Sowing Crisis, page 19
The Iranian coup was a crucial turning point for the United States in the Middle East, as had been Stalin’s unprecedented bullying of Turkey and Iran in 1945–46 for Soviet policy in the region. In a certain peculiar sense, both superpowers had been loyal to their core ideals (if not necessarily their proclaimed ones) even as they intervened in their different ways in Iran’s internal affairs. The Soviets claimed they were acting in the name of the “working masses” and of the oppressed nationalities of Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, while the Americans were only upholding the sanctity of private property and the paramountcy of free enterprise. The results were nevertheless traumatic for Iranians and others in the region, and highly deleterious to one of the oldest and most closely watched experiments in democratic and constitutional government in the Middle East. Deep and abiding Iranian fears of Russia and Britain were rekindled, to be joined by what proved to be a lasting resentment toward the United States.
Even more serious, the leaky ship of evolution toward democracy in Iran had been driven firmly aground, blown there by Stalin’s brutal pressure tactics, the cynical cupidity of British policymakers, and the shortsightedness and alarmist gullibility of American decision-makers. The bitter legacy left by these arbitrary interventions in Iranian politics, and the subsequent intensive American patronage for the hated regime of the shah, would fester for over a quarter of a century. Eventually, with the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, the inevitable happened, producing an incandescent eruption of anger at the United States that has continued for many years, and that helped to produce the grim, theocratic regime in power today in Tehran. As might have been expected, the undermining of a shaky but potentially viable liberal, democratic system, first by the USSR and then by the United States and the United Kingdom, two states that were great apostles of liberal and democratic values, naturally produced an authoritarian and illiberal reaction in Iran, just as did similar actions elsewhere in the Middle East, both before and after the Iranian Revolution.
If author Tim Weiner’s 2007 chronicle of the CIA’s covert actions is to be believed, the 1953 coup was the first major post–World War II American effort at “regime change.” It was to be followed in short order by the removal of another democratically elected leader who was no more a communist than had been the hapless Mohammad Mosaddeq: Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.14 This was not to be the last such American effort at government overthrow, but what is most important for our story is that the regime the CIA and MI6 were changing in Tehran was a democratic, constitutional one. Its replacement by an autocratic and repressive regime, pliable and obedient to the wishes of its powerful American backers, became the first element in a pattern where democracy was rarely if ever a consideration for American policymakers in the Middle East, any more than it was for their Soviet opposite numbers, or than it had been for their British predecessors as regional hegemons.
The Iranian coup announced to the entire Middle East that receptiveness to Western economic demands and rigid, knee-jerk anticommunism were the main criteria for those who wanted American support. Regional economic elites quickly got the message and learned to tell the Americans what they wanted to hear. American approval was what these elites themselves generally wanted, in any case: for the other side of this coin was the opportunity to get a share of the profits of the free-market system, and to get American support for repression of their domestic rivals. These rivals could easily be painted as communists or communist sympathizers to a receptive audience in Washington in situations where an insufficiently threatening number of genuine communists existed, guaranteeing the supportive Western response that local elites desired.
ABORTIVE MIDDLE EASTERN ALLIANCES
While Iran was the first and most important site of superpower interference that undermined the possibility of progress toward stable, democratic governance in the Middle East, it was far from being the last. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, however, most of the external meddling in the Middle East did not come from the superpowers, but rather from the old colonial powers, Britain and France, both of which still retained great residual influence in much of the region. They continued to intervene systematically in the internal affairs of nominally independent countries like Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, while they maintained their direct and indirect colonial rule over the other countries of North Africa, the Gulf, and southern Arabia: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Libya, Aden, Oman, the Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates), Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
We have seen that in addition to Iran, the exceptions to this situation of the lingering predominance of British or French influence included three cases where the superpowers rapidly became involved: these were the 1947–48 great-power maneuvering over the establishment of Israel, the crises in postwar Turkey (and Greece), and Saudi Arabia. In all three cases, one or both of the superpowers became implicated at a very early phase of their rivalry with each other in the Middle East. Indeed in Saudi Arabia this took place even earlier than the inception of the Cold War, with the granting of an oil concession to American companies in 1933. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia had established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1926, another example of Ibn Sa‘ud’s efforts to reduce his kingdom’s lingering dependence on Britain.15 Once they had established their predominant position in all these arenas, the superpowers rapidly elbowed out the old colonial powers. This was true of Iran, Turkey (and Greece), and Saudi Arabia. The only exception was Israel, where after 1948 France and to a lesser degree Britain became the main arms suppliers, and the former retained strong residual influence until the mid-1960s.
