Sowing Crisis, page 22
From the French Revolution until 1945, the eastern Mediterranean was a regular theater of rivalry and confrontation between the great powers, and was the site of important battlefields where the armies, navies, and later air forces of these powers and the major competing alliance systems warred with one another. The region saw some of the world’s most important battles over that century and a half. The first was Aboukir in 1798, when Napoleon’s fleet was sunk by that of Admiral Nelson, ending the Corsican general’s hopes of conquering the land route to India and the East and thereby obtaining for revolutionary France a decisive advantage over imperial Great Britain. The last was at El Alamein in 1942, when the eastward advance of Field Marshal Rommel’s panzers across North Africa toward strategic military and naval bases and oil fields under British control farther east, as well as toward the shortest route to India, was finally stopped.
However, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union marked a significant change in this age-old pattern whereby the Middle East was often the decisive scene of great-power rivalry. It can be argued that the Cold War was the first international conflict that was truly global in its scope, in every sense of that word. This was so because during the Cold War the main protagonists were in some measure extra-European states, and the stage of their rivalry was the entire world. In this, it was unlike the century of wars between Britain and France from the early eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, and the seventy-five years of wars from 1870 until 1945 that grew out of conflicts between Germany and France and Britain. All of these previous rivalries, and the wars that resulted from them, took place in some measure on a world stage, but they were between European powers and were in essence directed at achieving hegemony over Europe. While, for example, important battles in the sequence of Anglo-French conflicts from the time of Louis XIV until that of Napoleon were fought in the Indian Ocean, in India, and in North America,4 at heart these were essentially European wars, between European powers, to determine who would dominate the European continent.
The two greatest wars of the twentieth century were undoubtedly truly world wars in many respects, since they involved major extra-European powers like the United States and Japan and were fought on a world stage. Nevertheless, they, too, were at least in their inception basically European continental wars between European powers that were competing for world dominance. Thus World Wars I and II both started in Europe, and at the outset at least were fought between European powers over issues of traditional concern to the European balance of power. The fact that they started in the Balkans in 1914 and Poland in 1939, respectively, is the best evidence of this. The development and the global extensions of World War II marked the beginning of a new era that only came to maturity during the Cold War, and represented the shift in world hegemony away from the traditional Western and central European powers. Because of their essentially European nature, in all of these wars before the Cold War, including World Wars I and II, the Middle East could and often did play a central role, due to its vital strategic position where Europe adjoins the African and Asian continents to which it is linked.
All of this changed with the Cold War. The eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East of course continued to be important to both superpowers, for they abutted on the southern frontiers of the Soviet Union and contained vast reserves of energy. As we have seen, this region witnessed major confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union, from the crisis over the Turkish Straits in 1945 through the Greek civil war of 1946–49, the covert and overt involvement of both powers in Iran, the naval rivalries of the 1960s, and four major Arab-Israeli wars. Nevertheless, these events were part of a different pattern than that which characterized previous rivalries and conflicts involving the region. For the Cold War, unlike the previous two and a half centuries of international conflicts involving the Middle East, which were essentially centered on western Europe, took place simultaneously on several continents (even if Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East remained central to the concerns of both sides throughout the Cold War). This was obvious in a number of ways. Neither of the Cold War’s two main protagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union, was a western European power: one was located in North America and the other lay astride the Eurasian landmass, inside and outside Europe at the same time. The only three major hot wars directly involving either of the superpowers were fought in Asia: in Korea in the early 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1980s in Afghanistan, which is beyond the eastern edge of the Middle East as traditionally defined. Finally, although we have seen that the Middle East was at times a base for American strategic weapons systems, the nuclear weapons competition between the United States and the USSR was always truly intercontinental in its dimensions, whether it involved strategic intercontinental bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), or submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
I have argued that during the entire Cold War period, after the confrontations over Iran, Turkey, and Greece in the immediate post–World War II years, perhaps the most important crises involving the superpowers in the eastern Mediterranean region were those relating to the Arab-Israeli wars. Six of these wars involved the superpowers, sometimes in quite different alignments. The first two were the 1948 war and the 1956 Suez conflict. As I showed in chapter 4, in both of these conflicts, in spite of the rivalry between them, the United States and Soviet Union incongruously found themselves on the same side, both aligned with Israel against the Arab states in 1948, and with Egypt and against Britain, France, and Israel in 1956. These anomalous instances were followed by four major Arab-Israeli wars—the June 1967 war, the War of Attrition of 1968–70, the October 1973 war, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. During these conflicts the superpowers took opposite sides, in a familiar pattern, with the USSR supporting the Arabs, and the United States, Israel. There were also many less severe Arab-Israeli confrontations that at times involved the superpowers, some of them related to the war of 1975–90 in Lebanon. In addition to being a civil war, as we have seen, this prolonged and lethal conflict attracted the intervention of a broad range of regional and international actors, notably major protégés of the superpowers, like Israel, Syria, and the PLO.5
In the four major Arab-Israeli wars starting with that of 1967, the superpowers became ever more deeply involved in their support of the warring sides, with the United States increasingly supporting Israel, and the Soviet Union increasing its backing for the Arabs. The first three of these conflicts erupted in the envenomed international atmosphere of a major East-West confrontation over the wars that were raging in Indochina. They therefore developed into major crises between the United States and the Soviet Union, causing the Middle East once again to become an important strategic arena for the rivalry between the two superpowers. But after the Cold War, a fundamental change regarding conflicts in the Middle East and its peripheries appears to have occurred.
