Colossus (23 page)

It is the conventional wisdom that September 11, 2001, was one of the turning points of modern history. It is not to diminish the magnitude of the suffering the terrorists inflicted on thousands of families—or of the shock to the American collective psyche—to suggest that it was nothing of the sort. Without a doubt, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes perpetrated ghastly crimes for which they must be held accountable. But that would be true regardless of their motives. The crucial point in the eyes of the
historian is that those motives were the product of long-term historical forces, the origins of which lay decades earlier, and the direction of which was almost entirely unchanged afterward. On that bright late-summer’s morning, the history of America’s relations with the Middle East only seemed to reach a turning point. Like March 1848 in German history, September 2001 was in many ways the turning point at which that history failed to turn.

FIRST STEPS

It is often assumed that the greatest failure of American policy during the cold war was defeat in Vietnam. Yet the loss of much of Indochina to Communist regimes proved to be as strategically unimportant as it was politically embarrassing. The United States lost face. That was about all it lost. It was the people of Vietnam and Cambodia who paid the horrifically high price of American failure; Americans themselves were able to walk away from the wreckage of “containment.” The reality, which dawned only slowly on policy makers in Washington, was that Vietnam did not really matter. Nor, on mature reflection, did Cuba, which was why the United States quietly abandoned the idea of toppling the Castro regime. Whether they were in Hanoi or Havana, Communists in developing countries proved to be relatively harmless from the point of view of American national security. In the latter case, they might make all kinds of mischief in other peripheral theaters: witness Castro’s energetic participation in the Angolan and Ethiopian civil wars. But if the Caribbean mattered only slightly, then sub-Saharan African scarcely signified at all, by comparison with the one region of the world that, by the early 1970s, Americans could not possibly afford to “lose.” This was the Middle East.

Many misconceptions exist about the attitude of the United States toward the region. One is that the United States is actuated by an unconditional, unquestioning “special relationship” with the state of Israel. Another is that the United States has been drawn to the Middle East mainly by the existence of vast oil reserves beneath its desert sands. Still a third is that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were America’s just deserts for her misdeeds in the region. Such notions are by no means confined to the mem
bership of al Qa’eda. The fires had scarcely been quenched and the dust had barely begun to settle in Lower Manhattan when a succession of
bien-pensants
rushed to give vent to similar theories in the press.
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The reality is a great deal more complicated. First, America’s relationship with Israel has long been characterized by friction and ambivalence. It is anything but a marriage made in heaven. Secondly, the oil-rich United States is much less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than is Western Europe or Japan. “Control” of Arabian oil reserves is a goal the United States long ago renounced; if such control were really necessary to ensure the flow of oil to the Western world, it would be the oilless Germans and the Japanese who would be pressing for it with the greatest zeal. Thirdly, the phenomenon of terrorism in the Middle East—and indeed elsewhere—has until recently had relatively little to do with the United States. What was remarkable about 9/11 was simply that it had taken so long for a major terrorist outrage to happen on American soil. And what appears to have motivated the attackers could hardly be described as a misdeed, since American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia primarily in order to defend that country and its neighbors from the aggression of another Arab state, Iraq.

So important has the Middle East been in American foreign policy during the past three decades that it is easy to forget how much less attention it used to be given.
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Before the 1950s the American presence in the Middle East was as academic as it was strategic, taking the form of such notable institutions as the American universities in Cairo and Beirut, Roberts College in Istanbul and Alborz College in Iran. In September 1946 Loy W. Henderson, the director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, defined “the main objective” of American policy in the region as being “to prevent rivalries and conflicts of interest in that area from developing into open hostilities which eventually might lead to a third world war.”
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This cast the United States in the role of benign referee at most. More binding commitments were not much sought after. It was a British decision in effect to hand the Americans responsibility for Turkey (and, for that matter, Greece) in 1947. After that the British remained the dominant outside force in the region for at least another decade and even
after the fiasco of the Suez crisis continued to consider the Persian Gulf a part of their sphere of influence.

