Sowing Crisis, page 17
Even more cynical behavior by both superpowers followed the Iranian Revolution. This upheaval, which took place under the slogan “neither East nor West,” and marked a serious attempt by the new Iranian Islamic regime to follow a nonaligned path between the superpowers, deeply discomfited both Washington and Moscow. As we have seen, American policy under the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of “Vietnamization” had counted on building up powerful regional allies that could play the role of proxies after direct American intervention in different parts of the world became more difficult in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. I have already pointed out that Iran under the shah was a key Middle Eastern pillar of this strategy, and that the collapse of his regime was an extraordinarily telling blow to American policy in that region and to American prestige worldwide.
The virulence of the anti-Americanism that had been building up in Iran as a reaction to over a quarter century of unceasing American interference in Iranian domestic affairs was symbolized by the humiliating treatment of American diplomats who were held hostage in Tehran for over a year after the Islamic Revolution. Understandably, this cruel behavior shocked and angered Americans, who knew little of their country’s unpopular history of systematic meddling in Iran. The hostage crisis set in train a popular hostility against Iran and Islam in American public opinion that, far from abating in the intervening decades, has only been exacerbated by subsequent events. At the level of American policymakers, there were fears that Iran would spread its Islamic revolution to neighboring countries, including key American clients with Shi‘a populations on the southern shores of the Gulf, notably Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Finally, revolutionary Iran, as a major oil producer, played a militant role in pushing prices upward in the oil-producing cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). All of this caused Washington to look with serious dismay on the new regime in Tehran, and to display consistent hostility toward it after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The Soviet Union was no less concerned and no less hostile. Iran under the shah had been a major American client, but the monarch’s relations with the Soviet Union had generally been correct. The shah indeed had purchased military equipment from the USSR, benefiting from favorable prices and the simplicity and reliability of some Soviet weapons systems. At the same time, he intentionally provoked the concern of Washington and prodded it to be more forthcoming in meeting Iranian arms requests. Moscow now found, to its consternation, that in place of a conservative regime that rigorously suppressed the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, but was not aggressive toward the Soviet Union, Iran was now dominated by a fiercely ideological religious regime that was viscerally hostile to communism and the USSR, and even more savagely repressed the Tudeh party than had the shah. Even worse, and most ominously, the new Islamic regime threatened to proselytize Muslims in the southern republics of the USSR with its fervent anticommunist religious radicalism. Soviet policymakers were also concerned that revolutionary Iran would complicate the USSR’s already difficult situation in neighboring Afghanistan to the east, where Soviet troops faced an uphill struggle, and that the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini might destabilize the USSR’s ally in Ba‘thist Iraq to the west. For the Soviets, the Islamic revolutionary regime projected threatening instability in all directions.
The two status-quo-oriented superpowers, essentially conservative in many respects, were thus both horrified by the radical anti-American and anti-Soviet revolutionary zeal of the new regime. Both acted decisively to rein it in. In the absence of unimpeachable evidence, we can only guess at the covert activities they may have engaged in, together with their allies, to sabotage the new Islamic regime in Tehran.76 In the more public realm, however, it was common knowledge that American policymakers and their client regimes in the Arab world strongly encouraged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his ill-advised 1980 attack on Iran, which sparked an eight-year war that proved catastrophic for both countries.77
The United States and its European allies extended various forms of support to the Iraqi war effort, including the United States removing Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in March 1982. This made Iraq eligible to purchase a wide range of high-tech “dual-use” items, including weapons, and thereafter with its allies West Germany and France provided some of the technology necessary for Iraq to produce internationally banned weapons, notably poison gas. Equally important, the United States and its Western allies protected Iraq from suffering any international sanctions when it used these illegal weapons against both Iranian forces and its own Kurdish population. This is clear from official U.S. government documents that detail American support for Iraq in this period, notably acquiescence in its use of chemical weapons, obtained by the National Security Archive. These documents include accounts of the support extended personally to Saddam Hussein during two visits to Baghdad in December 1983 and March 1984 by American presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld.78 Additionally, during the war the CIA “provided intelligence for Iraq to use against Iran,” most likely in the form of satellite photographs of Iranian military dispositions.79
The Soviet Union at the same time was offering absolutely essential military support to the Iraqi war effort. The Soviets provided the bulk of the vast supply of imported weapons and munitions that Iraq used in its eight-year war with Iran. These weapons purchases led to Iraq running up a nearly $13-billion debt to Moscow.80 Iraq itself manufactured some Soviet-designed weapons in factories provided by the USSR, mainly light arms, as well as much of the ammunition it expended. Importantly, Moscow also carefully refrained from condemning Iraq’s massive employment of poison gas on the battlefield, the first time any state had employed it since fascist Italy did so in Ethiopia in 1936. Iran soon responded in kind, and with the use by both powers of these appalling weapons, a major barrier to the utilization of so-called weapons of mass destruction had fallen.81 The collusion of the superpowers and their allies was essential to preventing the United Nations from acting to halt Iraq’s initial employment of poison gas in violation of this important international restraint on barbarism in warfare, or to prevent Iran’s later use of similar means.
