Sowing Crisis, page 5
Soon after the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan and after the Iran-Iraq War ended in mutual exhaustion, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the rest of Eurasia began to crumble from within. The Soviet Union itself finally disappeared in 1991. It was undoubtedly sapped by its disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, and by exorbitant military expenditures to match the Reagan strategic arms buildup, but most experts agree that the Soviet system was probably ripe for collapse in any case.54 The Cold War was over, but its tragic sequels, its toxic debris, and its unexploded mines continued to cause great harm, in ways largely unrecognized in American public discourse. In a very real sense, the tragic outcome of 9/11 represents one of these sequels, the evil work of the distant but very real ghosts originally conjured up by the United States to wage the last phases of the Cold War. The Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union is no more, but those ghosts are still with us. They can perhaps only be fully laid to rest, and their malice overcome, if we recognize that their true origins are not as foreign as they are sometimes made out to seem.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
So to re-pose the questions with which I began, was the Cold War just a prologue to the current unfettered hegemony over the Middle East (and the rest of the world) that the United States was only able to exercise once the Soviet Union was out of the way? Or was the Soviet Union’s power exaggerated in American perceptions and public discourse, was it in fact less of an obstacle to American domination of the Middle East than it may have seemed to some, and was the United States always more dominant, globally and in the region, than it may have appeared? My inclination is toward concluding that the power of the Soviet Union in the Middle East and elsewhere was often exaggerated in the contemporary American view. One indication of the imbalance between the two is the fact that the Middle East, like most of the other major arenas of Cold War rivalry, was immediately adjacent to the USSR. There were no such Cold War battlefields in the immediate vicinity of the United States, with the exception of Cuba and, for a brief period in the 1980s, parts of Central America. Thus, from soon after 1945, it was the United States that was containing the Soviet Union and stationing forces and strategic weapons all around its frontiers and those of its satellites, and not vice versa, only one of many indices of the great disparity of power between the two superpowers in favor of the United States.
Of course, the United States has, and has always had, the luxury of a greater degree of isolation from the rest of the world than any other great power in history. Unlike Russia, it does not have, and has never had, powerful neighbors on its borders or off its shores. Moreover, except for an abortive Soviet attempt to deploy IRBMs and IL-28 medium-range bombers in Cuba in 1961, foiled by President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union was never able to place land-based or airborne strategic weapons in close proximity to the U.S. mainland. The United States was able to do this with the most lethal of strategic weapons, nuclear weapons, in a great arc surrounding the Soviet Union from the very first moments of the Cold War, in 1945–46, with some of these weapons based in the Middle East. Indeed, some historians have argued that the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan was at least in part aimed as a warning to the USSR of the overwhelming strategic capabilities at the disposal of the United States.55
Even after the USSR detonated its own atomic bomb in 1949, shifting the strategic balance somewhat in its favor, it had no assured delivery system for nuclear weapons until the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the mid-1960s. Thereafter, both powers soon became capable of destroying one another many times over. These are all indications, nevertheless, of the great superiority of the United States over the USSR, a superiority that was most importantly based on the United States’ far greater economic power, and its postwar dominance of the European and Japanese economies, which together produced more than the Soviet economy, little more than a decade after World War II. While the Soviet Union had a formidable heavy-industrial base (although it had been gravely damaged during World War II) and a massive arms industry, both were dwarfed by those of the United States, whose economy had been raised by the stimulus of war production from the doldrums of depression to unheard-of heights of productivity.
To be sure, the USSR also had certain advantages. By its very location it dominated the Eurasian landmass, and it had vast land armies, led by combat-hardened commanders. It had an initial ideological advantage in Europe because of the presence of strong communist parties there. It had a similar advantage in much of the developing world in the face of the persistence of European colonialism. I have suggested, and will discuss further in later chapters, how this ideological edge operated in the Middle East, although it now appears to have been of relatively limited significance in the long run. Yet, although the USSR was a great power, by far the greatest after the United States, in many respects it was not truly a superpower, lacking the global reach that the United States enjoyed with its fleets and air forces and with its far-flung military bases. This is not to speak of the enormous strength of the interlocking and interdependent capitalist economies that the United States thoroughly dominated through the financial system centered on Wall Street and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which it put into place after World War II and which gave absolute economic primacy to Washington and New York.
All of these American strategic advantages can be seen operating in the Middle East, where a quiet struggle was waged, first in the Mediterranean, when in the 1960s the U.S. Navy initially based Polaris SLBM-carrying submarines targeting the USSR there, and the Soviets sought naval and air bases in the region to counter them. These advantages could be seen operating again in the 1970s when the United States’ deployment of longer-range Poseidon SLBM-carrying submarines also targeting the USSR turned the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean into a similar theater of naval competition for both superpowers. As I will show in more detail in chapter 4, in the Middle East and elsewhere the United States was taking the initiative by stationing lethal strategic weapons in the backyard of the USSR, not vice versa. Thereafter, the United States was able to use its formidable economic power to help wean Egypt and other Arab states away from their former Soviet patrons, with generous promises of aid.