INTERCONNECTED CONFLICTS IN
THE WAKE OF THE COLD WAR
For all their severity and their potential for provoking a wider conflagration, it is important to note that each of the four Middle Eastern crises growing out of an Arab-Israeli war was in some measure self-contained, at least in regional terms. This may have had to do with the fact that the international confrontations that developed around the Arab-Israeli wars took place within the context of what had by the 1960s become a fixed and defined Cold War system, characterized by American containment of the USSR, and a precarious nuclear balance involving mutual assured destruction. Conflicts involving superpower proxies in the Middle East were seen as having to be rigorously curtailed, because of the danger that an unlimited local conflict might drag in the superpower patrons and lead to escalation, with the ultimate fear of a potential nuclear holocaust.
The self-containment of these Arab-Israeli wars may also have been a function of the fact that they took place in the context of a regional system that was generally relatively stable, whereby a certain degree of balance had developed between differing Arab states, and between Arab and non-Arab states. Finally, self-containment may have resulted from the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict—at least insofar as serious warfare was concerned—was essentially restricted to a small number of states (Israel, Egypt, and Syria, and occasionally Jordan and Iraq), and to one narrow, clearly defined region (the territory of these states, as well as Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories). Whether for these reasons or others, the Arab-Israeli confrontations did not lead to a wider regional conflagration. This was true even of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was the longest of these wars since 1948, and witnessed nearly ten weeks of siege and bombardment of an Arab capital, the first and only time such a thing had happened in all six Arab-Israeli wars.6
Whatever the explanation (and in 1982 the growing strategic weakness of the USSR vis-à-vis the United States may have been a factor in limiting the spread of this conflict), the grave international crises that developed around the periodic Arab-Israeli wars rarely threatened to spill over into broader region-wide conflagrations, although these crises were often influenced by region-wide contexts. The fierce Egyptian-Saudi rivalry of the mid-1960s, which I have already discussed in terms of what Malcolm Kerr called the “Arab cold war,”7 for example, contributed measurably to the slide into the June 1967 war. The intense rivalry between the two Arab powers, and in particular the constant outbidding of Saudi Arabia and its conservative allies, pushed the Egyptian leadership, whose military forces were already deeply entangled in the Yemeni civil war, to take risky escalatory steps against Israel during the April–May phase that led to the 1967 war. These were steps that the Egyptian leaders perhaps otherwise would not have taken but for the taunting of the Saudis and their allies about Egyptian troops “hiding behind” the United Nations Emergency Force in Sinai. Gamal Abdel Nasser and his colleagues saw themselves as obliged to shore up their threatened position as paramount leaders of the Arab world, and to act in support of their prickly allies in the radical Syrian regime when it appeared seriously threatened by Israel in the spring of 1967.8 Inter-Arab politics thus played a crucial role in precipitating one of the most important of the Arab-Israeli wars, and exacerbated an already critical situation.
The only possible exception to this general rule of the self-contained nature of the Arab-Israeli wars was the 1968–70 War of Attrition, which, in addition to Egypt and Israel, in time came to involve Syria, the PLO, Jordan, and Iraq in a direct way, as well as the United States and the Soviet Union indirectly. I have already argued that this was an underappreciated phase of the Arab-Israeli wars, which was crucially important in a number of ways. Among other things, the tactical military results of the War of Attrition made it possible for Egyptian forces to cross the Suez Canal three years later, during the October 1973 war.9 And we have seen that both superpowers committed significant military resources to their protégés. In the case of the Soviets these included many pilots and thousands of air defense personnel and others serving covertly in combat roles.10 Moreover, in large part because of the region-wide radical appeal of the Palestinian cause, it appeared for a time as if the War of Attrition might provoke extensive regional ramifications, including possible revolutionary upheavals in a number of Arab states.
