Chapter 17
Muddle in the Middle East
In This Chapter
Looking on as Israel battles its neighbours
Watching as Lebanon falls apart
Witnessing peace deals and Intifadas
Tracing the rise of militant Islam
The troubles of the Middle East have gone through many phases, with different conflicts in various parts of the region. The longest-running conflict, however, and the one which has proved most difficult to solve, is the tug-of-war between Jews and Arabs for control of the ancient land of Palestine. This chapter explains why this land of deserts and valleys became so unstable and why its conflicts have come to dominate the peace of the world.
When Israel was in Egypt’s Land
Chapter 11 explains how in 1947 the British were forced by international opinion and Jewish terrorism to hand Palestine back to the United Nations to be divided into Arab and Jewish states. The State of Israel was set up in 1948 but its Arab neighbours refused to accept it and tried to strangle the new state at birth.
Ever since Israel joined in Britain and France’s ill-fated plot in 1956 to invade Egypt and seize the Suez Canal (see Chapter 11), Egypt’s leader, Colonel Nasser, had led the Arab states in plotting to find a way to wipe Israel off the map. Nasser wanted to unite the Arabs in a single Arab super-state. He managed to get Syria to join Egypt in a United Arab Republic, though it only lasted a couple of years. But even if he couldn’t get the Arabs into one state, he reckoned he could still get them to act together – against Israel.
Six days that shook the world
In 1967 the Arabs thought the time had come to crush Israel once and for all. First, Israel’s economy was in trouble and its prime minister, Levi Eshkol, was looking old and tired. The Arabs thought that with a bit of help from them, the whole state might collapse. Second, The Arabs were trying to act as one people. Nasser was enthusiastic about ‘Pan-Arabism’, the idea of having one huge Arab state. So was the Ba’ath party, the Arab nationalist movement that had taken power in Syria and Iraq. What better for uniting the Arabs than a massive attack on Israel?
The initial attack
In April the Syrians started shelling northern Israel but the Israeli Air Force struck back hard. In May, Nasser got his troops into position and told the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping force from Sinai. Doing so was like sending Israel a message saying, ‘Dear Israel, We are planning to attack you through Sinai as soon as the UN troops are out of the way. Thought you’d like to know. Love, Nasser.’ The Israelis, who had excellent intelligence reports on the Egyptian forces, decided to get their retaliation in first.
There’s black gold in them thar dunes
Until the internal combustion engine was invented most people’s image of the Middle East was deserts and camels, but once geologists found oil under the desert sands early in the twentieth century that all changed. At first the Arab kings didn’t always fully appreciate quite how valuable this black stuff was and many Western oil firms were able to negotiate very favourable terms. But by the 1950s the Arabs were fully aware of what an asset they were sitting on, and in 1960 they joined together to create the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC to its friends. OPEC’s job was to co-ordinate prices and production targets to avoid the industry being dominated by the West, especially the United States. In 1973 and 1979 OPEC deliberately raised oil prices and cut supplies in order to hit at Western countries for being too pro-Israel, but no one gets rich by not selling things, so this state of affairs didn’t last. When the Arab countries started fighting each other in the 1980s, OPEC became less and less important.
The Israelis strike back
Early on the morning of 5 June 1967 the Israeli Air Force, flying fast and low so the Egyptian radar defences wouldn’t pick them up, attacked the Egyptian Air Force while it was neatly laid out on the ground. The Israelis kept up wave after wave of the attack, destroying the aircraft, bombing the runways, and then zooming in again just as the Egyptians were clearing up and trying to get a few planes into the air. The Egyptians didn’t know what to do: Their Commander-in-Chief was in a plane which didn’t dare descend in case the Israelis shot it down, and the Egyptian Air Force Commander was stuck in traffic. It really wasn’t Egypt’s day. And it wasn’t over yet.
The Israelis headed home to rest and refuel and then at lunchtime they headed off for Jordan and Syria and bombed their air forces into the ground too. They even bombed airfields in far-away Iraq, which had sent planes to attack Israel. Finally, in the evening the Israelis headed back to bomb the Egyptians again before calling it a day. The Israelis reckoned no one would’ve dared tell Nasser just how many planes he’d lost in the morning, so he wouldn’t have given orders to move them out of harm’s way. They were right.
The Israelis had effectively won the war on that first day, and the ground fighting had hardly started. Over the next five days the Israelis attacked in all directions, into Sinai and Gaza in the south, into the Golan Heights along the border with Syria in the north, and into the West Bank of the Jordan where they captured the ultimate prize – the city of Jerusalem.
