The Middle East attracts, and for a very long time has attracted, an inordinate share of people who are obsessed. This is true whether they are obsessed with God, with themselves and their own narratives, or with something else. Those obsessed with one area or aspect of the Middle East often lose sight of larger patterns that may in fact determine or explain outcomes throughout this region and beyond. Thus, for example, those who focus obsessively on Israel, Palestine, or the Arab-Israeli conflict tend to see their object of interest as unique, as sui generis, and as too important and too driven by its own complex internal dynamics to be profoundly affected by any broader patterns. This chapter examines one of these larger patterns that sometimes determined (and often still determine) outcomes, specifically how the Middle East as a whole has fitted into and was affected by the overall international system as that system has evolved over time. I will concentrate here on the impact of the international system before and especially during the Cold War, as well as in the years that have followed. The next chapter will examine another of these patterns: how the bipolar international system that emerged during the Cold War severely exacerbated several protracted regional conflicts, while the succeeding chapter argues that this Cold War system affected, and in many ways deeply distorted, internal developments in several countries of the Middle East.
I begin with four main points about the place of the Middle East in the international system. These points focus particularly on how this system has shifted over the past century or so from being a primarily European system to, increasingly, an international one, dominated during the Cold War by two superpowers, and since then by the United States. It is a system that may or may not have become more of an international community in the process.
The first point is that until about the middle of the twentieth century, the Middle East was an important arena for the operation of the traditional European state system, but Middle Eastern states were not fully accepted as part of that system, although one of them, the Ottoman Empire, for centuries controlled large areas of southeastern Europe and of the Mediterranean and Black Sea littorals. In this respect, this region resembled South Asia and North America in the eighteenth century, and Africa and China in the nineteenth century. All these areas were scenes of intense European rivalry, but states there, even highly organized, long-established, and powerful states like the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, and China under the Ch’ing dynasty, were not considered legitimate or full parts of the European system of states. This had to do not so much with power as with the fact that this was an essentially European system (including eventually colonial settler states like the United States and Australia that came to be inhabited mainly by populations that originated in Europe). Europeans did not consider non-Christian states without European settler populations to be part of this system, even if they were largely in Europe, like the Ottoman Empire. In some cases major states, like many in West Africa, were not even considered by Europeans to be “real” states. When this essentially European system later became the core of what developed into an international one, from which the bipolar Cold War system developed, some of these attitudes, with the racist overtones they implied, persisted in a variety of ways.1
The second point is that in the twentieth century there was a nominal change in the position of some of the peoples in the Middle East in the international system. This was partly a result of the post–World War I and post–World War II expansion of the European state system into a somewhat more broadly based international order, via the full inclusion in it of the United States, Japan, Latin American countries, and later the Soviet Union. It was a result as well of the restructuring of this system into something more closely resembling an international community through the establishment of generally accepted legal norms codified in the Covenant of the League of Nations, the United Nations Charter, and other international conventions and treaties. In stages after the two world wars, and with a speed that was accelerated partly because the Cold War rivalry helped further weaken the already loosening grip of the old colonial powers, certain Middle Eastern (and other) peoples obtained independent statehood and their states joined this “community of nations.” The result was a major change in the complexion of world affairs. The adhesion of these newly independent Middle Eastern states to the international order was not part of a universal process encompassing all the peoples of the region. It took place in some measure at the discretion of the victors of these world wars, or as a result of dissension between them. Some Middle Eastern peoples, such as the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Palestinians, were unable to achieve independent statehood, or to follow on this path.2
A third point is that in spite of these restructurings and transformations of the European interstate system into a somewhat more inclusive and fully international system between the world wars and during the Cold War, the Middle East remained almost continuously a major arena where the ambitions and rivalries of the great powers played out. These powers continued to strive to dominate the region, although which of them emerged as ascendant changed over time. In this respect, it may have appeared that even after the two world wars and the onset of the Cold War, little had changed from the old days of the Concert of Europe that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, the Eastern Question, and the “sick man of Europe” (a derogatory European way of referring to the Ottoman Empire in its last decades). Then, states and peoples in the Middle East were essentially objects, but were generally not allowed to be subjects, of international relations. Over time, however, some things did change, or appeared to change, as the bipolar Cold War system occasionally allowed certain powerful Middle Eastern states like Egypt, Israel, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria to play one superpower off against another, or to exploit the rivalry between them to obtain benefit. Meanwhile other, smaller, weaker states generally suffered as a result of the regional polarizations that were exacerbated by this rivalry. The end of the Cold War put a stop to such limited opportunities as the bipolar Cold War era had offered. Under the sway of a unipolar system dominated by what initially appeared to be an unchallengeable single superpower, the United States, in some ways the Middle East appeared to have returned to the old days when its states, weak and strong, were largely dominated from without. I will examine in this and subsequent chapters the extent to which these appearances coincided with reality.
