Sowing Crisis, page 29
2. In the Bancroft Prize–winning The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), historian Odd Arne Westad superbly traces this dynamic, perceptively using a broad range of primary sources to analyze the negative impact of the policies of both superpowers on various regions of the third world. However, he does not focus on the Middle East, and mentions (p. 4) that the Arab-Israeli wars are “treated in less depth” than other conflicts in his book.
3. On the latter subject, see Rashid Khalidi, British Policy in Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914 (Oxford: St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs, 1980), pp. 126–29, 183–86, 368–70, and Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), pp. 16–24, 79–81, 93–94, 162–64.
4. André Schiffrin, A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York (Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House, 2007), pp. 142–49, gives examples of CIA-sponsored groups Schiffrin was associated with. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999).
5. Historians now know much more than they did before about the decisions taken in launching this war by the North Korean regime, Stalin, and the new Communist government in China. See Kathryn Weathersby, “Stalin and the Korean War,” in The Origins of the Cold War: An International History, ed. Melvyn P. Leffer and David S. Painter, pp. 265–82, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005).
6. Thousands of prisoners seized as a result of the five years of internal strife in South Korea after 1945 were murdered by South Korean security forces in July 1950, just after the outset of the Korean War. See Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Stewart Lone and Gavan McCormack, Korea since 1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), section on “Atrocities,” pp. 119–22.
7. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 258–62. As Weiner shows, pp. 142–54, this was not the only involvement of the CIA in Indonesia: it had earlier attempted an unsuccessful coup against President Sukarno in 1958. See also Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 188.
8. This impact in many parts of the third world is brilliantly analyzed by Westad in The Global Cold War, although Westad notes that he does not focus on the Indo-Pakistani wars, conflicts that were considerably exacerbated by the superpower rivalry.
9. For details see Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s summary of his secret meeting with Robert Kennedy (obtained by the National Security Archive) on October 27, 1962, when the terms of the agreement were fully laid out: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/621027%20Dobrynin%20Cable%20to%20USSR.pdf.
10. M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1744–1923: A Study in International Relations (London: St. Martin’s, 1966), and L. Carl Brown, International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), both explain how this strategic reality became the core of the so-called Eastern Question for well over a century.
11. BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2007.
12. In 2006 the top five international oil companies had profits of over $120 billion: Le Monde, January 4, 2008, p. 12.
13. Over thirty years ago, the Israeli scholar Ilana Dimant-Kass noticed the salience of the region for the Soviet military. She pointed out that in the Soviet Ministry of Defense newspaper, Kraznaya Zvezda, the Middle East received “high priority, second only to that given to the United States and NATO, and more than that given to Europe or Southeast Asia,” which she ascribes to the region’s strategic, political, and economic significance for the West, and by implication for the USSR, and to its proximity to the southern Soviet frontiers: “The Soviet Military and Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1970–1973,” Soviet Studies 26, no. 4 (October 1974), p. 506.
14. Brown, International Politics and the Middle East, pp. 3–5.
15. For more on the Mandate period, see Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), chaps. 1–4.
16. For the different motivations of these three powers, see Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), and Mary Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
17. Abraham Ben-Zvi, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 97–102, 107–14. See also Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
18. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, chap. 3.
19. Text in J. C. Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record, 1914–1956 (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 308–9.
20. Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), pp. 265–67. U.S. documents covering the 1967 war are in Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter, FRUS), Johnson Administration, vol. 19, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967 available online: www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xix/index.htm.
21. In one case, new fighter planes had just been delivered, uncrated, and assembled at a Syrian air base by Soviet personnel when they were destroyed on the ground by Israeli air strikes: personal communication to the author by Soviet official formerly posted in Syria: Beirut, October 12, 1978.
22. Abraham Ben-Zvi, “Influence and Arms: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Politics of Arms Sales to Israel, 1962–1966,” Israel Affairs 10, nos. 1–2 (2004), pp. 29–59. The Skyhawks, ordered in 1966, were first delivered after the 1967 war.
23. Department of State Bulletin 63 (July 27, 1970), pp. 112–13.
24. On this understudied subject, see Dimant-Kass, “The Soviet Military and Soviet Policy in the Middle East,” pp. 502–21.
25. See Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 199–200.
26. The most perceptive student of these matters is Kass, e.g., in “The Soviet Military and Soviet Policy in the Middle East.”
