Sowing Crisis, page 16
American policymakers killed a number of birds with this stone. First, they earned a certain measure of Syrian gratitude, in spite of Damascus’s pique at the absence of American efforts to broker another disengagement deal with the Israelis along the lines of the second Sinai disengagement agreement of April 1975. Second, they broke up a coalescing bloc of Syria, the PLO, the LNM, and a number of Arab states like Iraq and Libya that were opposed to what were called “separate agreements” with Israel, meaning American-brokered deals that gained unilateral advantage for the United States while ignoring other fronts. Third, they benefited from helping to turn Syria against the PLO, seen as the most irreducible Arab opponent of American influence and of Israel. Finally, and in some ways most important to Washington, they deeply discomfited the USSR, which saw two of its prime remaining regional allies at each other’s throat, and which was thereby put into a thoroughly uncomfortable position.
The Soviets saw perfectly well the game Kissinger was playing, but could not prevent their ally, the Syrian regime, from acting in what it saw was its vital self-interest, even if this did grave harm to other Soviet allies and to the Soviet position in the region. So the Soviets effectively did nothing to halt the Syrian military intervention, and to rescue the Palestinians and their Lebanese allies from the plight they had in some measure gotten themselves into.62 By the summer of 1976, the PLO and the LNM were besieged in Beirut and the region to its immediate south down to Sidon, cut off by an Israeli naval blockade and surrounded on all other sides without any real backing from the Soviet Union or any other major power.63 They were at war facing the LF to the north, the Syrian Army to the east, and in the south the Israelis and the proxy force (called the South Lebanon Army) that they were already building up under a renegade Lebanese Army major, Saad Haddad.
The damage that this brutal initial 1975–76 phase of the war, which involved a whole range of external actors as well as Lebanese factions, did to Lebanon, and to the civilian population, Lebanese and Palestinian, was immense. Equally gravely, it set in motion fifteen years of sporadic but often fierce warfare that in the end destroyed large parts of Beirut, consumed the country, shattered its economy and society, and traumatized a generation. One searches in vain for signs that either of the superpowers (or any regional power), tried seriously to halt the carnage at this early stage. Instead, both worked assiduously to gain advantage at the expense of the other, with the Americans in the end making out far better than the Soviets.
A brief lull was finally worked out under Arab League auspices in the fall of 1976, as the Syrians, who had already achieved their basic objectives, were prevented by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states from finishing off the battered PLO and LNM. The respite was brief for Lebanon, however, as the war resumed in different forms and configurations in the succeeding years, with Syrian troops turning around and fighting against their erstwhile allies, the LF, in 1977, and Israeli forces invading to root out the PLO in the southern part of Lebanon in 1978. Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty served as the backdrop as the smoldering Lebanese conflict exploded periodically into renewed violence. These events once again polarized the region along Cold War lines, driving the PLO and Syria back into uneasy alignment with each other and with the USSR, and reinforcing the already strong American-Israeli-Egyptian axis. Both of these Cold War–derived groupings found in Lebanon a convenient battlefield.