Who won or lost what: A tally
By the time the UN passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, the Israelis had captured 26,000 square miles of Arab territory:
Sinai – captured from Egypt
The Gaza Strip – captured from Egypt
The West Bank – captured from Jordan
The Golan Heights – captured from Syria
The Arab states were stunned. To lose on one front was bad enough, but to lose on all three was a disaster. The Arab League met in Khartoum to decide what to do. They came up with a defiant triple ‘No’:
No peace with Israel
No recognition of Israel
No negotiations with Israel
Which sounded impressive except that they had no way of defeating Israel either.
The mass murderer in fluffy slippers
In 1961 Israeli agents swooped on a tall, balding, bespectacled man in a suburb of the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, bundled him into a car, and smuggled him out of the country. He was Adolf Eichmann, the former SS officer who’d helped organise the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi policy of extermination of Jews. In 1944 he’d been personally responsible for sending the Jewish population of Hungary to the gas chambers. Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem for mass murder. Everyone was expecting to see a dashing figure in his black SS uniform; in fact Eichmann turned out to be an ordinary little man in a cheap suit. In his cell he wore a cardigan and fluffy zip-up slippers as if he’d put his feet up after a hard day at the office. For the writer Hannah Arendt, Eichmann summed up the ‘banality of evil’. More worryingly, his appearance suggested that anyone could end up a mass murderer if the circumstances were right.
The trial helped Israelis, especially the young, to get a sense of what Jews had gone through in the Holocaust, and why keeping the Israeli nation safe and strong was so important.
The Arab states strike back
Israel’s amazing triumph in the Six Day War (see the earlier section ‘Six days that shook the world’) didn’t mean the fighting ended. The Egyptians were determined to get Sinai back and they kept up the pressure, launching small-scale attacks and raids, to try to wear the Israelis down. The tough, no-nonsense Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, struck back with bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory. To make things worse, Egypt was supported by the Soviet Union, so the Americans were nervous about giving Israel a blank cheque to do whatever she liked in case doing so sparked a nuclear war. Nasser died in 1970 and by 1973 the new Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, sensed that Israel’s position wasn’t as strong as it looked, so he got in touch with the Syrians. ‘Payback time for the Six Day War,’ he told them. Was Syria up for it? ‘You bet,’ said Syria.
The Yom Kippur War
On 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and one of the holiest festivals of the Jewish year, the Egyptians and Syrians attacked. The Egyptians pushed into Sinai; the Syrians attacked in the Golan Heights. This time it was the Israelis who were caught on the hop and the Arab forces pushed them right back. The Israelis soon got their breath back, though: They retook the Golan Heights and shattered the Egyptians in a massive tank battle in the Sinai desert. The Soviet Union threatened to intervene to stop Israel completely destroying the Egyptians, the United States went on nuclear alert, and finally the two sides agreed to a ceasefire. The Israelis had won but the Arabs had given them a good run for their money.
No help? No oil!
The Arab states felt that one of the main reasons they’d lost the Yom Kippur War was because the West had been so solidly behind Israel. Whether it was because of European feelings of guilt about the Holocaust or the strength of the Jewish lobby in America, the West seemed to have decided that the Israelis were the good guys and the Arabs were the bad guys. So in 1973 the Arabs decided to apply a little pressure to help Western countries see things from their point of view. The Arab oil-producing countries suddenly raised their prices to Western countries by an incredible 70 per cent. Saudi Arabia cut its production and refused to sell any oil at all to the United States or the Netherlands, Israel’s strongest allies in the West. Result: Chaos.
Huge queues at petrol stations
Western countries had to restrict petrol supplies and even drew up plans for rationing motorists
Supplies of all other goods were disrupted because freight transport had to be restricted to save fuel
Western countries looked round desperately for alternative sources of oil
A bicycle became the must-have of 1973
Strangely enough, faced with this onslaught on their oil supplies, Western countries did start to change their tune and agree that maybe the Palestinians had a point after all, and every question has two sides to it, and maybe they’d been a bit hasty in backing Israel quite so strongly. Funny, that.
Egypt and Israel make peace: Icicles seen in Hell
Egypt after 1973 was a country with big problems. It had lost its oil fields in Sinai after the 1967 war (see the earlier section ‘Six days that shook the world’). During that war, the Suez Canal had been so littered with sunken ships and unexploded bombs and shells that it had had to be closed, and no one knew when it would reopen. Shipping companies had started using other routes and were building supertankers that would be too big to use the canal when it reopened anyway. Since oil and the canal represented Egypt’s main sources of income, these were serious losses. The Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, realised that Egypt couldn’t hope to sustain the sort of expenditure that an arms race with Israel would involve. Egypt desperately needed American aid to solve its economic problems so Sadat wisely sent home all the Soviet advisers his predecessor Nasser had engaged. But Egypt wouldn’t get any American help while it was still at daggers drawn with Israel. That situation meant Egypt would have to think the unthinkable: Make peace with Israel.