27. Rubinstein found specifically that the Egyptians more often got their way than did the Soviets: Alvin Rubinstein, Red Star on the Nile: The Soviet-Egyptian Influence Relationship since the June War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). This point is also made by Zubok, A Failed Empire. See also Jon Glassman, Arms for the Arabs: The Soviet Union and War in the Middle East (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), and Mohamed Haikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in the Middle East (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
28. Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). See also Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Boston: Verso, 1983).
29. The canonical statement of this case is by Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
30. The War of Attrition is analyzed in Lawrence Whetten, The Canal War: Four-Power Conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974); Yaakov Bar-Siman-Tov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition, 1969–1970: A Case Study of Limited War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Edgar O’Ballance, The Electronic War in the Middle East, 1968–1970 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974). U.S. documents covering the period from the 1967 war through the end of 1968 are in FRUS, Johnson Administration, vol. 20, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–68, available at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xx/index.htm.
31. For details of Egyptian strategy see Mahmud Riyad, Muthakkirat Mahmud Riyad, 1948–1978: Al-Bahth ‘an al-salam wal-sira’ fil-sharq al-awsat [The Memoirs of Mahmud Riyad, 1948–1978: The Search for Peace and the Struggle in the Middle East] (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 1981); Abdel Magid Farid, Nasser: The Final Years (Reading, England: Ithaca Press, 1994); and Mohamed Heikal, Secret Channels: The Inside Story of the Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations (London: HarperCollins, 1996). Riyad was Egyptian foreign minister, Farid, secretary general of the Egyptian presidency, and Heikal, a minister and Nasser’s closest confidant.
32. Summary of a meeting in Tel-Aviv between Secretary of State William Rogers, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and other U.S. and Israeli government officials regarding plans for a Middle East peace agreement. Memo, Department of State, May 7, 1971, Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), doc. CK3100548308 (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2007). My attention was drawn to these documents by a 2007 unpublished paper by Omer Subhani, to whom I am grateful.
33. “Summary of Henry Kissinger’s telephone call to Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco regarding President Richard M. Nixon’s request that the State Department soften its dialogue with Israel over that country’s decision to violate its cease-fire.” Memo, White House, February 28, 1971, DDRS, doc. CK3100573382. Sisco argued to Kissinger that if the United States helped Egypt to negotiate a separate peace with Israel, it would achieve the aim of supplanting the Soviets in Egyptian favor as a by-product, but to no avail.
34. Haikal, The Sphinx and the Commissar, provides an Egyptian perspective on this.
35. There is a wealth of Egyptian and Israeli memoir material on the 1973 war: see, e.g., Mohamed Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (London: Collins, 1975); Muhammad Fawzi, Harb Uktubir ‘am 1973: dirasah wa-durus [The October War: Analysis and Lessons] (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi, 1988); Gen. Saad El-Shazly, The Crossing of Suez: The October War, 1973 (London: Third World Centre, 1980); Abba Eban, Abba Eban: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1977); Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement, October 1973 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975); Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East from the 1948 War of Independence through Lebanon (London: Greenhill Books, 2004); Avraham Adan, On the Banks of the Suez: An Israeli General’s Personal Account of the Yom Kippur War (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1980).
36. This is confirmed on the basis of Soviet sources by Zubok, A Failed Empire, p. 239. See also Viktor Israelyan, Inside the Kremlin during the Yom Kippur War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
37. These included some aircraft, like the F-4 Phantom, with limited production runs, for which there was heavy demand from the U.S. military because of equipment losses during the war in Southeast Asia.
38. The only partial exception was the firing by Iraq of several dozen Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War.
39. This was shown, ex post facto, by Syria’s acceptance at the end of the 1973 war of UN Security Council resolution 338, which embodied the acceptance by Damascus for the first time of resolution 242, and of the principle of a negotiated peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Egypt, Jordan, and later Israel, had all accepted resolution 242 several years before.
40. The literature on this episode is rich, starting with Henry Kissinger’s own memoir White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), and continuing through works incorporating new archival revelations, notably Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
41. Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, p. 520.
42. National Security Archive, “The October War and U.S. Policy,” ed. William Burr, in particular Document 54: Memcon between Meir and Kissinger, October 22, 1973, 1:35–2:15 p.m: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB98/index.htm#docs.
43. Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, pp. 530–31.
44. Richard Holbrooke, review of Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York, Knopf, 2008), New York Times, June 22, 2008.
45. There had been a Soviet and a UN presence that was purely symbolic at a one-day meeting of a peace conference in Geneva at the end of 1973, which grouped together Egypt, Jordan, and Israel and served only a formal purpose.
46. The text can be found in William Quandt, The Middle East Ten Years after Camp David (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1988), Appendix B, pp. 447–48.
