Sowing Crisis, page 31
47. For details, see Elizabeth Bishop, “Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan High Dam” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, Department of History, 1999).
48. This was Graham Fuller, who had the distinction of being the only person to be removed from his post for the Iran-Contra fiasco, perhaps—this being Washington—because he had vigorously opposed this illegal, foolish initiative when it was proposed by those in the Reagan White House who devised it. For this disaster, sadly, few of those actually responsible were ever punished. Some individuals who were convicted of felonies, like Elliott Abrams, were pardoned by George H. W. Bush, and returned to serve in equally illustrious fashion (albeit so far escaping indictment) in the administration of his son.
VI
Victory in the Cold War, and the Global War on Terror
1. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigan, in The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), acutely point out that the “continents” of Africa, Asia, and Europe are in fact a single landmass. While Europe, although just one of many protuberances from this huge landmass, is dignified with the title of a “continent” in conventional geographic terminology, South Asia, another larger extension from the same landmass, is commonly referred to as a mere “subcontinent.”
2. The cliffs at Nahr al-Kalb, north of Beirut, at a point where the coastal plain narrows greatly, are marked with inscriptions, steles, and other evidence carved in the stone that attests to the passage of armies, from those of the pharaohs and the Assyrians to the Roman and, much later, the British empires.
3. Recent research on the Phoenicians dates their rise to the middle of the second millennium BCE rather than the beginning of the first, as had been thought previously: see Glenn E. Markoe, Phoenicians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 11.
4. These conflicts are brilliantly analyzed in Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, rev. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1902), a book that has had great influence on British and American strategic thinking.
5. See Rashid Khalidi, “Lebanon in the Context of Regional Politics: Palestinian and Syrian Involvement in the Lebanese Crisis,” Third World Quarterly 7, no. 3 (July 1985), pp. 495–514; Naomi Weinberger, Syrian Intervention in Lebanon: The 1975–76 Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990); and Itamar Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 1970–1983 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
6. For details, see Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making during the 1982 War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Also important in limiting this conflict was the fact stated bluntly by Soviet envoy Yevgeni Primakov to his Palestinian interlocutors in Beirut on the eve of the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, that the USSR did not have the capability to confront Israel and its American backer in Lebanon, and could only guarantee protection of the territory of its Syrian protégé: personal information of the author. For further details, see chap. 4, n. 65.
7. Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ’Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958–1970, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
8. Kerr, The Arab Cold War, and David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), show how the rivalry with Saudi Arabia affected Egyptian decision-making.
9. Lawrence Whetten, The Canal War: Four-Power Conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), correctly describes the fighting along the Suez Canal of 1968–70 as a four-power conflict, showing how deeply the superpowers were engaged, and also how the Egyptian military managed to push their antiaircraft missile batteries forward to the banks of the Suez Canal in spite of intense Israeli bombardment, later making possible the 1973 crossing. See also Yaakov Bar-Siman-Tov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition, 1969–1970: A Case-Study of Limited Local War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
10. See Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim, eds., The Cold War and the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Nigel Ashton, ed., The Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conflict and the Superpowers, 1967–1973 (London: Routledge, 2007), for interpretations based partly on newly released archival materials. Another book based on such materials, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), appears to come to a number of unfounded conclusions.
11. Some of the key leaders of this neo-Ba‘th regime had been volunteers with the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the Algerian war of liberation and came away with a belief in the effectiveness of a “long-term people’s war of liberation,” to use the Maoist catchphrase of the era, and this was the basis of their support for Palestinians who espoused similar ideas.
12. See Robert Pranger, American Policy for Peace in the Middle East, 1969–1971: Problems of Principle, Maneuver, and Time (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1974), and Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch.
13. A work that reflects well this transitory moment in Arab politics is Walid Kazziha, Revolutionary Change in the Arab World: Habash and His Comrades from Arab Nationalism to Marxism (London: Hurst, 1975).
14. For a recent book that deals with this war, see Nubar Hovsepian, ed., The War on Lebanon: A Reader (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2007).
15. According to UN figures, the number of Palestinians killed by various forms of conflict in the Gaza Strip went up from 75 in the first five months of 2006 (13 of them children) to 462 in the subsequent seven months, of whom 109 were children. A total of 25 Israelis were killed in Israel and inside the occupied territories in 2006 as a direct or indirect result of the conflict, 2 of them children: www.ochaopt.org/documents/PoC_tables_June_08.pdf.