Finally, in the interwar and Cold War periods, and in the nearly two decades since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the current unipolar world system, the international system and international institutions, rather than restraining the dominant power or powers from expanding their dominion in the Middle East, have often facilitated this dominion. The degree to which the United States has been free to operate unilaterally and without restraint from other powers or international institutions like the UN, in Iraq and Palestine in the first years of the twenty-first century, is a striking example of this situation. The current American position in the Middle East should make us think carefully about the degree to which today anything that resembles the ideal vision of an “international community,” regulated by international law and conventions, exists independently of the influence of the dominant power or powers in the international system. This seems to have been true whether this system was multipolar, as it was before 1945, bipolar, as it was during the Cold War, or unipolar, as it has been ever since.
For well over two centuries after the formation of the modern state system that emerged with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the Middle East3 was generally considered to be outside of this system. Their exclusion meant that the states of the region were not considered to be on a par with European states, nor were they treated in terms of the same rules and norms. The Middle East was nevertheless a crucial arena of European wars and diplomacy in the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, mainly involving Russia and Austro-Hungary. The Ottoman Empire was drawn into the Napoleonic Wars by none other than Napoleon himself, through his invasion of Egypt in 1798. In consequence, the empire at times served as a diplomatic arena, as a battlefield, and as a junior ally in the quarter-century-long European conflict that began with the French Revolution. However, the Ottoman Empire was not a party to the Peace of Paris or the Congress of Vienna, where those wars were ended and where a new European system, one with pretensions to being an international order, was put into place.
Interestingly, one of the main architects of that new system, the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, while at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, originally intended that the Ottoman Empire be subject to the “general accord and guarantee” that he envisaged be directed against any power that disturbed the peace of the European continent. This was one of many precursors of the ideas for a new global interstate order that were later embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the United Nations Charter.4 Nothing came of the proposal for such a guarantee, which aroused the suspicions of a British Parliament wary of involving Great Britain in a broader system that might restrain its freedom of action and limit parliamentary prerogatives.5 In consequence, the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Middle East remained on the margins of the European state system. Nevertheless, we find here the beginnings of a pattern, whereby the Middle East is an active arena for the major powers in the international system but does not form part of that system, and whereby Middle Eastern states are not treated as full parties to an international order that in time encompasses them.
There were other mileposts along this path: they included the Treaty of London of 1840, to which the Ottoman Empire was a party but which was crafted entirely by the European powers led by Lord Palmerston; the 1878 Congress of Berlin, whereby European statesmen like Otto von Bismarck and Lord Salisbury imposed onerous terms on the Ottoman Empire; the London Ambassadors’ Conference of 1913 to resolve issues resulting from the Balkan Wars, which laid down the outlines for the post–World War I great-power partition of the Ottoman Empire, primarily via concessions for railways;6 and the 1915–16 Sykes-Picot accords and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whereby European powers arrogated to themselves the right to dispose of Arab lands as they saw fit, with no attention whatsoever to the interests and wishes of the peoples affected. All of these measures, and many others, however, including the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which unsuccessfully proposed the partition of Turkey, could be seen as examples of the bad old European secret diplomacy that the fresh wind of Wilsonian idealism was supposed to sweep away, with its “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”7 We know that this did not happen, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the Middle East: there, the traditional behind-the-scenes realpolitik of the great powers ultimately prevailed, notwithstanding the fleeting influence of President Wilson on the new structure of the Middle Eastern state system that was fashioned at the Paris Peace Conference.