Making peace would mean talking with the new Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin. Begin was an old terrorist leader from the war against the British and he was just as tough on Israel’s Arab enemies. But even Begin was taken aback (and very wary) when Sadat got in touch suggesting they talk. But his suggestion was no trick: In November 1977 the world watched in disbelief as Anwar Sadat, Israel’s arch-enemy, travelled to Tel Aviv and addressed the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The following year US President Jimmy Carter seized the chance to invite both men to his country retreat, Camp David, to talk peace and do a bit of fishing. The informal setting worked. The three men agreed that:
Egypt would recognise and establish full and normal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, and accept its right to exist
Israel and Egypt would make a permanent peace
Israel would cut its troops in the West Bank and the Golan Heights
Israel would withdraw its troops from Sinai, dismantle its settlements there, and gradually hand Sinai back to Egypt
Begin and Sadat would negotiate terms for an autonomous Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank
The Camp David agreements earned Begin and Sadat the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. Would they bring peace to the whole Middle East? Er, no. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated by men from an Islamist faction of his own bodyguard, disgusted with his ‘betrayal’ of the Arab cause. For the Middle East, such violence was business as normal.
Palestine: Two into One Won’t Go
The Israelis proved tougher than anyone had expected, defeated the Arabs, and even took over the area the UN had designated as a Palestinian homeland while the Arabs were nursing their wounds and wondering quite what had hit them (see the earlier section ‘When Israel was in Egypt’s Land’). So the Palestinians, like the Jews before them, were a people without a home, living as refugees in the neighbouring Arab countries. Now it was their turn to dream of regaining their homeland.
War’n’terror – the PLO
The Palestinians hadn’t been sitting around waiting for the Arab states to liberate them: They’d set up a whole set of rival liberation movements of their own. You could choose from:
The Palestine National Liberation Movement (Nationalist)
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Marxist)
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Democratic)
In 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed to try to unite these different groups. It was soon dominated by the Palestine National Liberation Movement, also known as Al Fatah, which carried out terrorist attacks on Israel from its bases in Syria and the West Bank, though it never quite controlled the even more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). After the Six Day War (see the earlier section ‘Six days that shook the world’), the PLO had to clear out of the West Bank and move to Jordan. From there they planned a series of terrorist attacks designed to put pressure on Israel and win publicity for the Palestinian cause.
The Arab states soon learned that the PLO were difficult and dangerous guests. They virtually set up a state within a state in Jordan, operating their own law and police force. King Hussein was afraid that they’d try to take over his kingdom completely.
The Dawson’s Field hijacking
The PFLP’s most spectacular attack was a mass hijacking of three international airliners in 1970, designed to force the British, German, and Swiss governments to release PLO terrorists captured during previous hijacking attempts. With 56 hostages’ lives at stake, the three governments gave in and released their prisoners. The PFLP then blew up the three airliners in front of the world’s press at Dawson’s Field in Jordan. The hostages weren’t on board, though no one knew this till a bit later.
A very black September
The Dawson’s Field hijacking (see previous section) was the last straw: Within days King Hussein of Jordan declared martial law and sent the Royal Jordanian Army in to destroy the PLO bases. After a week of heavy fighting the king’s men won: the PLO had to pull out and move to Lebanon, where they caused even more trouble (see the later section ‘The Killing Grounds of Lebanon’).
The PLO were very bitter about the Jordanian action and called it ‘Black September’ in memory of the month in which it happened. One radical PLO group actually called themselves ‘Black September’ and vowed to get revenge. In 1971 they assassinated the Jordanian prime minister. The following year they scored their most spectacular coup when they attacked the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics.
An Olympic gold for murder
Black September’s most dramatic attack was at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where they burst into the quarters of the Israeli team, killed two of them, and took nine more hostage. A tense stand-off followed as the terrorists demanded the release of 200 Palestinians held in Israel and safe passage out of Germany. The Israelis refused the demand but the Germans offered to fly the terrorists and their hostages to an Arab country. Then, at the airport, the German police opened fire. All of the athletes, four of the terrorists, and one policeman were killed in the gun battle that followed.
The Munich attack showed how ruthless some of the Palestinian groups were; it also made Israel more determined than ever to defend itself and to crush the PLO.
Yasser Arafat
The PLO’s leader was Yasser Arafat, the man who’d set up Al Fatah back in 1956. Arafat liked to present himself as a man of action, always wearing military uniform and even carrying a pistol when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. But despite his terrorist image he preferred to work through negotiation; many of the rival Palestinian liberation groups within the PLO got fed up with him and said he wasn’t militant enough, though most Israelis thought he was, thank you very much.