Thus, I would argue that while the struggle for influence in the Middle East seesawed back and forth, and at times looked desperate to some in Washington, it was the United States that ultimately always had the upper hand strategically. This became apparent with the “defection” to the American side of formerly radical Arab nationalist regimes like that of Egypt under Sadat in the 1970s, and later that of Iraq under Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War. Moreover, for all the fevered rhetoric in 1950s Washington about countries in the Middle East being controlled by “international communism,” these Arab regimes and their elites were never drawn ideologically to the USSR. Quite the contrary, all of them were deeply, fundamentally anticommunist, and none were committedly anticapitalist (the sole exception in the entire Middle East for the entirety of the Cold War was South Yemen). Even where communist parties had a role in the domestic politics of Middle Eastern countries, as in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and to a much lesser extent Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt for very short periods, communists were never even close to being in control of these countries. The attraction of most Middle Eastern rulers to both sides in the Cold War was purely based on naked power, and as it became apparent to Middle Eastern elites that the United States was far more powerful and far richer than the Soviet Union, they eventually tended to gravitate toward Washington. Even the revulsion caused by Washington’s constantly increasing bias in favor of Israel was not enough to alienate many Arab governments. We have seen this in the case of Saudi Arabia. It was equally true of Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and other reliably pro-American regimes. After Sadat’s “apostasy” in leaving the pro-Soviet camp in 1972 and thereafter, it was increasingly clear that there were no longer any red lines in this regard, and that the United States could have its Israeli cake and eat whatever it wanted in the Arab world too.
I will leave to the conclusion of this study of the Cold War in the Middle East the final question of whether the George W. Bush administration’s unilateral and interventionist policies in the region, starting with invasion, occupation, and regime change in Iraq, will come to be seen as an aberration and an anomaly, and whether in consequence we will see the pendulum swing back to a less assertive, less aggressive, less intrusive American policy in the Middle East following Bush’s departure from office in January 2009. Alternatively, were the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq the beginning of a new era in American hegemony in the Middle East, an era of even more naked direct intervention than in the past? I will try to show that the answers to these questions are rooted in a thorough understanding of how the current position of the United States in the Middle East evolved in response to the Soviet challenge over the four and a half decades of the Cold War. These questions are therefore best answered after an examination of that challenge and the evolving response, and their impact on the Middle East, to which we now turn.
II
OIL AND THE ORIGINS
OF THE COLD WAR
Historians are notorious for their preoccupation with beginnings, with origins, with the starting points of historical periods. Different scholars point to different moments as marking the beginning of the Cold War. However, there is general agreement about the first indications in the Middle East of the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated the succeeding decades. These were linked to a series of apparently grave crises that took place in 1945 and 1946 along the southwestern perimeter of the newly expanded sphere of Soviet power, drawing in the major wartime allies, the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain. These crises involved Iran, Turkey, and the adjacent Balkans, and started in the closing stages of World War II, continuing immediately after the war ended and through 1947, by which time the Middle East had been fully drawn into the Cold War.
These linked Middle Eastern and Balkan flare-ups, together with others at the same time in eastern and central Europe, were among the first signs that the precarious wartime amity between the three major allies might not be long-lived, and are generally considered to be among the most important markers of the beginning of the Cold War. They aroused deep suspicions in the United States and Britain as to Soviet intentions, while the actions of the Americans and the British and their responses to Soviet initiatives in these regions were in turn causes for serious alarm in Moscow.
President Harry S. Truman’s address of March 12, 1947, to a joint session of Congress about these developments, which came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, was a key turning point in the Cold War as a whole. It was also the culmination of the sequence of events that began with these 1945 great-power confrontations over Iran, Turkey, and the Balkans. This speech focused on the crises involving Turkey and Greece in particular, and warned of the dangers developments there posed to the Middle East. Truman told Congress that if the United States did not extend military and financial aid to both countries in confronting domestic communist forces and the Soviet Union (although the latter was never mentioned by name in the speech) “confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.”1
This address, delivered less than two years after World War II ended, marked a notable evolution in the position of the United States in two respects. The first was vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, which was now being described publicly by the president as a rival and potential enemy. Truman’s address was one of the first major landmarks of the Cold War, and showed clearly that a full-blown direct and indirect confrontation between East and West was already well under way in the Middle East. Second, this speech constituted the first time an American president had designated the Middle East as an area that was crucial to the national security interests of the United States. It thus signified that American power had become global and extended to areas never before considered vital to decision makers in Washington or to the American public. In consequence, Turkey and Greece, and later on other Middle Eastern states, became dependent on the United States, and in some measure became client states of this nascent superpower.