47. As might be imagined, the Soviets looked dimly on this outcome: for a semiofficial reaction, see A. Ustyagov, “The Eygptian-Israeli Deal: A Dangerous Step,” International Affairs 7 (July 1979), pp. 53–59.
48. An insider perspective on this period can be found in William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict since 1967, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), pp. 177–204.
49. Whether the term used was “terrorism,” “banditry,” “thuggery,” or “lawless elements,” colonial powers have traditionally denigrated and tried to delegitimize and diminish the responses to their rule of subject peoples. The lack of historical awareness of this background in American public discourse, while not surprising, is deeply depressing.
50. During the Reagan era, Ross helped to define the misguided “interim” approach to negotiations, which protected Israel from having to make difficult decisions, and played key roles in both subsequent administrations. His book, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), is a masterpiece of self-justification. It must be read, if at all, in tandem with Clayton Swisher’s more accurate The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Nation Books, 2004), and with accounts of other participants, including that of the then Israeli foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami: Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Arab-Israeli Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
51. The Oslo Accords have many critics. In Scars of War, pp. 201–22, 225–39, Ben Ami, while poorly assessing Palestinian politics, highlights some flaws of Oslo. Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (New York: Nation Books, 2007), shows how settlements, never slowed by Oslo, torpedoed the prospects of peace. See also Khalidi, The Iron Cage, chaps. 5 and 6.
52. See Khalidi, The Iron Cage, chap. 6, for details.
53. Brown, International Politics and the Middle East, pp. 4–5.
54. For different interpretations of the causes of the 1975–90 war in Lebanon, see Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1979); Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987); Ghassan Tueni, Une guerre pour les autres (Paris: Lattes, 1985); Itamar Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 1970–1983 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990); and Naomi Weinberger, Syrian Intervention in Lebanon: The 1975–76 Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
55. The massacre took place in a situation of growing sectarian polarization in Lebanon and in the wake of high tension after populist leader Marouf Saad had been shot a few weeks earlier while heading a demonstration of fishermen in the southern port city of Sidon. Saad later died of his wounds.
56. Kissinger’s account of the second Sinai disengagement accord and the period that followed, including the war in Lebanon, can be found in Years of Upheaval (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982).
57. Ilana Dimant-Kass, The Lebanon Civil War, 1975–76: A Case of Crisis Mismanagement (Jerusalem, Hebrew University, 1979), pp. 9–17.
58. This discretion did not succeed in hiding all traces of such involvement, as when Iranian-manufactured G-3 automatic rifles and Saudi-manufactured 81 mm mortar ammunition turned up in the hands of the right-wing Lebanese Forces in the 1975–76 phase of the Lebanese war, as could be attested by the many people in West Beirut in this period who saw expended mortar rounds in the street, or captured G-3 rifles.
59. For one of the better accounts of this complex period, see W. Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon.
60. There is much material on this episode in The Kissinger Transcripts: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969–1977, available online through the National Security Archive via ProQuest. This can be accessed via www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/index.htm.
61. The southern limit of the Syrian deployment in Lebanon was first the Beirut-Damascus road, but later became a line from south of Sidon running eastward. By the spring of 1976, Kissinger was already telling his aides to tell Damascus that “we agree with the Syrian approach”: ibid., Memorandum of Conversation, March 26, 1976.
62. For insights into Soviet policy at this point see Rashid Khalidi, “Soviet Policy in the Arab World in 1976: A Year of Setbacks,” in The Yearbook of the Palestine Question: 1976 [Arabic], Camille Mansour, ed. (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1979), pp. 397–420.
63. Egypt and Iraq, eager to exploit any situation that would harm their Syrian rivals, both managed to smuggle some weapons and Palestinian Liberation Army cadres based on their territory to the PLO and its allies through the blockade, but their impact was minimal.
64. See Alexander M. Haig Jr., Inner Circles: How America Changed the World; A Memoir (New York: Warner Books, 1992); Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege: P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).
65. Primakov, then a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (he later became foreign minister and prime minister of the Russian Federation), spoke to PLO leaders and thereafter to Palestinian researchers at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut: personal information of the author.
66. This was the case even though Ronald Reagan was finally moved to try to put some restraints on America’s client by the outcry provoked by the magnitude of the casualties and damage inflicted by Israel’s indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments of Beirut from June 5 until August 12, 1982. Over nineteen thousand people, the great majority of them Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, died in the 1982 war according to Lebanese police figures quoted in the Washington Post, December 2, 1982, and cited in R. Khalidi, Under Siege, p. 200, n. 5.