The United States had long since acquired an economic interest in the region, it is true. From the 1920s onward, American oil companies had fought hard to establish a foothold there, forcing the reluctant British companies to grant them a stake in the Turkish (later Iraq) Petroleum Company a year after the British had struck oil at Baba Gurgur in 1927.
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It was early days; even by 1940 Middle Eastern producers were still accounting for no more than 5 percent of world production. But the Americans had by now convinced themselves of the vast untapped potential there.
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In the 1930s they worked assiduously, aided by the renegade British Arabist Harry St. John Philby, to turn the desert kingdom ruled by the Saudi family into an American satellite.
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During the Second World War they took advantage of British weakness to propose a deal: the United States would take Saudi Arabia, leaving the British Persia; Iraq and Kuwait would be shared.
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The pattern of U.S.-Saudi relations was already established: cash and arms for the Saudi royal family in return for oil concessions and military bases for the Americans.
¹⁰
The consortium of oil companies that formed the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) became a channel for royal rents; soon they were paying as much as half of their revenues to the Saudis, payments that the U.S. Treasury treated as tax-deductible.
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When John Foster Dulles became the first American secretary of state to visit the Middle East in 1953, he was impressed; the oil and other mineral resources of the region would, he declared, be “vital to our welfare.”
¹²

Yet if the United States had really believed that, it would surely have acted very differently in one fundamental respect. For nothing could have been better calculated to alienate the Arab peoples than consistent support for the state of Israel. The prompt recognition of the new state was in many ways Harry Truman’s responsibility; he insisted on it in May 1948 against the advice of the State Department.
¹³
Truman’s commitment has endured. By 1958 the paramount importance of the relationship to Israel had become an axiom of American foreign policy. In the words of a former American ambassador to Egypt, “Israel represents our oldest direct interest
in the area
…. The continuance of Israel as an independent state certainly represents a basic foreign policy commitment of the United States….”
¹⁴
Many analysts concentrate their attention on the reasons for this commitment: the political influence of the so-called Zionist lobby in the United States; feelings of guilt about the Holocaust among a wider public; the fact that Israel is a democratic oasis in the Middle East; the belief of evangelical Christians that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land is a sign of the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming. What is less frequently noticed is how often Israel and the United States have disagreed. Truman’s support for Israel did not extend to military assistance, for example. Dulles suspended aid to Israel on more than one occasion. The United States was hostile when Israel occupied Sinai and the Gaza Strip in 1956, insisting that the Israelis withdraw. It failed to ensure freedom of passage for Israeli shipping through the Strait of Tiran on the eve of the Six-Day War, despite having pledged to do so at the United Nations. Later the United States favored the internationalization of Jerusalem and expressed criticism of the Israeli policy of colonization in the territories captured from the Arabs in 1967.
¹⁵
Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has manifestly done little to serve American interests.

What really drew the United States into the Middle East in the 1950s was not Israel or oil but fear of the Soviet Union; to be precise, fear that the Russians would be able to capitalize on the crisis of the European empires as successfully in the Arab world as they had done in the Asian.
¹⁶
To begin with, as it turned out, the Russians were notably clumsy. Stalin’s advances toward Tehran backfired;
¹⁷
by comparison, the British-inspired but CIA-executed overthrow of the Iranian premier Muhammad Mussadegh, who had rashly nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, seemed to guarantee American dominance at minimal cost.
¹⁸
The American rationale for Operation Ajax was, in essence, preemptive containment. As one of the CIA operatives recalled, “It was about what the Soviets had done and what we knew about their future plans.” Iran, in his view, had been “very high” on the Russian “priority list.”
¹⁹