The Intifada – shaking Israel off
Israel was determined to keep the lands it had taken in the Six Day War (see the earlier section ‘Six days that shook the world’). It had given Sinai back to Egypt, but it wasn’t planning to give up the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or the Golan Heights. Keeping these lands didn’t just mean planting an Israeli flag: The builders arrived and started building settlements for Israelis to come and live in – not tents but proper housing estates, with driveways and bus stops and local shops and schools. Israel was treating the occupied territories as if they were just normal parts of the country. The idea was to make the Israeli presence in the occupied territories so permanent that moving them out would be impossible. European countries had done much the same whenever they moved their borders – which they often did.
The United Nations repeatedly told Israel to clear out of the occupied territories, but Israel took no notice. Neither governments nor terrorists could make the Israelis budge. So the young Palestinians decided to see what they could do with a few stones.
Remember the story of David and Goliath? The boy David killed the mighty Goliath with a single stone from his sling. Perhaps the Israelis should have remembered that story, because in 1987 young Palestinians in Gaza took to the streets and started throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Now here’s a dilemma: If people are throwing stones at you, does that mean they’re armed? And should you fire back?
The Israelis decided to open fire on the stone-throwers. But every time Israeli soldiers opened fire, it provoked another outburst of stone throwing, either in Gaza or in the West Bank. In one of the worst incidents, Israeli soldiers killed 17 Palestinians on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The stone throwing even got a special name: Intifada (‘the shaking off’). Israel had a full-scale crisis on its hands.
When Israel had been defending itself against Arab attacks, the West had sympathised with the underdog; now, television footage of Israeli soldiers firing on ‘unarmed’ youths made the underdog appear to have become a very nasty bully.
A little peace? The Oslo Accords
Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli defence minister in charge of the army fighting the Intifada, was the first to realise that Israel was fighting a war it couldn’t win. In 1992 he became prime minister and with his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, Rabin made it clear he was ready to talk. The government of Norway stepped in to help. It invited the Israelis and the PLO to Oslo where, in 1993, they drew up a set of agreements to make peace. They’d have signed them too, only US President Bill Clinton didn’t want to miss a photo opportunity, so he invited them to sign the Oslo Accords in Washington. So it was that on 13 September 1993, on the White House lawn and with Clinton spreading his arms out behind them, the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO leader Yasser Arafat shook hands.
The Oslo Accords were followed by a second agreement called ‘Oslo B’ and the Gaza–Jericho agreement. Taken altogether, here’s what they said:
The PLO recognises Israel and accepts its right to exist. Which, for the PLO, was quite an admission.
Israel recognises the PLO as the legal representative of the Palestinian people. Which was not going to be easy for most Israelis to swallow.
Israel recognises that the Palestinians have the right to an autonomous homeland, which is to be in Gaza, Jericho, and some parts of the West Bank. This wasn’t easy for Israelis to swallow either.
Israel agrees to start withdrawing its forces from the West Bank. A new Palestinian security force would take over. The Israeli West Bank settlers weren’t going to like that one bit.
Normal service is resumed
Some Israelis regarded the assassinated Rabin (see previous section) as a martyr; others thought he got all he deserved. In 1995 Israelis elected the hardline Binyamin Netanyahu prime minister. He dragged his heels over implementing the peace deal as much as he could, saying the Palestinians were not to be trusted. They’d set Gaza up as a state of sorts, called the Palestinian National Authority, but it wasn’t really national and it didn’t seem to have much authority. Despite massive injections of cash, mainly from Europe, its economy was falling apart, the Palestinian police detained people without trial, and the whole system seemed to be mired in corruption. Worse, terrorists were still operating from within the National Authority area, and the Israelis said the Palestinian police were doing nothing about it. In 2000 a second Intifada broke out. This time Hezbollah (the Lebanese militant group; see the later section ‘The Army of God’) got involved, providing the Palestinians with weapons, as did a radical Palestinian group called Hamas, who thought the PLO had gone soft and was never going to get anywhere. The peace process seemed to be going into reverse.
In 2002 Israel began a massive assault against the Palestinian National Authority. Yasser Arafat found himself under siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. He was already a sick man and in 2004 he died in hospital in Paris. The peace deal he and Rabin had negotiated in Oslo was dead too.
The Killing Grounds of Lebanon
Lebanon in the 1960s was the Middle East’s playground: A sunny holiday destination where tourists could enjoy the sandy beaches or watch the world go by in one of the French-style cafes in its fashionable capital city, Beirut. By the 1970s, however, Lebanon was torn apart in a vicious and complex civil war and Beirut had been reduced to rubble.