16. Lebanon was little involved in the first three Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967, except as the recipient of large numbers of Palestinians driven in 1948 from their homes in Galilee, Haifa, and Jaffa by Israeli forces.
17. To mention only one precedent, the revolutionary movements in the Arab world and other parts of the Middle East in the 1960s, mentioned earlier in this chapter, were also connected, in some cases very closely, to one another, as well as to states and groups outside the Middle East: see, inter alia, Kazziha, Revolutionary Change in the Arab World. There were similar, shadowy connections between Arab revolutionaries and military officers in several Arab countries and Turkey in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
18. Yediot Aharanot, May 2, 2008. He also said that “twenty years ago we supported the establishment of the Hamas.”
19. Robert Scheer, “Obama on the Brink,” July 22, 2008, www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080722_obama_on_the_brink.
20. On the underlying basis of this ideological drive, see Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
21. I owe this formulation to my friend Jim Chandler of the University of Chicago.
22. The Baker-Hamilton Report issued by the Iraq Study Group in December 2006 did not describe how poorly the Iraq War had been waged by the United States at the outset, but was critical of the war generally and said “U.S. efforts in Afghanistan have been complicated by the overriding focus of U.S. attention and resources on Iraq”: www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/iraq_study_group_report.pdf.
Among many others, see also Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), and Paul R. Pillar, “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006: www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html.
23. This was the October 2, 2002, “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq”: www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021002-2.html.
24. There is a growing body of new work that makes the link between the dramatic extension of American presidential power, the growing infringements on citizens’ rights and liberties, and interventions abroad justified under the banner of the global war on terror. Besides Mayer, The Dark Side, among the best are Frederick Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: New Press, 2007); Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (New York: Norton, 2007); and Stephen Holmes, The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
25. Perhaps the most dramatic of these announcements was that by Attorney General John Ashcroft while on a visit to Moscow of the arrest of José Padilla on charges of planning a terrorist attack involving nuclear materials, charges that were quietly dropped long before Padilla was charged and convicted on more mundane grounds.
26. For a brilliant legal analysis of these infringements on liberty, see Michael Tigar, “A System of Wholesale Denial of Rights,” Monthly Review 59, no. 4 (2007), pp. 11–24.
27. Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: Norton, 2004).
28. Figures in constant 2005 dollars. Information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database: www.sipri.org/contents/milap/milex/mex_database1.html. Essentially the same core constellation of neoconservatives and muscular nationalists that has called for and waged the global war on terror in the George W. Bush era was responsible during the Reagan administration for artificially inflating the Soviet threat. They used, among other methods, the fantastic exaggerations of the Soviet defense budget concocted in 1976 by the “Team B” group (inspired by University of Chicago right-wing academic Albert Wohlstetter, himself a disciple of Leo Strauss, and supported by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney), including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as Richard Pipes and Paul Nitze, to claim that what we now know to have been the already inflated estimations of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community of Soviet military spending were too low. See: “November 1976: Team B Browbeats CIA Analysts,” www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a1176teambversusteama.
29. In the materials produced by the Project for a New American Century and other far-right-wing groupings out of which emerged most of the key foreign policy decision-makers of the new administration, China was prominently featured as the great danger to be feared: newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf.
30. Official American military casualty figures are as of July 2008: www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf. The World Health Organization in January 2008 released the results of a survey of 9,345 households to ascertain Iraqi civilian casualties. On the basis of this survey, it estimated the number of Iraqis killed violently between the invasion of March 19, 2003, and the end of February 2008 as about 220,000, with deaths “linked to the conflict” totaling 600,000: Le Monde, March 19, 2008.
31. The supplemental appropriation request for fiscal year 2007 was estimated at $100–$128 billion. That for 2006 was $66 billion; for 2005, $82 billion; for 2004, $72 billion, and for 2003, $74 billion, all on top of the regular defense budget: Ivan Eland, “Hidden Costs,” American Conservative, January 15, 2007, pp. 16–17.
32. The ineffable Richard Perle has written (with David Frum, in An End to Evil): “For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause…. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust,” cited in Jim Lobe, “From Holocaust to Hyperpower,” Inter Press Service, January 26, 2005. He has also said: “For those of us who are involved in foreign and defense policy today, my generation, the defining moment of our history was certainly the Holocaust. It was the destruction, the genocide of a whole people, and it was the failure to respond in a timely fashion to a threat that was clearly gathering. We don’t want that to happen again; when we have the ability to stop totalitarian regimes we should do so, because when we fail to do so, the results are catastrophic,” cited in Jim Lobe, “‘Moral Clarity’ or Moral Abdication?” TomPaine.com, May 11, 2005: www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/05/11/moral_clarity_or_moral_abdication.php.