The actual nature of the League of Nations Mandate system as it worked in practice was one of the most egregious examples of outcomes in the Middle East being determined by the cold calculus of power politics rather than idealistic Wilsonian rhetoric. In the Middle East in general, and in Palestine in particular, great-power interests rather than the principle of self-determination or the wishes of the indigenous peoples concerned dictated the nature of the form of governance that was imposed on them by the League of Nations. British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour, one of the primary architects of both the League of Nations and of its Mandate system, and author of the famous declaration that bears his name, was brutally frank in a confidential 1919 memo. In it, he described the hypocrisy of Britain and the other great powers in ignoring the commitments regarding Syria and Palestine embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations and earlier Allied pledges:
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant [of the League of Nations] and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the “independent nation” of Palestine than in that of the “independent nation” of Syria. For in Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonized with the [Balfour] declaration, the Covenant, or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry.
I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs; but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an “independent nation,” nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those who live there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.8
In fact, as historian Margaret MacMillan, among others, has argued, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and in particular those relating to national self-determination, were far more ambiguous and equivocal than many took them to be, especially when it came to the Middle East.9 Moreover, neither Wilson nor other Western statesmen necessarily had a clear idea of the nature of the peoples and nations involved in the Middle East. Wilson seems in any case to have intended his concept of self-determination to apply primarily to European peoples, and only secondarily to those of the Ottoman Empire, and he clearly did not mean for them to apply at all to peoples under colonial rule. Whatever Wilson’s intentions, and however his words were interpreted by colonized peoples the world over, the leaders of the great colonial powers allied with the United States, notably Great Britain and France, did everything possible to prevent these principles from applying to their colonies and semicolonies.
Nevertheless, in certain fundamental ways, it was intended by the victorious Allied powers who constructed the new international order symbolized by the Fourteen Points, the Versailles Peace Conference, and the League of Nations, that this new order would deal differently with the Middle East than had the old European state system. The Middle East was adjudged by the victors of the Great War to be deficient, among other things, in not having states organized along the national principle. The victors proposed to remedy this deficiency by creating new nation-states there, as they did in Central and Eastern Europe, regions judged to be similarly deficient. They did not do so, of course, in accordance with the wishes of the peoples concerned. Had they, the Middle East might have been quite different in the twentieth century. The region might conceivably have witnessed less conflict, although since the development of many Middle Eastern national identities at this time was still at an embryonic stage, more conflict might also have been the result.10 There would also very likely have been fewer nation-states in the Mashriq (the eastern Arab world), as well as possibly an Armenian and a Kurdish state.
For all the flaws of the process as it worked out in practice, many of the states that exist today in the Middle East—notably Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—were direct products of these great-power interactions, and of the eventual implementation of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination. It is open to question whether these existing states were constructed out of already existing “nations,” or whether new nations have since grown up inside these states and others that were arbitrarily conceived by the Allied powers in Paris in 1919, and put into place within thoroughly artificial frontiers by the Mandate system that these powers thereafter erected. In any case, all remain independent nation-states today.