From Lockerbie to Libya
On 21 December 1988 a Pan American flight from London Heathrow to New York blew up over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. All the passengers and crew were killed and so were 11 people on the ground. Suspicion surrounded all America’s enemies in the Middle East, especially Iran and Syria, but in the end the finger pointed at Libya’s erratic dictator, Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi had a long history of supporting anti-Western terrorist groups: Staff at his London embassy had even opened fire on a demonstration in the street, killing a policewoman. In 1986 the US Air Force bombed Tripoli, killing one of Gaddafi’s children. Was Lockerbie his way of hitting back?
The British demanded the extradition of two Libyan agents and got the United Nations to impose sanctions on Libya until Gaddafi agreed to hand them over. Ultimately he did, though only one of them was convicted and some people still doubt he was involved. Very slowly, Libya began to improve relations with the West and stopped backing terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists. Gaddafi even had a visit from the British prime minister Tony Blair, though that may have been punishment enough. For both of them.
Lebanon had been part of Syria, but when the French took Syria over after the First World War they separated Lebanon from its neighbour and set it up as a separate autonomous republic in 1926. Lebanon’s population is comprised of three groups which set it apart from other Middle Eastern countries:
Maronite Christians: An ancient Christian sect who made up about half of the Lebanese population until the 1960s.
Muslims: Drawn from the orthodox Sunni group and the Shi’ite sect. By the 1960s Lebanon’s Muslims were growing in numbers – fast.
Druzes: A Muslim sect who grew out of the Shi’ite tradition but had developed some rather oddball ideas of their own. Most Muslims didn’t accept them as Islamic at all.
In 1943 the different groups in Lebanon worked out a power-sharing constitution that gave most power to the Christians. Doing so made sense because the 1932 census suggested the Christians were in the majority and they certainly tended to own most of the country’s wealth. However, by the 1960s the Muslim population was growing at such a rate that they overtook the Christians to become the biggest group by far. Once the (Muslim) PLO moved its base to Lebanon in 1970 after it was thrown out of Jordan, the Lebanese Muslims started demanding changes: They wanted the constitution altered to give most power to them. The PLO supported the Muslims, but the Christians were afraid of what would happen if they gave up their power, so they said no. Both sides started acquiring guns. Then in 1975 Christian militia attacked a bus carrying Palestinians. It was war.
Who’s killing whom?
The Lebanese civil war was pretty confusing because it had more than one side and groups changed sides:
Christians, Muslims, and Druzes all fought against each other but they didn’t all fight all the others all of the time. Two deadly enemies who were always against each other were the pan-Arab Muslims, who wanted an Arab super-state, and the right-wing Phalange Christian movement.
The Syrians, who didn’t trust the PLO as far as they could spit, were worried that the Palestinians were setting up bases along their border, so they sent troops in to help the Christians (who were fighting the Palestinians – do try to keep up) so as to keep the Palestinians concentrated in the south, along the Israeli border, where they couldn’t threaten Syria.
In 1978 the Israelis, who didn’t want the PLO along their border, invaded to help the Christians (who were fighting their enemies the Palestinians, remember). This development meant that Israel and Syria, who were deadly enemies, had actually been fighting on the same side! The UN told Israel to get out, so they did and a UN peacekeeping force moved in.
In 1980 the Syrians turned against the Christians (because the Christians were being helped by the Israelis. See? The whole situation’s simple really).
Through all of this chaos, the PLO had been getting stronger in the south and were launching missile attacks into Israel. The Israelis hit back by launching bombing raids into Lebanon, but doing so wasn’t enough to stop the attacks. So in 1982 Israel launched a massive full-scale invasion of Lebanon. They overran the south of the country and reached Beirut. The PLO had to pack up quickly and clear out. The Lebanese, who were thoroughly fed up with the Palestinians taking over their country, welcomed the Israelis with open arms.
Lebanon’s camps of death
The Israelis were hoping to turn Lebanon into a sort of puppet state, but the Lebanese hadn’t waved goodbye and good riddance to the PLO only to be taken over by the Israelis. Then the Israelis found themselves linked to one of the most shameful episodes to come out of Lebanon’s already terrible civil war.
On 14 September a pro-Syrian group blew up the Lebanese Christian president-elect, Bashir Gemayel. Gemayel had been regarded as a hero to Lebanese Christians, and some of them decided to take terrible revenge. Four days after the assassination, Christian militia arrived at two Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila and shot everyone they could find. The Israelis, it was revealed, had deliberately stood by and let them do it. The Israeli defence minister, Ariel Sharon, resigned. Israel’s image as the Liberator of Lebanon was well and truly destroyed, just when it was about to face its deadliest enemy yet.