The United States and the Soviet Union had already become deeply engaged in the Middle East at an early stage of their participation in World War II. Although other great powers (including tsarist Russia) had throughout their modern history regarded this region as being of considerable strategic importance, it is ironic in view of their later deep involvement in the Middle East that in the immediate pre–World War II period neither the foreign policy of the Soviet Union nor that of the United States laid particular stress on the region. This was the case at least until the two powers were drawn into World War II by surprise attacks in June and December 1941, respectively. Before that, leaders of both countries appeared far more concerned with events in Europe and East Asia, notably the frightening military rise of Nazi Germany and the growth of expansionist Japanese militarism. For both, the Middle East was by comparison a foreign-policy backwater through the end of the 1930s.
This situation changed dramatically immediately after the Soviet Union and the United States were attacked and thereby brought into World War II. Soon after the German conquests of the Balkans and Crete in early 1941, the Middle East and adjacent areas became the theaters of some of the war’s most decisive and strategically important military operations. This became even more the case starting with Hitler’s 1942 Stalingrad and North African campaigns, which for a time became the focal points of the war with Germany. These two major offensives eastward, combined with covert Nazi subversion in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, and efforts to woo neutral Turkey, constituted an attempt at a vast pincer movement, with its focus on the Middle East and the neighboring region to the north of it between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Should the Wehrmacht—which was undefeated until this point in the war—have been successful in this great gamble, Hitler’s armies would have controlled the southern Soviet Union, nearly the entire Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, and most of the Middle East. They would have been in a position to dominate the Suez Canal and with it the shortest route to India. The possibility of such an extremely dangerous strategic situation emerging in 1942 naturally obliged American, British, and Soviet leaders and military commanders to concentrate their attention on this region from an early stage of the war. The critical situation in the Middle East clarified in the most urgent possible way the vital strategic position of the region for those who might have been previously unaware of it. Given that they had focused relatively little on this area in the prewar era, the key American and Soviet strategists who directed their countries’ war efforts had to adapt quickly. The lessons they learned during this difficult year of the war were to inform their thinking throughout the Cold War.
From the moment the Western powers and the Soviet Union began to focus seriously on the Middle East at this point in World War II, the region’s strategic importance to them was almost self-evident, and its continuing prominence thereafter during the Cold War was easy to understand. The region lay at the junction of three continents; it bordered four major bodies of water, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean; and it lay immediately to the south of the borders of Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Transcaspia. For all these reasons it had long attracted the ambitions of would-be global powers, even if in the decades before World War II neither American nor Soviet policymakers had seemed particularly concerned with it. As soon as the war began, however, the region’s geographic characteristics quickly attracted the attention of strategists in both Washington and Moscow.2 The great German offensives just described, finally blunted by the Soviets at Stalingrad and by the British at El Alamein in North Africa, and the great victories for both that followed, had the effect of further underlining the region’s already considerable strategic importance for leaders in Moscow, London, and Washington.
But something other than its intrinsic strategic importance and the fact that early on in World War II the Middle East was clearly a focus of the grand strategy of the Axis powers drew the attention of Cold War policymakers in the United States and the USSR to this region. Even before the outset of the Cold War, an uncannily symmetrical simultaneous interest in Middle Eastern oil was shown by American and Soviet leaders at the highest level, although the oil question has won relatively limited attention from historians by contrast with other elements of the broader strategic picture. Considerable concern about establishing access to the oil resources of the Middle East was indeed manifested while World War II was still raging, and while both powers were focused on Germany, rather than each other, as a rival. While linked to long-standing strategic factors that had been brought to the surface in the course of the war, such as control of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the route to India, the interest in access to oil involved an entirely new emphasis, at the same time as it was linked to traditional approaches of both powers. It is a minor irony that at the outset of what was soon to become the atomic age, an earlier form of energy was to play such a prominent role in the confrontation between the two nascent superpowers.
The fact that as early as 1945 both the United States and the Soviet Union were paying considerable attention to Middle Eastern oil does call for some explanation. Both powers were major producers of oil, the world’s two greatest, both had considerable reserves, and both had traditionally enjoyed self-sufficiency in oil production. Indeed, in 1941 the United States was the world’s largest oil producer, with 63 percent of world production, with the USSR second, with 10.7 percent.3 In this respect they were in a far better position than all their great-power rivals during the first half of the twentieth century. Germany, France, Japan, and Italy had limited or no domestic sources of oil, even as the development of air and land transport and of various new forms of military technology drastically increased demand for this vital commodity and made it considerably more strategically important than ever before. Even the great British Empire was dependent upon faraway supplies of oil in distant and unstable lands, notably Iran and Iraq.