Equally important, at the same time as several entirely new states were being conceived in Paris, as already mentioned, other independent states did not see the light of day: notably Kurdistan, Armenia, and Palestine. Their disposition was left to an uncertain future, although both Armenia and Kurdistan were promised independence by the victorious Allied powers in the Treaty of Sèvres after World War I (and Armenia is today an independent country, on a fraction of the ancestral homeland of the Armenians), and the Palestinian people were promised a state decades later by the United Nations General Assembly. In two of these three cases of peoples who in the end were ignored by the great powers—those of Kurdistan and Palestine—the final disposition of their countries, and indeed their future as peoples, is still very much in question.11
Given the continuing commitment to colonialism of the victorious great powers that dominated the Paris Peace Conference, yet another category of states was effectively denied representation in the new international community that they created: the existing colonies and protectorates of these European powers. The people of Egypt, for example, understandably believed that in view of the principles enunciated by President Wilson they should be entitled to send representatives to the peace conference in Paris in order to achieve their freedom from British occupation. For that purpose, their leaders organized a delegation (in Arabic, wafd, for which the dominant political party in Egypt for the next three decades was named) of leading political figures to go to Paris to plead their case. Like subject peoples in the Middle East and other parts of the colonized world, the Egyptians were denied that right by the British, who summarily exiled the members of the delegation to Malta, provoking a huge popular uprising known in Egyptian historiography as the Revolution of 1919. Colonized peoples the world over felt a similar sense of disappointment at the frustration of their initial expectations raised by the Fourteen Points and at their exclusion from the Paris Peace Conference. This frustration led directly to massive popular anticolonial uprisings in the spring of 1919 in India, Korea, China, and elsewhere.12
The only Middle Eastern state allowed a place at the table at the Paris Peace Conference was the isolated, backward, and lightly populated Hijaz, which in light of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans in alliance with Britain was adjudged to be one of the Allied and Associated powers. This aroused the fury of the Egyptians, who saw themselves as heirs to a great civilization, possessing at the same time all the modern prerequisites for independence, but who were barred by the British from sending representatives to Paris, while the Hijazis were fully represented. The representative of the Hijaz, Amir Faisal ibn Husayn, considered himself to be both the plenipotentiary of his father, Husayn ibn ‘Ali, the king of the Hijaz, and the king of Syria, a post to which he had been elected by the Syrian Parliament. Faisal was allowed to participate in the proceedings in Paris, but only as an emissary of his father and as a representative of the Hijaz, not as king of Syria. This was emblematic of the way the “new” international community dealt with the Middle East: in an arbitrary fashion little different from that of the old European state system. The League of Nations Mandate formula that was thereafter applied to several parts of the Middle East combined many of the worst features of the old European colonialism with the amateurishness and high-minded ignorance that characterized so much of Wilson’s diplomacy. Speaking about the concept of self-determination, Wilson himself said at the Paris Peace Conference: “When I gave utterance to those words, I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.”13
The post–World War I settlement in the Middle East created states within what were often completely arbitrary borders (including thousands of miles of straight lines in the frontiers of Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria that slice through communities, natural features, trade routes, and economic zones) which were drawn solely for the convenience of the British and the French. Some of these borders have been continuing sources of conflict over more than eighty-five years. This settlement exacerbated existing regional problems and created entirely new frictions, many of which have lingered until the present day. There is much discussion of some of these frictions in circles completely innocent of any knowledge of Middle Eastern history, as if they were “age-old,” whereas in their current form they are essentially the result of a state structure recently imposed from outside the region. I will touch on some of these problems newly created by the grasping ambitions of the colonial powers in chapter 4, with specific reference to Lebanon.
The postwar settlement also did nothing to rein in the competition of the great powers in the region. Britain and France, allies during World War I, for decades thereafter maintained in the Middle East that attitude of cordial contempt for each other that had been such a striking feature of their relations for so many centuries, and that still lingers today, particularly among the British. Thus Britain in 1925–26 gave refuge to Syrian rebels against the French, who repaid the favor in 1937–39 by sheltering Palestinian rebels against the British. Toward the end of the interwar period, other great powers entered the fray, as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany challenged Anglo-French hegemony in the Middle East. As we have seen in chapter 1, the region thereafter became one of the major battlefields of World War II, as it had been of World War I. It was again reorganized as a result of the postwar restructuring of the world order. The new post– World War II order, which initially appeared as if it might reflect a new cooperative ethos, symbolized by the wartime cooperation of the Allies, and their new creation intended to organize international affairs, the United Nations, rapidly came to be dominated by the Cold War.