The Army of God
A new group on the Lebanese scene decided to drive Israel and all westerners out of Lebanon once and for all. Called Hezbollah (the ‘Army of God’), it was inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran (see the later section ‘Islam – the New World Revolution’). Hezbollah wanted to set up an Islamic republic in Lebanon and wipe Israel off the map, not just because it was occupying Palestinian land, but because it believed that Jews were the enemies of God. For the first time the Israelis found themselves up against an enemy as fierce and determined as they were themselves.
As Lebanon collapsed into anarchy, a multinational peacekeeping force arrived, though finding much peace to keep was difficult. Hezbollah, who didn’t want westerners around the place, launched a series of devastating suicide bomb attacks against the peacekeeping forces’ headquarters: 239 people were killed in just one bomb blast at the American military HQ. The peacekeepers hurriedly pulled out. In 1985 the Israelis themselves finally acknowledged defeat and withdrew.
With the Israelis and the PLO both out of the picture, the Lebanese themselves had to try to restore some order and stability to their country. In 1990 General Aoun of the Christian militia seized the presidential palace and declared himself president. But the Muslims and their Syrian backers didn’t want him: Their man, Glias Hrawi, formed his own government and the two men spent most of the year arguing over who was in fact president, until in October General Aoun finally gave way.
Lebanon was much more stable in the 1990s and managed to rebuild something of its national pride and confidence. Lebanon’s new challenge was how to prevent the Syrians trying to dominate the country as the Palestinians and Israelis had done in the past.
A hostage to fortune
Seizing Western hostages was a favourite Hezbollah tactic. The Archbishop of Canter-bury’s special envoy, Terry Waite, had managed to negotiate the release of Western hostages in Libya and Iran, so in 1987 the Archbishop sent him to Lebanon to see what he could do there. Not much, as it turned out, because he was kidnapped himself by Hezbollah, who were suspicious of the way the Americans had used him in their rather shady arms deal with Iran. They kept Waite prisoner until 1992.
Islam – the New World Revolution
In the 1970s the Middle East seemed to be turning its back on its traditional way of life. Oil-rich Arabs drove flashy cars and spent their evenings at the casino, having a few very non-Islamic drinks. Shops sold Western music and Western fashions. Women left their veils at home and walked out in fashionable jeans and t-shirts. Traditional imams in the mosques could only shake their heads in disapproval. History, apparently, was against them.
But history was about to go into sharp reverse. Starting in Iran.
Iran: The fundamentalist things apply
The Islamic Revolution that brought down the Shah of Iran in 1979 changed the whole direction of the Middle East. Instead of a dispute over who should own Palestine, Middle Eastern politics became a cultural battle about the role of Islam throughout the world.
The shah must go on
The dynasty of shahs who ruled twentieth-century Iran wasn’t that ancient. In 1923 Reza Khan became prime minister and three years later he overthrew the shah and had himself crowned Reza Shah Pahlevi. Reza’s regime was strongly pro-Nazi (he changed the country’s name to ‘Iran’ (‘Aryan’) to please Hitler), but in 1941 the British and Russians got rid of him and put his son, Muhammad Reza, in charge. However, the new shah quickly learned that real power lay with the popular Iranian nationalist leader Muhammad Mossadeq. In 1953, the two men tussled for power and Mossadeq seemed so firmly entrenched that the shah fled the country. At that point his friends the Americans stepped in: The CIA staged a coup which overthrew Mossadeq (he spent the rest of his life in jail) and put the shah back on his throne.
This time the shah kept power firmly in his own hands. He sent troops to crush the attempts by the Kurds and Azerbaijanis to break away, and Savak, his dreaded secret police, kept close tabs on anyone suspected of disloyalty. He was particularly tough on those who objected to the way Iran was becoming increasingly Western. In 1963 he launched the ‘White Revolution’, a big drive to spread Western ideals such as rights for women and education for all and eradicate traditional Islamic culture. One of the many people who were arrested and exiled for opposing this revolution was an up-and-coming Islamic scholar called Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.
This country is now under new (divine) management
Khomeini settled in Iraq, where he called not only for the shah to be overthrown but also for a complete rejection of Western culture. He said Iran should go back to its Islamic roots and govern itself by Islamic law. In comparison to the shah’s repressive regime, many Iranians found they liked what they were hearing. In 1978 the Iranians persuaded Iraq to kick Khomeini out, but he just moved to Paris and carried on his campaign from there. By then protests against the shah had got out of hand; in 1979 he was forced to flee and Ayatollah Khomeini flew in from Paris to take charge.
What followed was a strange sight for the twentieth century: A popular revolution taking a country straight back to the Middle Ages:
Iran became an Islamic republic. High ranking clergy were in charge, with Ayatollah Khomeini in overall charge for life.