33. Pillar, “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq.” This account is corroborated by that of Richard Clarke, the senior counterterrorism official at the outset of the George W. Bush administration in his book Against All Enemies. The run-up to the Iraq War witnessed a reprise of the identical tactic utilized by the Team B group in 1976 of stampeding public opinion with distortions, exaggerations, and concoctions about Soviet military prowess in order to justify massive American arms budgets (which finally could be adopted during the Reagan administration). Having been taken in by these neocon con men once, the American public sadly failed to see through the same shameless charade when it was performed a quarter-century later.
34. Jeff Stein, “Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?” New York Times, October 17, 2006.
35. For an analysis of the underlying rationale behind the extremist conservative takeover of the Republican Party in recent years, and the role played by the right-wing think tanks, see Tom Frank, “The Wrecking Crew: How a Gang of Right-Wing Con Men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing,” Harper’s, August 2008, pp. 35–45.
36. A good example in the think-tank world would be Danielle Pletka, the highly visible vice president for strategy of the American Enterprise Institute, whose sole credentials for her repeated fatuous but quotable pronouncements on the Middle East would appear to be a brief stint in Israel, work on a right-wing newspaper, and service as a junior aide to Senator Jesse Helms. The administration of George W. Bush pullulated with officials dealing with the Middle East in a range of departments and agencies, some in senior positions, with equally slim résumés as far as any real in-depth Middle East expertise goes.
37. For details on the Ottoman background, and the role of former Ottoman officers, see Muhammad Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1982); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
38. Andrew Cockburn, in CounterPunch, and Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker, have reported on a “presidential finding” authorizing the waging of a covert campaign against the Iranian regime and its influence both inside Iran and from Lebanon to Afghanistan, and the appropriation of $300–$400 million for this purpose: Andrew Cockburn, “Secret Bush ‘Finding’ Widens War on Iran,” CounterPunch, May 2, 2008; Seymour Hersh, “Preparing the Battlefield,” New Yorker, July 7, 2008.
39. See Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), chaps. 5 and 6, for details.
40. See Christine Spolar, “14 ‘Enduring Bases’ Set in Iraq: Long-Term Military Presence Planned,” Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2004.
41. For details, see the Defense Department’s website for the new command: www.defenselink.mil/africom/.
42. In an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Begin a Troop Pullout,” New York Times, July 14, 2008.
43. According to a March 2008 poll done for the BBC, ABC, ARD, and NHK, 72 percent of Iraqis opposed the presence of “coalition forces,” 61 percent felt that the presence of U.S. forces made the security situation worse, and 1 percent wanted American forces to stay permanently: www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/poll/2008/0308opinion.pdf.
44. According to Andrew Kohut and Richard Wike, “All the World’s a Stage,” National Interest, May 6, 2008, in several years of polling done by the Pew Global Attitudes Project: “Between 2002 and 2007, the number of people with a favorable view of the United States fell in twenty-six countries out of the thirty-three where trend data are available. Ratings of the United States are disturbingly low among many of our longtime European allies, and they have dipped in Latin America and other parts of the world as well. The findings are especially dismal in Muslim nations.” www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=17502.
45. In fourteen CNN polls from May 2007 until June 2008, disapproval ranged from 63–68 percent: www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm. The president’s approval rating was equally dismal: 28 percent of respondents approved of his performance in a poll in April 2008, and 81 percent were dissatisfied with the country’s direction: www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/us/04poll.html.
46. One only has to read accounts of the inner workings of the Nixon administration, reputed for its expertise in foreign and strategic matters, to see how much of an illusion this may have been: see, e.g., the revelations about Nixon’s distraction from matters of foreign policy during the 1973 Middle East war, leading up to the dangerous nuclear confrontation with the USSR, in Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007),pp. 520–33.
47. The populations of these six states are: Libya: 6 million; UAE: 4.6 million; Oman: 3.3 million; Kuwait: 2.7 million; Qatar: 900,000; Bahrain 700,000. Very large proportions of these 14 million people are noncitizens, a majority in some states. Their respective 2007 GDPs (today much inflated by the rise in the price of oil) are $74 billion; $167 billion; $61 billion; $130 billion; $57 billion; and $24 billion. Central Intelligence Agency, 2008 World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html.
