The Modern Middle East (82 page)

28.
Hiro,
Longest War,
p. 250; Islamic Republic News Agency, September 23, 2000.

29.
Hiro,
Longest War,
p. 250.

30.
Karsh and Rautsi,
Saddam Hussein,
p. 201.

31.
Simon Henderson,
Instant Empire: Saddam Hussein’s Ambition for Iraq
(San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), p. 219.

32.
Quoted in Laurie Mylroie, “Saddam Hussein’s Invasion of Kuwait: A Premeditated Act,” in
The Iraqi Aggression against Kuwait: Strategic Lessons and Implications for Europe,
ed. Wolfgang F. Danspeckgruber and Charles Tripp (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 44.

33.
Hiro,
Longest War,
pp. 60–61.

34.
Bruce W. Jentleson,
With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam,
1982–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 46. For other examples of U.S.-Iraqi cooperation during the Iran-Iraq War, see Adam Tarock,
The Superpowers’ Involvement in the Iran-Iraq War
(Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1998), pp. 80–90.

35.
Jean Edward Smith,
George Bush’s War
(New York: Henry Holt, 1992), p. 9.

36.
Members of the coalition included Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The contribution of some of the countries was almost purely symbolic: 300 troops by Afghanistan, 150 by Honduras, 500 by Niger, and so on.

37.
The resolution was supported by Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, and the UAE. Iraq, Libya, and the PLO opposed it. Algeria and Yemen abstained, and Jordan, Mauritania, and Sudan expressed reservations about the resolution. Dilip Hiro,
Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War
(New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 128.

38.
Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh,
The Gulf Conflict,
1990–1991
:
Diplomacy and War in the New World Order
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 325. Nevertheless, Freedman and Karsh cite an analyst (p. 312) who claimed that some fifty out of the eight hundred strategic targets had been misidentified.

39.
Ibid., pp. 333–37.

40.
Quoted in Hiro,
Desert Shield to Desert Storm,
p. 387.

41.
The Iraqi government’s maltreatment of Shiʿites and Kurds has been well documented. See, for example, Saïd K. Aburish,
Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), pp. 122–23, and Kanan Makiya,
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World
(New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 152–53.

42.
Makiya,
Cruelty and Silence,
p. 152. According to Makiya, Kurdish leaders put the number of killed at 180,000.

43.
Ibid., p. 219.

44.
Ismael,
International Relations,
pp. 52–56.

45.
See Hussein J. Agha and Ahmad S. Khalidi,
Syria and Iran: Rivalry and Cooperation
(New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1995).

46.
R. Stephen Humphreys,
Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 82.

47.
Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Middle East Regional System,” in
The Foreign Policies of Middle East States,
ed. Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), p. 49.

48.
Richard K. Herrmann and R. William Ayres, “The New Geopolitics of the Gulf: Forces for Change and Stability,” in
The Persian Gulf at the Millennium: Essays in Politics, Economy, Security, and Religion,
ed. Gary G. Sick and Lawrence G. Potter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 38.

49.
Bahgat Korany, “The Arab World and the New Balance of Power in the New Middle East,” in
Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration,
ed. Michael C. Hudson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 47–48.

50.
Michael N. Barnett,
Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. ix.

51.
Shibley Telhami and Michael Barnett, “Introduction: Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” in
Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East,
ed. Shibley Telhami and Michael Barnett (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 13–14.

52.
Hinnebusch, “Middle East Regional System,” p. 49.

53.
Shimon Peres,
The New Middle East
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 60.

54.
Hinnebusch, “Middle East Regional System,” p. 48.

55.
Korany, “Arab World,” pp. 51–52.

56.
Ibid., p. 51.

57.
To keep the historical narrative unbroken, the following section examines the role of Islamic fundamentalism insofar as the specific events surrounding the September 11 attacks are concerned. Chapter 7 offers a more detailed analysis of the multiple causes and consequences, and the various manifestations, of political Islam, including Islamic fundamentalism.

58.
David A. Kaplan,
The Accidental President
(New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

59.
Fouad Ajami, “The Uneasy Imperium: Pax Americana in the Middle East,” in
How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War,
ed. James F. Hoge and Gideon Rose (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2001), p. 15.

60.
On American support for Israel, in their best-selling and controversial book
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write: “For the past four decades, the United States has provided Israel with a level of material and diplomatic support that dwarfs what it provides to other countries. That aid is largely unconditional: no matter what Israel does, the level of support remains largely unchanged.” They go on to argue that “the United States has also undertaken policies in the broader Middle East that reflect Israel’s preferences,” a situation that “has no equal in American history” and “is due primarily to the activities of the Israel lobby.” John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt,
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 7–8.

61.
Alvin Rabushka, “Why Aid to Israel Hurts . . . Israelis,”
Hoover Digest,
no. 3 (1998): 109–12. According to Rabushka, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, American aid to Israel totaled around $1 billion a year. It thereafter steadily increased, reaching some $4 billion by the late 1990s. A 2010 report by the Congressional Research Service, prepared for members of the U.S. Congress, puts the total annual U.S. aid to Israel at around $2.8 billion. According to the report, in 2007 the Bush administration asked the U.S. Congress to increase U.S. assistance to Israel by $6 billion over the next decade. Jeremy Sharp, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” Congressional Research Service Report RL33222, September 16, 2010, p. 2,
www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl33222.pdf
.