It would be possible to chart in similar detail how American and Soviet policies driven by Cold War imperatives exacerbated the Lebanese crisis over the next several years, but one more illustration will suffice: the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its immediate sequels. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that the 1982 war in Lebanon was a direct result of the renewed Cold War chill that was produced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the American response to it, most notably under the new Reagan administration, with its full complement of vintage Cold Warriors. Nevertheless, the much more adversarial relationship between the superpowers, especially in the first years of the Reagan administration, considerably facilitated the decisions of the Begin government and its dominant figure, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, to invade Lebanon, with the aim of uprooting and destroying the PLO, eliminating Syrian influence, and creating a Lebanese puppet regime. Gen. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, was much taken by Sharon, by the evidence of his own autobiography, and gave the Israelis the green light they wanted for this ambitious scheme.64
What was quite striking in this situation, in which the United States and its powerful ally were telegraphing their aggressive intentions in Lebanon (it was an open secret in Beirut, Washington, and elsewhere in the spring of 1982 that Israel would invade, and the only surprise was exactly when), was how flaccid the Soviet response was. The USSR indeed sent an envoy, Dr. Yevgeni Primakov, an academic, an Arabist, and a senior Communist Party figure, to Beirut in late spring 1982, essentially to convince PLO officials that the USSR had quite limited capabilities and was only able to extend a defensive shield to the territory of Syria itself. He made it absolutely clear to his Palestinian interlocutors that the Soviets did not have the capacity to protect the PLO, Syrian forces in Lebanon, or Lebanon itself when Israel launched its expected attack.65 Soviet actions once the war started in June 1982 bore out Primakov’s words: the Israeli military was able to operate freely against Syrian forces and the PLO in Lebanon, and in all areas of Lebanon. It did so with the full, unstinting support of the United States,66 ultimately expelling the PLO, occupying much of Lebanon, and helping to install a friendly regime in Beirut under Bashir Gemayel, commander of the LF, all of this without the Soviet Union lifting a finger. This was all portrayed as a great victory over Soviet influence by the Reagan administration, which immediately after the war floated an initiative to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict on American-Israeli terms, the so-called Shultz initiative (named for the new secretary of state, George P. Shultz), now that the PLO had apparently been crushed, Syria had been defeated, and the Soviet Union had been shown to be a paper tiger. The mood of euphoria and Cold War triumphalism in Washington did not last long, however.
In very short order, Israel’s apparent victory in Lebanon and its attempt, together with the Reagan administration, to exploit it to create a permanent structure of power favorable to Western interests in that country and the region both collapsed like a house of cards. Public opinion in the United States was deeply alienated first as Israel bombarded the besieged city of Beirut for weeks on end. The reaction in both Israel and the United States was even more negative after the capture of the city and the departure of the PLO, when Israeli forces in control of the region introduced into refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila members of right-wing Lebanese militias allied with them, who massacred over two thousand unarmed Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. These camps were under Israeli military control, in a city occupied by the Israeli army, and were lit overnight by Israeli army flares as the butchers went about their work.67 The architect of the Lebanese invasion, Ariel Sharon, lost his post as defense minister in the wake of the conclusions of an official Israeli commission of inquiry, which held him and senior Israeli officers indirectly responsible for the massacre.
Moreover, having driven out the PLO, which had carried out military operations against Israel relatively ineffectually from South Lebanon, Israel soon found itself facing sustained Lebanese armed resistance to its occupation of the Lebanese South. This proved far more tenacious than that of the Palestinians to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For unlike the Palestinians, the Lebanese groups resisting the Israeli occupation had the advantage of open borders with friendly allies, mainly Syria and Iran, which were able to supply copious supplies of weapons and other forms of support. After eighteen years of a bloody and futile rearguard action, Israel was ultimately obliged to withdraw its occupation forces unconditionally from Lebanon in 2000, leaving the south of the country in the hands of a far more formidable military foe than the PLO had ever been. This was Hizballah, an entirely new enemy dedicated to militant armed resistance, an enemy that Israel itself had called into being by its occupation. In the words of Ehud Barak, chief of Israeli Military Intelligence from 1983 to 1985, deputy chief of staff from 1987 to 1991, and chief of staff from then until 1995, who knew well whereof he spoke: “We entered into Lebanon … [and] Hizbullah was created as a result of our stay there.”68
Even more quickly, things turned sour for the American and French forces that had landed in Lebanon in August 1982, originally to supervise the withdrawal of the PLO, immediately after which they were precipitously withdrawn. They then returned to cope with the consequences of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, which the United States had faithlessly promised the PLO to prevent.69 There they rapidly found themselves confronting the armed hostility of forces representing a large majority of Lebanese. American forces could not prevail, in spite of the full might of the United States, including the American battleship New Jersey, which bombarded the Lebanese mountains with its sixteen-inch guns. Ferocious subsequent attacks on these troops (hundreds of U.S. Marines and French paratroopers were killed in simultaneous suicide attacks on their barracks) and on American interests in Lebanon soon broke the political will of the Reagan administration. American and allied troops withdrew ignominiously, bringing an end to the ill-advised attempt to create an American-Israeli client regime in Lebanon, and to tie that country to Israel by a peace treaty imposed on it while it was under Israeli occupation. An American policy driven by Cold War imperatives and based on ignorance of the real forces on the ground had proven utterly bankrupt. It was undermined not by the increasingly enfeebled Soviets, but rather by the savage realities of a Lebanon that had been turned into a battlefield in large measure by the callous machinations of the superpowers and their clients, ruthlessly seeking advantage over one another at the expense of the hapless Lebanese people and Palestinian refugees on their soil.