The United Nations, which was the primary fruit of the postwar restructuring of the international order, grew out of the alliance of victorious powers in World War II—indeed, this wartime alliance of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and other powers called itself the United Nations well before the creation of the organization of that name.14 The new United Nations organization included several newly independent Middle Eastern states, some of which were helped to achieve their independence by the victors in the war. But again, as after World War I, some entities saw the light as independent states, while other Middle Eastern peoples, like the Palestinians and the Kurds, or the peoples of French-controlled North Africa and the British-controlled peripheries of the Arabian Peninsula, did not obtain the benefit of statehood or independence, and remained under occupation or colonial tutelage or dispersed among existing states. The colonial status of those Middle Eastern states remaining under European rule was not long-lasting, however. The influence of the two new post–World War II superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, their opposition to colonialism, and their Cold War rivalry all helped to erode old-style colonial domination, which was already under pressure from the national movements of the colonized peoples. The result was the independence of more states in the Middle East, and their joining the international system, as symbolized by their membership in the United Nations. This was one of the little-recognized indirect benefits of the Cold War in its earliest phases: the American-Soviet rivalry helped considerably in the dissolution of the centuries-old European colonial empires the world over.
A new factor in the Middle East in the wake of World War II was the region’s growing centrality to the two new superpowers as their rivalry developed into the Cold War. It is clear that East and Southeast Asia were hotter arenas of open conflict between the superpowers and their proxies than was the Middle East, as was evidenced by the Korean and Vietnam wars, while Europe always remained in many ways the central arena of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Middle East was also an important early Cold War battleground, as I have shown in the preceding chapters, the first time it had been a primary area of attention for either the United States or the Soviet Union. It was one of the first sites of friction between the superpowers, starting with the crises immediately after the end of World War II involving the USSR and Turkey over Kars, Ardahan, and the Turkish Straits, and that over the Soviet-supported autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan and the Kurdish Mahabad Republic in northern Iran. The region was the focus of the Truman Doctrine of 1947 (specifically its northern tier of Turkey and Iran, which was essential to the U.S. strategy of containment of the USSR), and of the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957. American attempts to incorporate the states of the region into the military alliances that were central to containment included plans for the abortive Middle East Command and the Middle East Defense Organization, and then the Baghdad Pact and its successor, the Central Treaty Organization, which will be examined in chapter 4. These plans had a powerful destabilizing effect on the internal politics of several Middle Eastern states and on inter-Arab and regional politics for nearly a decade.
Later on, the Middle East was one of the foci of the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, for which both Iran and Israel were central Middle Eastern pillars. This erection of privileged regional powers into local policemen for the interests of the United States too had a destabilizing effect, as did the efforts of the Soviet Union to counter this strategy via mobilizing and organizing its own clients and allies in the region. As I have already mentioned, the Middle East was the scene of repeated international crises over the Arab-Israeli conflict that produced superpower confrontations, including in 1956, 1967, 1968–70, 1973, and 1982. The 1973 crisis resulted in a grave confrontation between the superpowers in support of their respective clients, and led to Soviet threats to intervene militarily in Egypt and to a global American nuclear alert. Early in the Cold War, bases in the Middle East became crucial to the strategies of both superpowers because of its proximity to the southern frontiers of the USSR. In consequence, intermediate-range ballistic missiles and bombers, and then submarine-launched ballistic missiles, were stationed in and around the region by the United States, and the Soviet Union established naval and air bases there to counter this strategic threat and to expand its local influence. All of these developments will be further discussed in chapter 4.
Another characteristic of the region during the Cold War era was that it became a major concern of the new United Nations, which took upon itself the disposition of Italy’s former colony of Libya and of Britain’s former League of Nations Mandate of Palestine, and played a role in the decolonization of several other Middle Eastern states. Beyond this, 25 percent of the resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council over more than a quarter of a century after 1948 were devoted to one single Middle Eastern issue, the Palestine question and its various ramifications, as compared to all other issues and all other regions of the world combined.15 Clearly, the United Nations and the international community it purported to represent were deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs.
