraq. Horrified at the advance, the CIA and INC fled their nearby base at Salahuddin and evacuated their 5,000 agents, leaving American plans for a bridgehead from which to topple Saddam Hussein in tatters. In what smacked of a parting shot, President Bill Clinton lobbed cruise missiles on
southern Iraq – a revealing indication of where Washington’s concerns really lay – and raised the southern no-fly zone to the perimeter of Baghdad. Iraqi tanks withdrew, but Saddam Hussein had proved that despite his Gulf War defeat, he remained a formidable military power commanding 380,000 men. International tears for the Kurds proved largely of the crocodile kind. As long as the Kurds had proved useful, the US had trumpeted their rights in Iraq. But it had long dismissed the Kurdish movement in Turkey, the PKK, as terrorists even though it was resisting a Turkish policy of cultural annihilation far more pervasive than that of Baghdad. In pursuit of the PKK, Ankara’s troops and F-16 bombers invaded the safe haven in May 1997 with barely a whisper of criticism from Washington. US military aid continued to flow to Ankara, as did its supply of arms used in the killing of an estimated 23,000 people in Turkey’s war with the Kurds.