Thus, the reasons the stakes were perceived as so high during the War of Attrition did not only have to do with the strategic importance of the ferocious battles that raged for over two years along the Suez Canal, or with the full superpower backing of both sides and the concomitant danger of superpower confrontation. Beyond this, a truly radical regime was in power in Damascus from 1966 onward which strongly supported the most militant elements among the Palestinians.11 At the same time, important elements of the PLO like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine at this stage were strongly influenced by Marxist and other radical and revolutionary ideas. These and other Palestinian factions were avidly preaching the virtues of armed struggle and Arab revolution (as were the radical neo-Ba‘thists in power in Damascus). Practicing what they preached, various Palestinian factions were carrying out attacks in Israel and inside the Israeli-occupied territories via Jordan and Lebanon, where they had established bases at the expense of the sovereignty of the host states. They took heart from the fighting along the Suez Canal and argued that it justified their thesis that only armed struggle could liberate occupied Arab land. Much of Arab public opinion was apparently dissatisfied with the status quo and was attracted by radical theses like those put forward by the Palestinians, while fragile regimes were tottering in both Lebanon and Jordan. In view of this explosive situation, at the time there seemed every possibility that the continuation of the War of Attrition, which by 1968 had extended to include sporadic fighting along Israel’s eastern military fronts opposite Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, might produce widespread regional upheavals, and a change in the composition of many regimes.12
In the end, the prospect of such a dangerous turn of events provoked the reaction of the status quo powers in the region, which preeminently included the superpowers, and none of this happened. As we have seen, in August 1970 a cease-fire was achieved along the Suez Canal on the basis of the American Rogers Plan and Soviet mediation, and was accepted by both Egypt and Jordan with the support of Saudi Arabia. Clearly, both the superpowers and the governments of many major states in the region were horrified by the prospect of unlimited region-wide instability growing out of continued Arab-Israeli fighting. Thereafter, the PLO was crushed in Jordan during the Black September 1970 confrontation with the Jordanian army, and in 1971 was completely driven out of the country, Iraqi and Syrian troops left Jordan, and the putative revolutionary moment in the Arab world passed.13 A dangerous extension of the Arab-Israeli conflict into other potentially highly destabilizing developments was thereby avoided and this conflict remained contained.
Throughout the Cold War, and indeed until its final stages, it ultimately proved possible to localize and insulate crises and conflicts involving the superpowers growing out of the Arab-Israeli wars, and to limit their connections to other Middle Eastern hot spots. This was true even if these wars had a broader regional dimension, and even though this region was an important arena of the Cold War. Thus from the 1960s until the 1990s, Arab-Israeli wars were, as it were, largely compartmentalized and separate from other crises involving the superpowers and their proxies. These included the civil war in Yemen, the conflicts between Libya and Chad and Morocco and Algeria, and the series of major wars and confrontations in the Gulf region, including the Iraq-Iran War and the first round of conflict in Afghanistan provoked by the Soviet invasion. This was true even though the United States and the Soviet Union (and occasionally other lesser powers like France, Britain, and China) were major protagonists in all these conflicts, and often saw these hot spots as linked to one another and as part of a larger global struggle for influence.
My major argument here, and my reason for recapitulating all this history, some of which was covered in detail in earlier chapters, is that while this situation obtained for some years after the end of the Cold War, something important has changed in what, since the end of World War II, had been a relatively fixed pattern. In this pattern, as we have seen, crises in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the rest of the Middle East, notably those involving Israel and the Arabs, and others involving Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf, remained relatively isolated from one another and from broader regional ramifications. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been quite striking that crises in the entire Middle East region and adjacent ones have appeared harder to isolate and more and more closely entwined with one another. This change unquestionably had something to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent end of the Cold War in 1989–90, and with it the demise of a generally stable, if dangerous, system of international relations that had prevailed for forty-five years. This system certainly restrained the Soviet Union, indeed it “contained” it in some measure, but it also restrained the United States in certain ways. In the two decades since the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Cold War system, these restraints on American action have been removed, and nothing has taken their place.
This change was also triggered by indigenous Middle Eastern factors. These included notably developments growing out of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which it is already clear was one of the major events of the latter part of the twentieth century, but whose full impact it is still too early to assess. Other factors emerged from the ongoing wars inside Afghanistan that began with the Soviet invasion of that country in the same year, and have continued to be fought almost without interruption in some fashion ever since. Finally, this change also appears to be related to the connection that developed at the very end of the Cold War between the American response to Iraq’s disastrous 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and the launching in the following year of the Madrid peace process. Since then, the Gulf and Arab-Israeli regional subsystems have been intertwined in ways that they were not before. It is of course true that Iraq was involved in the Arab states’ conflict with Israel from its beginnings in 1948, and that Iraqi public opinion has been moved by the Palestine issue since the 1930s. However, Iraq always had relatively little if any impact on this conflict, whether during the 1948 war, when its forces’ played an entirely secondary role, or during the War of Attrition and the 1973 war, when their role was even more minor. Even Iraq’s firing of Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War had little strategic importance. Before the post– Cold War era, disputes in the Gulf had never been so intimately connected with the Arab-Israeli conflict, let alone with an attempted resolution of it. There may well be other linkages that go farther back and deeper than any of these.