62.
Taylor,
Superpowers and the Middle East,
p. 62.

63.
Paul Findley,
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1989), p. 25. For more on how in the United States the Israel lobby guides the policy process, dominates public discourse on issues related to Israel and its foes, and influences foreign policy toward Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, see Mearsheimer and Walt,
Israel Lobby.

64.
Shibley Telhami, 2006
Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey,
2006,
http://sadat.umd.edu/new%20surveys/surveys.htm
(under “Results”), 2008
Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey,
2008,
www.brookings.edu/∼/media/events/2008/4/14%20middle%20east/0414_middle_east_telhami.pdf
, and 2009
Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey,
2009,
www.brookings.edu/∼/media/Files/events/2009/0519_arab_opinion/2009_arab_public_opinion_poll.pdf
, all three prepared by the University of Maryland, with Zogby International.

65.
Telhami, 2006
Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey.

66.
Telhami, 2009
Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey.

67.
Nadia El-Shazly and Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Challenge of Security in the Post–Gulf War Middle East System,” in Hinnebusch and Ehteshami,
Foreign Policies,
p. 73.

68.
Neamatollah Najoumi,
The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan: Mass Mobilization, Civil War, and the Future of the Region
(New York: Palgrave Press, 2002), p. 222.

69.
Ahmad Rashid,
Taliban
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 130.

70.
Ibid., p. 133.

71.
Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Faux Realism: Spin versus Substance in the Bush Foreign Policy Doctrine,”
Foreign Policy,
no. 125 (July–August 2001): 81–82.

72.
The 2002
U.S. National Security Strategy
report, issued by the White House, states: “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.” White House,
The National Security Strategy of the United States, September
2002 (Washington, DC: White House, 2002), p. 6. For more on the Bush Doctrine, see also François Heisbourg, “A Work in Progress: The Bush Doctrine and Its Consequences,”
Washington Quarterly
26 (Spring 2003): 75–88.

73.
For the full text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech, see “President Delivers State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002,
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html
.

74.
U.S. Department of Defense,
Base Structure Report, Fiscal Year
2008
Baseline
(Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2008), p. 2.

75.
Richard L. Berke and Janet Elder, “After the Attacks: The Poll; Public Voices Overwhelming Support for the Use of Force against Terrorism,”
New York Times,
September 17, 2001, p. 5. Only a month before the attacks, the president’s popularity had been as low as 50 percent.

76.
By far the most thorough account of such plans is presented by the investigative journalist Bob Woodward in his
Plan of Attack
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

77.
For the full text of President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, see “President Delivers ‘State of the Union,’” January 28, 2003,
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html
.

78.
Data collected from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of 2012, under “Countries,” “Iraq: Overview/Data,”
www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=IZ
.

79.
See, for example, Douglas Feith and Frank Gaffney, “A Continuing Botch-Up of U.S. Policy,”
Jerusalem Post,
March 9, 1992; Douglas Feith, “An Alliance That Threatens World Order,”
Jerusalem Post,
May 30, 1991; Chris Toensing and Ian Urbina, “Bush’s Middle East Policy: Look to His Advisers,”
Foreign Policy in Focus,
December 1, 2000, pp. 9–12,
www.fpif.org/articles/bushs_middle_east_policy_look_to_his_advisers
.

80.
In January 1998, a group of well-known conservative intellectuals and political figures affiliated with the Project for the New American Century, a nonprofit organization set up “to promote American global leadership,” wrote an open letter to President Clinton calling on his administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power and to “undertake military action [against Iraq] as diplomacy is clearly failing.” The authors of the letter included, among others, future secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and a number of other highly influential figures in the Bush administration, such as Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Richard Perle. The text of the letter, “Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,” January 26, 1998, is available on the group’s website at
www.newamerican-century.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
.

81.
United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1441, November 8, 2002, pp. 3, 5.

82.
Hans Blix, “Briefing of the Security Council,”
UN News Service,
February 14, 2003.

83.
Judith S. Yaphe, “War and Occupation in Iraq: What Went Right? What Could Go Wrong?”
Middle East Journal
57 (Summer 2003): 393.

84.
Patricia Weiss Fagen,
Iraqi Refugees: Seeking Stability in Syria and Jordan,
occasional paper, Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service in
Qatar, Center for International and Regional Studies, 2009, p. 4,
www12.georgetown.edu/sfs/qatar/cirs/PatriciaFagenCIRSOccasionalPaper2009.pdf
.

85.
According to the website IraqBodyCount.org at
www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
, this number represents documented civilian deaths, and the actual number may be much higher. Another study, this one by the British medical journal
Lancet,
did put the number much higher, maintaining that from the start of the invasion until July 2006, some 654,965 Iraqis, or an estimated 2.5 percent of the country’s total population, had lost their lives as a consequence of the war. Gilbert Burnham et al., “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,”
Lancet
369, no. 9545 (2006): 1421. The cited study did face criticism on grounds of its methodology and the accuracy of its data, although the authors have stood by their assertions. For some of the criticism against the study and its authors’ rebuttal, see Johan von Schreeb et al., “Mortality in Iraq/Authors’ Reply,”
Lancet
369, no. 9556 (2007): 101–5.