What is striking about all the attention paid by the United Nations, and the League of Nations before it, to the Middle East is how closely the involvement of what was nominally an international community tracked with and reflected the policies and outlook of the era’s dominant power or powers. Thus the Mandate for Palestine promulgated by the League of Nations in 1922 to provide guidance for Britain in its governance of this territory incorporated verbatim the terms of the Balfour Declaration issued unilaterally by the British cabinet five years earlier. It was no more than a recasting in nominally international terms of a unilateral policy decision taken earlier by the British cabinet. The Mandate indeed consisted essentially of an extrapolation and amplification of the terms of the Balfour Declaration relating to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In neither the Balfour Declaration nor the Mandate for Palestine were the words “Arab” or “Palestinian” utilized, nor was there any reference to the overwhelming 90 percent majority of the population of the territory who were Arab, except in describing them negatively and in a backhanded fashion as “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This 90 percent Arab majority were described in the Mandate as having neither national nor political rights; only “civil and religious” ones.16 Thus, the language adopted by the League in the terms of the Mandate for Palestine perfectly reflected the utter obliviousness of the British to Arab national claims in Palestine. This obliviousness continued at least during the first two decades of their control over Palestine, until the 1936–39 Palestinian national revolt finally forced British policymakers to take grudging account of these claims.17
It is true, as the historian Susan Pedersen has shown,18 that the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations occasionally had different ideas than did the British Colonial Office as to how Palestine should be governed. In most cases, these ideas were even more sympathetic to the Zionists than were those of the British, although on occasion some members of the commission expressed disquiet about Britain’s treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that the League measurably changed or hindered the course of British policy in Palestine during the two decades when it was nominally responsible for supervising Britain’s execution of its mandatory responsibilities there. British concerns and interests indeed largely determined the behavior of the League toward all of Britain’s Middle Eastern mandates, as did those of France regarding its mandates in the region. In other words, the new “international order” embodied by the League of Nations affected only slightly the behavior of the dominant powers of the day.
The way in which the United Nations dealt with the Middle East differed somewhat from the approach of the League. This was a result of the much-changed international situation, specifically the Cold War and the wave of post–World War II decolonization. It was a result as well of the structure of the United Nations, which in important respects did not resemble that of the League of Nations. Unlike the latter, the new UN included all the major powers, and it had many more member states and a slightly more functional form of organization, with a powerful Security Council and an occasionally effective General Assembly. Finally, it was a function of the new Cold War architecture of international relations dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which had had a limited involvement with the League of Nations. For this reason, and in spite of changed international circumstances, the United Nations tended to reflect, as had the League, the interests of the dominant powers in the international system, which in the post–World War II era were increasingly the United States and the USSR. Because of the veto power of the permanent members in the Security Council, that body could only take action, in the Middle East or elsewhere, when all of them were in concurrence. In practice this meant that the Council was able to act relatively frequently in the Middle East during the first decade or so after World War II, before Cold War rivalries became all consuming, and while both superpowers were still concerned with diminishing British influence in the region. It was able to take action somewhat less frequently thereafter.
There was relatively limited friction over the Middle East at the United Nations between the United States and the USSR at the very outset of the Cold War, except for early tensions concerning the northern tier of Turkey and Iran. At this early stage both superpowers often seemed more concerned (for different reasons) with eliminating the residual—albeit still considerable —British imperial presence in the region than with dealing with each other. It is often forgotten that the United States and the USSR were on the same side as far as the conflict over Palestine was concerned in 1947–49: they both opposed Britain and supported the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel. In this sense, the new era symbolized by the United Nations did not differ significantly from the old one symbolized by the League of Nations: the November 29, 1947, General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine reflected the views of the dominant great powers, the United States and the USSR, rather than those of the still overwhelming Arab majority of the population of Palestine. Soviet military support, via arms supplied through Czechoslovakia, was essential to Israel’s resounding ultimate victory during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49. The position of the superpowers was similar in 1956, when, in spite of the high tension between them over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both the United States and the USSR opposed the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt. Indeed, as we have seen, it was not until after the 1967 war that the superpowers became fully and rigidly aligned on opposite sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Meanwhile, the Cold War became even more entrenched in the Middle East, and its impact came to be reflected at the United Nations, which increasingly became a forum for the superpowers to wage their propaganda war with one another.