Even as it was massively arming Iraq, the USSR also supplied arms to Iran, notably replacements for those purchased under the shah, as well as some new weapons systems. Equally cynically, and perhaps even more surprising, the Reagan administration secretly supplied Iran with American weapons and spare parts, including TOW antitank missiles, Hawk antiaircraft missiles, and spare parts, both directly and via America’s ally Israel. This harebrained scheme was part of the amateurish arms-for-hostages diplomacy run out of the White House basement by Lt. Col. Oliver North and his coconspirators. The entire sordid and illegal scheme was later exposed and developed into the Iran-Contra scandal, when it was revealed that the proceeds from these sales were used to finance covert operations in Nicaragua against the express intent of legislation passed by Congress.82 At the same time as the CIA was providing similar information to the Iraqis, it also offered Iran “battlefield intelligence for the war against Iraq” as part of the Iran-Contra deal.83
In the case of both the USSR and the United States, a similar hostility toward what they saw as the destabilizing radicalism of the new Islamic regime in Tehran drove their policies, in particular the basic support of both for Iraq. At the same time, the contradictory policies that led both to extend some support to Iran were also driven by their obsessive rivalry with each other, and by the fear of each that the other might secure a decisive advantage with either of the two combatant powers. In fact, a reported remark of Henry Kissinger’s, that the ideal outcome for the United States would have been for both powers to lose, may best have reflected the true basis of the tortuous policies of Washington and Moscow.84
The duplicitous support of both superpowers for both sides in this savage eight-year war was a particularly sordid result of the uncompromising rivalry that finally ended with the demise of both the USSR and the Cold War, only a couple of years after the Iran-Iraq War came to an end. In the Middle East, the superpower rivalry had significant direct and indirect consequences, exacerbating, sharpening, and intensifying regional conflicts, and fueling them with massive amounts of sophisticated and deadly armaments. Most of the estimated 1 million casualties suffered by both sides in the Iran-Iraq War were inflicted by weapons delivered by the two superpowers, in sales from which both profited handsomely. The same was undoubtedly the case for the weapons used to inflict most of the casualties in the other two Middle Eastern conflicts I have surveyed (in which the total number of casualties on all sides was considerably smaller than in the Iran-Iraq War).
The harm inflicted by the weapons they manufactured and sold was only one indication of the cost of the superpower rivalry, a cost that is rarely weighed when either the Cold War or these conflicts are analyzed. This chapter has shown part of the price paid by the peoples of the Middle East when their region became a premier battlefield of the Cold War. But this price was not only paid in the form of the worsening and prolongation of conflicts in the Middle East. Just as peace in different parts of this highly penetrated region was probably measurably retarded by the superpowers’ adoption of local conflicts as proxy wars in their duel with each other, so was the political evolution of the countries of the region. These countries paid a high price in this realm as well, in the form of the distortion of their political systems, the sabotaging of democracy, and the curtailment of human rights.
V
THE COLD WAR AND THE
UNDERMINING OF DEMOCRACY
Since World War II, there has been halting but nonetheless significant progress toward establishing democratic, constitutional regimes in many areas of the globe. One region, however, stands out as a glaring exception to the general picture of the gradual spread of democratic systems worldwide. This region is the Middle East, which for nearly half a century has been an almost universally bleak desert as far as the development of vibrant, full-fledged democratic systems is concerned. The very few exceptions to this rule are themselves hedged around with conditions.1 All that has seemed to thrive in recent years in this vast zone of undemocratic governance stretching from the Atlantic to the Caucasus and the frontiers of Pakistan and Afghanistan have been autocracies, kleptocracies, absolute monarchies, and other forms of despotic and authoritarian rule, some covered with a transparent fig-leaf of sham “democratic” forms.
Indeed, in some respects the situation is palpably worse today in many Middle Eastern countries than it was in the 1940s and 1950s, when various forms of parliamentary democracy, albeit marred by significant flaws in each case, obtained in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, as well as in Turkey and Israel. At that time, it appeared as if countries in the Middle East might have the possibility of continuing to evolve toward more democratic forms of governance. That has certainly not been the case in the intervening decades down to the present. By contrast, many areas of Latin America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and even some parts of Africa, all of which were bywords for arbitrary, or autocratic, or otherwise undemocratic governance for the first decades of the postindependence period after 1945, are today characterized by new and often thriving democracies, reinforced by economic growth, the expansion of new middle classes, and the growing maturity of constitutional institutions.