As we have seen, Israel owed its existence in large measure to American and Soviet support for the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state, and to the superpowers’ diplomatic and military support for the new state after it was established in May 1948. Both the United States and the USSR hoped to win Israel to its side, albeit for different reasons. The Soviets were rudely disillusioned when Israel aligned itself with the United States over the Korean War in 1950. Stalin, moreover, had been dismayed at the enthusiastic reception that Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR, received from Soviet Jews, which awakened the latent anti-Semitic tendencies of the aging and suspicious Soviet leader and his entourage.16 Israel thereafter drifted into the orbit of France, and later Britain, although U.S. economic and diplomatic support continued, albeit at a relatively low level. As I showed in the preceding chapter, this situation only changed fully after the 1967 war, by which time Israel had become completely aligned with the United States on Cold War and other issues.
Turkey, meanwhile, after the 1945–46 crisis over Stalin’s imperious territorial demands, became one of the focal points of the Truman Doctrine, and was incorporated into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soon after the alliance’s formation in 1949. Both Israel and Turkey had democratic systems, although in the latter the country’s governmental institutions were in the last analysis in the grip of the military and other elements of the state apparatus. Members of this secular elite saw themselves as the true heirs of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Atatürk, and acted as if they knew better than the electorate, the parliament, or the prime minister what was good for the people and the republic. Acting on these sentiments, the Turkish military was to depose and execute the country’s first freely elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, in 1961, severely setting back the cause of democracy in Turkey. Thus began a series of overt and barely covert interventions by the military and its civilian allies in the government bureaucracy and the judiciary in that country’s politics that continues in some measure until the present day. The coup elicited no serious protest from Washington, which appeared to care far more about Turkey’s continued international alignment with the United States than about how the country was governed. This lack of interest in democracy on the part of the two superpowers became a common Cold War pattern, and could be seen early on in Saudi Arabia, the first American foothold in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia, as I described in chapter 2, was the scene of a stroke of good fortune by what eventually became a consortium of the biggest American oil companies when they outbid their British rivals and obtained an exclusive concession to explore for and exploit Saudi oil reserves. We have seen that President Roosevelt and later American presidents highly appreciated the value of this privileged position. As I have already noted in chapter 1, the United States was thereafter careful to ensure that it maintained its paramountcy in Saudi Arabia, establishing an air base at Dhahran in 1945. To this day American policymakers have carefully treated Saudi Arabia and its regime as the major strategic asset that they were and are to the global position of the United States. In spite of the xenophobia of some of the Saudi monarchy’s Wahhabi supporters, Saudi Arabia remained untroubled for many years by nationalist agitation against the American connection, which was largely screened off from the view of most of the Saudi public.17 By the mid-1950s, however, with the spread of modern education and the greater openness of Saudi Arabia to the strong nationalist currents in the rest of the Arab world, the situation began to change. These developments did not impel the ruling family to loosen its absolute grip on political power. Far from encouraging it to do so, the United States fully supported this absolute monarchy in resisting pressures from external sources as well as pressures to liberalize from within Saudi society, particularly after the highly competent King Faisal succeeded his profligate brother Sa‘ud in 1962.
As the Cold War developed, the United States and the Soviet Union inexorably became more deeply embroiled in the affairs of other Middle Eastern countries beyond Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The Soviet Union, which had been shut out of the region in the interwar years in part because of its own weakness and that of most regional communist parties, attempted to make up for lost time after World War II and establish itself there. It initially did so by such diverse stratagems as supporting Kurdish and Azeri autonomy inside Iran, support of the establishment of Israel, and asking to be granted a UN trusteeship over the former Italian colony of Libya. None of these efforts was successful in producing a foothold for Soviet power. Nor was the USSR initially able to exploit another potential avenue for Soviet influence, the local communist parties in the Arab world. These parties became highly unpopular with Arab nationalist public opinion in 1947–48 after the USSR suddenly changed its previous position of opposition to Zionism and voted for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Immediately thereafter, all the Arab communist parties had obediently changed their stands and supported the creation of Israel. The turnaround made them appear to be what they in some measure were: stooges of a foreign power rather than independent political parties.
Thanks to their highly trumpeted anticolonial stance, however, the Soviets had one major asset in the region: the deep and lingering resentment of nationalists all over the Middle East against British and French colonialism. Although the United States had also enjoyed an anticolonial reputation in the Middle East since the era of Woodrow Wilson, the USSR was often able to align itself with anticolonial sentiment more effectively than the Americans, since the latter had to show some deference to the interests of their British and French allies. These old colonial powers were eager in particular to retain their influence in the region, and to continue to maintain military bases there, which often made them, and by extension the United States, anathema to nationalist public opinion in the Middle East.