The PLO, too, suffered from this situation, and from its reliance on its waning superpower patron. In the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had gravely exacerbated strained relations with the United States by its doomed invasion of Afghanistan, thereby helping to bring into office a ferociously anti-Soviet American president, Ronald Reagan. When the United States reacted vigorously in a variety of realms, among them via support for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to destroy the PLO, the USSR thereupon showed itself so feeble that it could not even extend serious support to one of its few remaining Middle Eastern clients in a moment of its greatest need. It once again let down the PLO, as it had in 1976 when the Palestinians confronted Syria.
Although the Cold War was winding down, and the Soviet Union was on its last legs, to the uninitiated it may still have appeared like a serious rival to the United States. No one who experienced the ten-week Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, as I did, would ever have made that mistake. Thus, only for those who could not see the Soviet weakness revealed in Beirut in 1982, and in many other Middle Eastern contexts—in other words, only for those blinded by preconceptions and ideology—was the collapse of the USSR in 1989–90 a surprise. This collapse took place at a particularly crucial moment in the evolution of another Middle Eastern arena where the Soviet Union’s Cold War policies and those of its American rival had gravely exacerbated events, the conflict between Iran and Iraq.
THE IRAN-IRAQ CONFLICT
As I showed in earlier chapters, the involvement of the Soviet Union and the United States in Iran go back to the beginnings of the Cold War and before. After the American-British-initiated coup that brought down the elected Mosaddeq government and reinstalled the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah in 1953, American influence predominated in Iran for the next quarter century, as part of a policy driven largely by Cold War considerations. This deep and long-lasting American intervention in Iran’s internal affairs, the close relations between Washington and Tehran under the last shah, and the latter’s dependence on the United States in a number of spheres became constants of Middle Eastern politics, and determined alignments and political dispositions throughout the region. The importance of this alignment can be deduced from the fact that the 1979 collapse of the American policy constructed on the foundation of the shah’s precarious regime has continued to produce regional and global reverberations over the decades until the present day. A whole generation of American policymakers was traumatized by it, as was American public opinion, with the 444-day crisis involving American diplomats being held hostage in Tehran an ongoing sore point. Iranians were at least as severely affected, if not more so, by the close U.S. relationship with the hated shah, and the hostility from Washington that followed his disappearance.
Iraq was an entirely different matter. A state created on Ottoman foundations but in its modern form by British colonialism in the 1920s, it had been a pillar of British regional power for decades. After the 1958 revolution overthrew the monarchy and ended paramount British influence in Iraq, however, both the Soviet Union and the United States became much more deeply involved there. The Soviets at this point had a major ally in Iraq in the powerful Iraqi Communist Party, one of the biggest and most active in the Arab world.70 This party had played a central role in the popular opposition to the hated British-supported monarchy, and came to exercise strong influence in the regime of Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, which emerged from the 1958 coup.