With little or no serious historical or other scholarly underpinning, a plethora of commentaries purport to ascribe the undemocratic nature of most current Middle Eastern regimes to something inherent in Islam, the predominant religion in the region. These ahistorical, essentialist, and occasionally borderline-racist theories (of the genre “Muslims are incapable of …”) are belied by the growth of democracy, albeit often in a troubled fashion, in large majority-Muslim countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nigeria. They are belied as well by the lengthy history of struggles for democracy and constitutionalism in Middle Eastern countries between the latter part of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. These go back to the Ottoman constitutional periods from 1876 to 1878 and 1908 to 1918; the struggle between the autocratic Egyptian khedive and an assembly that insisted on more power in the 1870s and until 1882; and the first Iranian constitutional period from 1905 to 1911. While none of these efforts were ultimately successful, they reveal the attraction of democratic and constitutional ideals for the elites and many of the people of this region. These struggles to achieve more democratic governance continued under the sometimes unstable parliamentary regimes that lasted in more than a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries for many decades during the twentieth century. Very rarely, if ever, over the years down to World War II did the European great powers use their influence in favor of democracy or constitutionalism in these countries. They often did quite the opposite, subverting democracy, aligning with autocrats, and preventing free expression of public opinion.2 Notwithstanding all of this evidence for the compatibility of democracy with Islamic societies, and the establishment, albeit sometimes temporary and sometimes checkered, of democratic systems in the Middle East over several generations since the 1870s, there clearly is a serious problem today where democracy is concerned in most of that region.
In some measure, that problem has to do with some of the well-known obstacles to democratic governance: much of the Middle East is certainly affected by having powerful states with a tradition of strong rulers; elites loath to give up their privileges or their control of the political system; high levels of poverty and illiteracy in some sectors in certain countries; and weak political parties, unions, and professional associations. In an earlier era, the Middle East also suffered from the constant interference of European powers, some of which, like absolutist tsarist Russia, were ideologically opposed to democracy in any form, and all of which tended to undermine democratic regimes whenever these obstructed their economic or strategic interests. In the case of the Middle East, a region that was subject to a very high degree of such external intervention, this was a particular problem for the Ottoman and Persian constitutional experiments and for democratic governance in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and a number of Middle Eastern countries thereafter. These and other specific obstacles certainly prevented greater progress toward democracy before World War II, and have done so again over the past sixty-five years.
Like most historians, I hesitate to offer a single explanation for a multidimensional problem like the retarded growth of democracy in a region as vast and varied as the Middle East over so long a period. Nevertheless, it is worth considering whether the Cold War, which I have tried to show in preceding chapters played a particularly important role in the Middle East, may have been a factor that contributed to this bleak situation. For the Cold War was only another episode in this region’s recent history of being a target for external intervention, which rendered it, to use L. Carl Brown’s term once again, a highly “penetrated” system for more than two hundred years.3 And as I showed in the previous chapter, the Cold War seriously exacerbated the conflicts that erupted in that region between 1945 and 1990. This in turn intensified the wars that scarred the Middle East during most of this period, and that still persist there.
Often these conflicts and the wars they engendered have been described as if they were sui generis, as if they were all age-old, particularly complex, and particularly resistant to analysis in terms of standard categories. Even cursory examination shows that this is simply not the case: the Iran-Iraq and Arab-Israeli conflicts, to take the two most prominent examples, far from having been ongoing since time immemorial, are essentially products of the twentieth century. The fact that the current protagonists (for complex reasons having to do with the obsessive need of modern nationalisms to manufacture ancient roots) quite arbitrarily choose to look back to Abraham and Moses, the Jebusites and the Israelites, the Sassanians and the Umayyads, and the Safavids and the Ottomans in framing their disputes does not make this any less the case, or these far-fetched parallels any more correct. For all their undoubted complexity, these and most other conflicts in the region, like that over the western Sahara, or between Libya and Chad, or in Sudan or the Horn of Africa, or those involving the Kurds or Lebanon, are essentially common, garden-variety outcomes of colonization, the arbitrary drawing of boundaries by the colonial powers, the decolonization process, and the rise of nation-state nationalism. Similar conflicts, with similar roots, can be found in every region of the formerly colonized world.
Moreover, Middle Eastern countries have witnessed precisely the same processes whereby war has led to the strengthening of the executive authority at the expense of other branches of government and at the expense of the citizenry and its rights, which is well known to have operated in countries in other regions. For examples, one need only think of the governments of Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau in World War I, or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II, or of George W. Bush after September 11, 2001. Of the Middle East, as of any other region of the world, one can say with James Madison that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”4 If this is true in countries with old and well-established constitutional systems like Britain, the United States, and France, it is all the more the case in the Middle East, where there is such a strong tradition of powerful executive authority, a tradition that stretches back to the very first states and empires in human history, established there well over six millennia ago. So in the wars and nagging conflicts that have afflicted this region since World War II, wars whose flames I have shown in the preceding chapter were often fanned by the superpowers in their heated competition with each other, and that reinforced an already strong tradition of executive monopolization of power, we have one possible cause of the retardation of the spread of democracy in the Middle East over the past sixty years or so. There were other causes.