Western music was banned (and Country music wasn’t exactly approved of). Women were to wear Islamic dress and lose many of their civil rights.
Strict Sharia (Islamic) law was to be applied, including execution for adultery and cutting off the hands of thieves.
Anyone who opposed these changes was to be executed too.
Khomeini declared death to America! He referred to the United States as the ‘Great Satan’, an evil power out to destroy all Muslims.
Iran went through a period of terrifying chaos. Thousands were killed on the Ayatollah’s orders. In November 1979 Iranian students took his anti-American message to heart by storming the American embassy in Tehran and taking the staff hostage. The Ayatollah may not have ordered the snatch, but he certainly refused to do anything to get the hostages released, despite calls of protest from all over the world. US President Jimmy Carter authorised a dramatic James Bond-style rescue attempt, but mechanical difficulties and bad luck caused the commanders to abort the mission, which then ended in a fiery crash between two of the aircraft involved . Just to rub the humiliation in, the Ayatollah finally released the hostages just as Carter left office in 1981.
After the hostage crisis Iran tried to improve relations with the West, but in 1989 The Satanic Verses by the Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie appeared, attacking aspects of Islam. The Ayatollah passed a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death and calling on Muslims all over the world to assassinate him. Western governments protested at this attack on freedom of speech; Muslims protested at this attack on their faith. The Iranian revolution had become a worldwide confrontation between Islam and Western culture.
Better know your Shia from your Sunni
Like Orthodox Christians and Catholics in the Christian Church, Islam is divided into two main groups, and they don’t usually get on. Most Muslims are Sunni, from ‘sunna’ meaning ‘custom’ or ‘how to behave’. The Sunni believe that they follow in the correct tradition of Islam handed down directly by the Prophet Muhammad and his successors. The Shia say that the line of succession went through the wrong people and that it should have gone through Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. The issue may seem somewhat arcane to outsiders, but this dispute between Muslims is every bit as serious as the splits within Christianity. Every year the Shia celebrate the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husain with a re-enactment of his death and a bloody ceremony where the men cut their heads with knives and allow the blood to stream down them, as a sign of their devotion to their faith. As the West would very soon learn, this was not a faith to trifle with.
Note to self: Don’t invade Afghanistan even if they ask you
The Kingdom of Afghanistan spent much of the twentieth century playing hard to get. In the 1920s and 1930s it switched between being a Western-style state and going back to its traditional style of rule and it spent the Cold War getting help from both sides without actually committing itself to either. In 1978 a communist group within the army seized power but the members all ended up fighting each other. Babrak Kemal took power himself in 1979 but he needed more support. He asked the Russians for help.
In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Immediately all the warring groups stopped fighting each other and banded together to fight the Russians. Like the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians had all the latest military hardware, but they couldn’t defeat the guerrillas fighting on their home ground. The Russians stayed in Afghanistan for ten long, unhappy years, losing thousands of men, until eventually in 1989 they pulled out.
The Americans did all they could to help the Afghans fight the Russians. They sent arms and money to the Mujahidin, the Islamic ‘Holy Warriors’ who were resisting up in the hills. Unfortunately, when the Russians pulled out in 1989, the Afghans didn’t all become instantly pro-American. Instead, the different groups resumed the in-fighting that the Russians had so rudely interrupted, so that by the early 1990s the country was in chaos.
The nearest Afghanistan had to a pro-Western group was the Northern Alliance, but they were losing ground to the militant Mujahidin. By 1996 an extreme Islamic group called the Taliban had taken over most of the country. They turned Afghanistan into an Islamic republic along the same lines as Iran. They didn’t just force women to give up their jobs and cover up in public: They completely banned all aspects of Western culture and executed thousands of people who objected to their brutality.
The Taliban had two main sources of support:
Income from the international drugs trade
Osama Bin-Laden and the Al-Qaeda network
The Americans were kicking themselves: They’d helped turn Afghanistan into a major international headache. For America, mainly.
Ba’ath Ba’ath – Black Sheep
Not all Arab states became Islamic republics. Some followed a radical new creed called Ba’athism. Ba’athism (‘renaissance’) began in Syria in the 1940s as a movement to drive foreigners out of the Middle East and set up one pan-Arab state. It was a secular creed, which borrowed many ideas from socialism. Like the Nazi or Communist Parties, the Ba’ath Party insisted on unquestioning obedience and it set its leaders up as all-powerful dictators.
Arabs tended to like Ba’athist ideas in theory but not necessarily in practice: Egypt and Syria joined together as one state in 1958, but the union fell apart four years later. Syria, however, stuck to the Ba’athist ideal. The other country which took the Ba’athist path was Iraq.