Given the Cold War environment prevailing in Washington, the strength of the Iraqi Communist Party was inevitably a source of abiding concern to American policymakers. As elsewhere, they developed ties to forces that were seen as capable of opposing local Communists, in the case of Iraq most notably the Iraqi Ba‘th Party. In the internecine conflict between the two parties that reached a peak of intensity during the Kassem regime from 1958 until 1963, and that continued without respite thereafter, the CIA provided information to the Ba‘thists that helped them to arrest and kill thousands of Iraqi Communists during a brief period when the Ba‘th Party was precariously in power, from February until August 1963.71 The ferocious competition between the Iraqi Ba‘th Party and the Iraqi Communist Party continued for decades, and although whenever the Ba‘thists were in power they were occasionally obliged to allow the Communists to operate under tight constraints, they denied them any access to real decision-making.
Once the Ba‘th Party took firm control in Baghdad in July 1968, dominating the country for the next thirty-five years with a fist of iron, Iraq’s relations with Washington tended to be a function of the competition between the superpowers, and of the balance of power between Iraq and its traditional regional rival, Iran. Following the 1958 revolution, Iraq was generally aligned with Moscow against Iran, which as we have seen was closely linked to Washington until the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Under Ba‘th rule from 1968 onward, this pattern generally continued. In the on again, off again confrontations between Iran and Iraq, therefore, there eventually developed the same kind of Cold War polarization that characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict from the 1960s onward, with Iran firmly aligned with the United States, and Iraq with the Soviets.
In supporting their clients against one another, both superpowers used all available means, as they did elsewhere. Thus, in the mid-1970s, the shah of Iran cynically exploited and covertly supported a rebellion against the Baghdad government by the Iraqi Kurds as a means of exerting pressure on his Iraqi rivals. As we saw in chapter 1, the United States supported this approach with its own covert assets (as did Israel72), and then looked on coldly as the shah dropped the Kurds once he had achieved his aims with the 1975 Algiers agreement. Needless to say, this allowed the Ba‘thist regime to extract its brutal revenge completely unhindered against Iraqi Kurdish civilians, whose leaders had mistakenly come to rely on their Iranian, American, and Israeli patrons. It is important to recognize that there was no particular animus toward the Kurds in Kissinger’s dismissal of an aide’s shocked reaction at this betrayal with the words quoted in chapter 1: “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”73 This was just part of the Cold War game, as a major client dropped its minor client and the superpower patron looked on impassively. Kurdish civilians paid most of the price for their people’s being dragged into this great-power game, as they did again and again in subsequent years, for example in the savage gassings at Halabja and elsewhere during the Iran-Iraq War and in the brutal suppression of the Kurdish revolt against the Ba‘th regime after the 1991 Gulf War. The fact that this price was in some measure inflicted as a result of the cold instrumentalism of American and Soviet Cold War policies, and those of the clients they armed and supported, is rarely acknowledged in the sanctimonious cant about the sufferings of the Kurdish people that has been heard in Washington in recent years.
In a similarly callous fashion, the USSR never at any stage allowed the Iraqi Ba‘th regime’s deep anticommunism, or its almost unremittingly brutal treatment of Iraqi Communists, to interfere with Moscow’s generally good relations with the Ba‘th regime. Strategic Cold War imperatives that involved countering the United States were clearly far more important to the Soviet leaders than protecting their Iraqi comrades from Saddam Hussein’s murderous henchmen. Such Soviet behavior was not, of course, restricted to Iraq. One can follow the contortions of Soviet ideologists who attempted in a whole body of ostensibly academic literature to demonstrate the “progressive” nature of regimes such as the Iraqi, the Egyptian, and the Syrian—in spite of these regimes’ often anticommunist domestic policies and sometimes savage repression of their respective communist parties—in order to justify the USSR’s Cold War–driven alignment with them.74 It is not a pretty picture. The wonder is that so many Communists in these countries were able to maintain their faith in Marxist-Leninist ideology and their loyalty to the USSR in spite of the cold, unideological, realpolitik nature of Soviet policy.75