Over time, however, largely because of the growth of the power of the nonaligned bloc at the UN, the increasingly hegemonic United States was either obliged to find means to subordinate the United Nations to its policies, or had no choice but to bypass it entirely. Subordination notably took the form of the United States repeatedly using its veto power in the Security Council in support of Israel to paralyze the efforts of the world body.19 Sometimes the United States achieved the same end more subtly, as on the last day of the June 1967 war, when U.S. ambassador Arthur Goldberg suddenly asked for a recess in the urgent Security Council meting called to vote on an already-agreed-upon draft cease-fire resolution. This was intended to halt the Israeli army’s offensive after it had overcome the resistance of Syrian troops in the Golan Heights and was moving rapidly through Quneitra toward the Syrian capital. The nominal purpose of this recess was for Goldberg to “consult with his government,” but in fact it was meant to stall the United Nations Security Council, and to give Israel more precious time to continue its advance toward Damascus just a bit farther, to the intense frustration of the Soviets and their Arab allies.20 Something similar happened in 1973, as is discussed in chapter 4. We have much more recently seen another egregious example of these stalling tactics, this one in the post–Cold War era, once again subordinating the United Nations to American purposes, in the delay imposed by the United States on Security Council consideration of a cease-fire in Lebanon during August 2006. This constituted yet another transparent American effort to enable Israel to continue a military offensive and achieve more of its strategic objectives.
Insofar as the tactic of bypassing the United Nations was concerned, the Rogers Plan of 1968–70 for a cease-fire on the Suez Canal and the launch of Egyptian-Israeli negotiations, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy of 1973–76, and the Camp David Accords of 1978 were all part of an essentially unilateral U.S. approach to Arab-Israeli negotiations that largely ignored the UN, and indeed any multilateral forum, or any other major power. As we will see in more detail in chapter 4, the primary objective of these efforts was to achieve exclusive influence for the United States and to freeze the Soviet Union out of peacemaking, and ultimately out of the Middle East. These efforts were essentially unilateral, although Kissinger did agree to convene a purely symbolic single session of the Geneva Conference on Middle East peace including representatives of the USSR and the United Nations in December 1973. This was no more than an empty piece of playacting. Thereafter, Kissinger again deliberately ignored the Soviets and the UN (although Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko attempted to make his country relevant by repeated visits to the area) and returned immediately to the unilateral American shuttle diplomacy that produced two Egyptian-Israeli disengagement accords and the Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement between 1973 and 1976. This shuttle diplomacy was meant primarily to establish the paramount position of the United States in the Middle East at the expense of the Soviet Union, and weaken the latter, rather than to resolve fully the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is true although in both cases these accords solidified and made more permanent UN-established cease-fires. Proof that resolving the larger Arab-Israeli conflict was not a priority for Kissinger can be found in his studiously avoiding giving serious attention to those aspects of it involving Lebanon and Jordan. Most notably, he never addressed the question of Palestine, which is the core issue of the entire conflict. Regarding these essential matters, Kissinger engaged in crisis management when necessary, but he made no serious effort to deal with them in a manner that would have furthered a just permanent resolution of the overall conflict.