Syria: President Assad’s kingdom
The Ba’ath Party seized control in Syria in 1963 and from 1970 the country was ruled by the Ba’athist army commander, General Assad. Assad ruled with a grip of iron: Businesses were nationalised and critics and opponents locked up. Assad was particularly ruthless with religious opposition: He crushed an Islamic fundamentalist revolt against his rule in 1982.
Assad’s neighbours couldn’t rest easy either: He did his best to turn Lebanon into a Syrian puppet state and he made no secret of the fact that he couldn’t stand Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist government of Iraq. When the PLO were abandoning terrorism for the negotiating table, Assad provided a base for the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal to launch attacks against Israeli and Western targets, but when Syria’s Soviet support collapsed in 1989, Assad tried to open up links with the West. By and large, the West was not impressed.
Iraq: The republic of fear
The Ba’ath Party took control in Iraq in 1968. In some ways, Ba’athism was very good for Iraq: It modernised, gave much greater freedom to women, and turned itself into a strong, Western-style state. The West wasn’t convinced, though, because the Iraqis nationalised the oil industry, taking it out of the hands of Western companies. However, the military commander, General Saddam Hussein, was gradually taking more power into his hands and in 1979 he took over the presidency. He ruled by terror, using the army, the secret police, and members of his own family. On one occasion he sat in a Ba’ath Party meeting calmly smoking a cigar as his men dragged delegates who had criticised him outside to be shot.
Saddam Hussein played on the fact that Iraq had some of the richest reserves of oil in the world; unfortunately, the oil fields were mostly in the Kurdish lands in the north and the Shia lands in the south. Neither group felt at home in Saddam’s Iraq and both wanted out of it: The Kurds wanted their own state and the Shia wanted to join with Iran. Saddam’s response: Full-scale military attack, even using poison gas.
There ain’t room in the Middle East for both of us: Iran v Iraq
Iran and Iraq represented the two opposite extremes of Arab states: Iran was a fiercely Muslim state, Iraq was a fiercely anti-religious, secular state. In 1980 Iraq took advantage of the chaos in Iran to try to seize disputed land on the border (see the earlier section ‘This country is now under new (divine) management’ to find out why Iran was in chaos). At first the Iraqis caught the Iranians on the back foot, but Iran swiftly recovered and fought back, and the war soon became a long slog, more like the trenches of the First World War than the hi-tech late twentieth century. The fighting finally stopped in 1988, mainly because each side was exhausted, and Saddam had his eyes on an easier victim. What had each side gained from eight years of war? Precisely nothing.
Pick on someone your own size! The war for Kuwait
In the 1980s OPEC reached an amicable agreement with the West to lower oil prices. Cheaper oil would hit Iraq badly unless Saddam could somehow corner the market. So he cast his eye on the neighbouring state of Kuwait – small, vulnerable, defenceless, and sitting on some of the world’s largest reserves of oil. In August 1990 the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait, drove the emir into exile, and announced that henceforth Kuwait was a province of Iraq.
Saddam miscalculated badly in Kuwait. He assumed that his friends, the Americans, would just tut tut loudly and let him off, but instead President George Bush Senior and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced his action and arranged for a United Nations force to liberate Kuwait. (Saddam holding all the westerners in Kuwait hostage didn’t help his cause.) Saddam boasted that he would win the ‘Mother of All Battles’ but in the event the coalition forces walked all over his men in a couple of weeks. The Iraqis set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields in a fit of sour grapes, creating an ecological disaster for the whole region. Saddam’s days appeared numbered. And then the UN forces stopped.
President Bush stuck to his mandate: The UN had said he could liberate Kuwait, but it hadn’t said anything about toppling Saddam Hussein. This development was bad news for the Shia and Kurds, who had risen up in rebellion expecting coalition forces to be arriving at any moment. Instead they got the Iraqi army arriving in force, and they always enjoyed killing people who couldn’t fight back. The UN forced Saddam to accept a no-fly zone over Kurdistan and imposed a set of sanctions to try to force him to grant a few basic human rights, but many people in the West, especially around the White House, thought that they’d missed a golden opportunity to get rid of a very nasty dictator.
Postscript
The coalition forces who liberated Kuwait (see previous section) operated from bases in Saudi Arabia. After the war, the United States kept its troops on Saudi territory. The sight of American soldiers riding around the Prophet’s homeland was too much for one wealthy Saudi citizen already sickened by the corruption of the Saudi royal family – one Osama bin Laden. In 1988 Bin Laden had become head of a network of Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan where, of course, the Americans had kept him and his men well supplied with arms and ammunition. But now Bin Laden reckoned the Americans had gone too far: The presence of their troops on Saudi soil, he decided, was a deadly insult to all Muslims and his network would avenge it. What was his network’s name? Al Qaeda.