Some Americans had doubts about the wisdom of backing the old colonialists against a popular leader who was manifestly no Marxist. In Egypt the initial American impulse was to back the nationalist demagogue—in this case Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser—against the British; indeed, the State Department positively encouraged the Egyptian leader to demand the end of the British military presence in the Suez Canal Zone.
By 1956, however, Nasser’s flirtations with the Russians and grandstanding appeals to the rest of the Arab world had irritated Eisenhower and Dulles so much that they resolved to call his (and Khrushchev’s) bluff. The American refusal to finance Nasser’s projected Aswan Dam prompted another spectacular nationalization, this time of the Suez Canal.
²⁰
If, at this juncture, the United States had been able to control what were supposed to be two of its closest allies, Britain and Israel, things might have turned out quite differently, and not only in the Middle East. Instead the British prime minister Sir Anthony Eden agreed to a harebrained French scheme to reoccupy the Suez Canal Zone by force, on the pretext of stopping an Arab-Israeli War that the Israelis were happy to arrange. Not only did Eden fail to consult Eisenhower; he had been explicitly warned by the Americans that such a coup would not be endorsed by the United States, for the simple reason that it would look like an even more egregious neocolonial adventure than the overthrow of Mussadegh and might drive the entire Middle East apart from Israel into Khrushchev’s arms. Incredulously, Eisenhower asked: “How can we possibly support Britain and France if in doing so we lose the whole Arab world?”
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Unfortunately, Khrushchev’s public threat to use nuclear weapons
appeared
to be the reason for the Anglo-French withdrawal,
²²
whereas in reality it was the disastrous run on sterling and the American refusal to lend Britain a cent until Eden agreed to pull out. Worse, the disarray of the West gave the Russians a free hand to suppress with extreme brutality the reformist government of Imre Nagy in Hungary. Thus the United States got no credit in Cairo for pulling the plug on Eden
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and just two years later found itself unable to do anything when, at Nasser’s instigation, a group of Iraqi army officers staged a revolt in Baghdad that toppled and murdered the pro-British Hashemite monarch, Faisal II, and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said. The decision to send a force of fifteen thousand marines to Lebanon in the aftermath of this coup achieved nothing; indeed, it is hard to see what they could possibly have done there that would have influenced events in Baghdad or anywhere else. (Beirut at this time was still something of a cosmopolitan playground, very far from the war zone it later became.)
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If American strategy was driven by a desire to control Middle Eastern oil, this was a serious setback. Not long after the coup the new Iraqi government revoked the Iraqi Petroleum Company’s con
cession (thereby ending Britain’s principal gain from its successful invasion of 1917); Iraq was among the first Arab countries to nationalize its oil industry.
²⁵
Meanwhile the Saudis halted their arms purchases from the United States and declined to renew the lease on the Dhahran air base.
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Unlike Castro in Cuba, Nasser had little interest in the Soviet economic model, but he too was happy to collect such bounty as Moscow had to offer and to jeer derisively at Washington.
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BETWEEN GAZA AND THE GULF

By the end of the 1950s three things were already painfully obvious about America’s position in the Middle East. First, the Israelis regarded U.S. support as having, to all intents and purposes, no strings attached. They would do as they chose. Secondly, the American oil companies were as vulnerable as the British stake in the Suez Canal to nationalization by Arab governments that had no very obvious incentive to share the rents from their oil with foreigners. Thirdly, peaceful coexistence between Israel and its Arab neighbors was unlikely, if not impossible; somehow the United States had to minimize the damage caused by their conflict. The good news from an American standpoint was that Soviet penetration of the Middle East proved to be much less successful than might have been expected in 1958. The bad news was that there arose in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars a more dangerous—or at least less predictable—threat than Soviet penetration. This was terrorism, the original sin of the modern Middle East. What Zionist extremists had once done to drive the British out of Palestine, Palestinian extremists now did to the Israelis, once their hopes of an Arab military victory had been dashed. The Arab states brought defeat upon themselves. A two-state solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the former British mandate of Palestine was available at the outset, in the form of UN General Assembly resolution 181. The Arabs opted instead for war. Yet the combined forces of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt—supported by Saudi Arabia—failed miserably to strangle the infant state of Israel at birth. Suez was a humiliation for Britain and France, but for the Israelis it was a victory: the Gaza
Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh were seized, though afterward put under UN control; heavy losses were inflicted on Egyptian forces at relatively low cost to the Israeli Defense Forces. The Six-Day War of 1967 was a direct and legitimate response by Israel to transparent Egyptian-led preparations for a war; ten days before the first Israeli air strikes, Nasser had explicitly pledged to wipe Israel off the map. Once again the Arabs were easily beaten, once again the Israelis occupied Sinai and Gaza and now, in response to the Jordanian decision to join the Egyptian side, they also took Judea, including Jerusalem and Samaria (the West Bank), as well as the Golan Heights. Despite its initial successes, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 ended up as another botched attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria. Even with Iraqi and then Soviet assistance, the Arab armies were driven back into their own territory. By 1982 the Israelis felt confident enough to invade Lebanon.