The United States labored under another related disadvantage by comparison with the USSR: its drive to obtain Middle Eastern bases of its own in order to complete the encirclement of the USSR from the south. This pursuit at times led the United States to fall in with the British, in particular in their desire to maintain their unpopular Middle Eastern military bases. The idea of the “containment” of the Soviet Union’s perceived aggressive behavior found its origins in George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow, later transformed into the well-known anonymous 1947 Foreign Affairs article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”18 By the end of the decade, Kennan’s thesis, or at least a popularized understanding of it, had grown inexorably into an American idée fixe: the constitution of a chain of military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery. The first and the most important of these alliances was NATO, established in 1949 to confront the massive Red Army in Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, plans for such alliances were floated under a number of rubrics, including the Middle East Command, the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO), and the one that was eventually established, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), commonly known as the Baghdad Pact.19 Although the United States in the end did not join CENTO (Great Britain, also a prime mover in all these alliance schemes, did become a member), this grouping constituted another link in the notional chain Washington was building, and was thus a crucial element in the global American strategy of military containment of the Soviet Union.
The problem for the United States when it tried to preach the virtues of such Middle Eastern alliances against the Soviet Union, which involved host countries providing bases for Western troops while receiving American weapons and support, was that in light of their history, most people in this region had come over many years to see foreign military bases of any kind as outposts of colonialism. In Egypt, for example, the nationalist struggle against Britain’s much-hated military bases had been going on since the British occupation of 1882. Only a few years earlier, in 1936, Britain had finally removed its garrison from the heart of the Egyptian capital to the Canal Zone, whence successive Egyptian governments had thereafter tried in vain to evict them. These proposed alliances boiled down to Western powers, including Britain and France, as well as the United States, maintaining bases in countries that had just gotten rid of British and French troops or were still trying to do so. It did little good for American envoys to raise the alarm about the danger of the Soviet Union’s looming presence. Outside of Iran and Turkey, where Soviet power was close by and historical memories of continuous earlier Russian encroachments and of Stalin’s recent bullying was fresh, American warnings of the menace of Soviet expansionism aroused little fear in the Middle East. To public opinion in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad, such arguments were unconvincing, and the idea of the British and the French coming back through the rear window (now together with their American friends) after being shown the front door was thoroughly unacceptable. If some of the Arab countries felt danger from another power, it was from Israel, which by 1956 had decisively defeated several of them in two wars in the space of eight years. The Soviet Union, needless to say, had a field day painting the United States with the colors of the old European colonialist powers, and in depicting all the Western powers as the neocolonialist patrons and backers of Israel in its confrontation with the Arabs.
The pressure to join American-sponsored alliance systems continued nonetheless, and played a large role in the polarization in the Arab world that, as we saw earlier, developed into what Malcolm Kerr called the “Arab Cold War,”20 between a camp headed by Nasser’s Egypt and another headed by King Faisal and Saudi Arabia. The same East-West polarization later affected the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, again as we have seen, both this conflict and the regional conflicts of the Arab cold war eventually came to track closely with the Cold War itself, with the superpowers aligned with one or another side in each of these confrontations. Arab states, including Egypt and Syria, that resisted pressures to join superpower-dominated alliance systems and tried to remain nonaligned were stigmatized by John Foster Dulles’s moralistic foreign policy as little better than communist dupes. Earlier, under the influence of chief communist ideologist Andrei Zhdanov’s 1947 “two camps” theory,21 which appeared to presage a division of the world as rigid as that described by Kennan’s famous Foreign Affairs article two months earlier, the Soviet Union initially seemed to take an equally dim view of nonalignment as between the communist and capitalist camps.22 However, even before the death of Stalin in 1953, the USSR had begun to take a more flexible view of nonalignment. It thus was able to benefit in an opportunistic fashion from the Eisenhower administration’s relative rigidity on this score. It benefited as well from the global resistance on the part of many countries to joining great-power-dominated alliance groupings, which led to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung summit in 1955, at which Indonesian leader Sukarno hosted other leading third world figures like Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
For Egyptian president Nasser, the pressure from Washington to take sides eventually proved intolerable.23 He rapidly found himself cut off from the United States, which in 1955 abruptly withdrew a World Bank offer to help fund the Aswan High Dam. This led to the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and thereafter to the 1956 Suez War. Willingly or unwillingly, Egypt, Syria, and later Iraq and other Arab countries eventually found themselves drawn into the orbit of the Soviet Union, partly because the United States, with its “with us or against us” approach, left them little choice, and partly to obtain arms made necessary by the regional conflicts described in chapter 4. On the other side of this divide, Iraq before the 1958 revolution, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries ended up aligning themselves with the United States and Britain. In the end, only Iraq and the non-Arab states Iran and Pakistan, as well as Great Britain, joined CENTO: as mentioned, the United States, ironically, never joined the alliance, and Iraq left it after the 1958 revolution. Thus an alliance system meant originally to encompass both Arab states and the “Northern Tier” of Turkey and Iran ended up including only the latter. The agitation and polarization precipitated by the formation of Western alliance systems nevertheless roiled the politics of the Arab world for nearly a decade. Among the countries that were the most destabilized by Western pressure to join these Cold War alliances during the 1950s were Lebanon and Jordan, to whose complicated internal politics, and troubled attempts to establish democratic governance, I now turn.