Before, during, and after Kissinger’s stewardship of American policy, the United Nations thus served the interests of both superpowers when they were in accord on halting a major or minor round of Arab-Israeli violence. Otherwise, it was largely ignored by the United States, which was gradually acquiring a dominant position in the region and was determined to monopolize and control peacemaking efforts in ways that enhanced American influence and diminished that of the USSR. It did so irrespective of whether that facilitated the achievement of a lasting peace between all the parties concerned. It was argued by some during the latter decades of the Cold War that to be lasting, Middle Eastern peace would have to be comprehensive and involve the United Nations. Moreover, they argued, given the ties of several key Arab states to the Soviet Union and the latter’s power and influence in the region, it would be impossible to achieve a comprehensive settlement without the Soviets, who with their Arab friends urged such a comprehensive approach. Nevertheless, American policymakers tended to avoid such a settlement, for several reasons. Among them were the intensity of the rivalry between the superpowers, the hostility of Israel to the UN and to any multilateral forum with the Arabs in which it believed it would be at a disadvantage, and in particular the desire of the United States to expand its own growing regional dominance. Whether it was achievable or not, a comprehensive settlement was never reached during the Cold War, nor has it been up to this day. I will come back to other aspects of how the Arab-Israeli conflict was affected by the Cold War in the next chapter.
These two contrasting American approaches to the United Nations and the international community—subordination and bypassing—could be seen at work during the last phase of the Cold War, and also after its end. This was the case during the last two Gulf wars, that of 1991 to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and that of 2003 leading to the current American occupation of Iraq (the first Gulf war, it is often forgotten, was that between Iraq and Iran from 1980–88). In the former instance, the United States essentially made a unilateral decision as to what action to take. It then took advantage of the winding down of the Cold War, the imminent dissolution of the USSR, and the hostility that the odious regime of Saddam Hussein inspired in virtually all its neighbors and most of the rest of the world, to fashion a United Nations–sanctioned coalition to drive Iraqi troops out of occupied Kuwait. Although the UN was involved, it was in a strictly subordinate capacity. The Kuwait campaign was very much an American-directed, American-controlled effort, albeit operating under the flag of a Security Council resolution. American monopolization of decision making was made much easier by the weakness of the declining Soviet Union and by its incapacity to project power into the Middle East (although Middle East expert Yevgeni Primakov made a last-minute trip to Baghdad as an envoy of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a futile effort to avert war).21 In the waning stages of the Cold War, the United States both had a large measure of freedom of action and was able to obtain international sanction for its efforts.
By contrast, after the end of the Cold War in a situation where there was no longer another superpower confronting it, in its 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States was obliged to bypass a recalcitrant Security Council, where it would probably have faced three vetoes from permanent members: those of Russia, China, and France. It thus went to war (together with Britain and a few other allies) without any formal international endorsement. The United States thereby acted in violation of the UN Charter and international law, but otherwise without the slightest practical hindrance. Since then, the United States has obtained much of what it wanted regarding Iraq from a bullied and compliant United Nations in the way of Security Council resolutions blessing and legalizing some of its unilateral (and illegal) actions ex post facto. This included one such resolution (UN Security Council resolution 1546) stating in effect that the U.S. occupation of Iraq was not an occupation. It asserted as well that an Iraqi government that had virtually no control over most of the most important decisions made in its country (these were made in Washington and by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad) was sovereign, and could freely request the maintenance of U.S. forces, now placed under a nominal UN mandate.22 Over time, that government, while still almost entirely dependent on U.S. forces, has begun to exhibit a small degree of independence from its American patrons, although nothing it had yet done at the time of writing in August 2008 made it appear fully “sovereign.”
The Iraq campaign was one of a sequence of efforts following the events of September 11, 2001, whereby the Bush administration proclaimed that it had the right and the obligation to engage in vigorous unilateral actions, launching wars and actively intervening militarily in the Middle East and its peripheries, like Afghanistan, acting together with ad hoc coalitions of allies put together for each occasion. A few years after 9/11, however, it appeared to some observers as if Washington might be following a more multilateral approach in the Middle East. Certainly, other powers like France, Germany, Russia, and China, which were vigorously opposed to the 2003 war in Iraq, drew lessons from that bitter and divisive episode and the harshness of the Bush administration’s response to their criticisms, and thereafter became much more careful to avoid overtly opposing the United States in the Middle East. There was even a degree of multilateral cooperation in some areas of the region, such as with France over Lebanon or with the European Union over Iran’s nuclear program, although much of it was on the ad hoc basis favored by the Bush administration, and these efforts were anything but comprehensive, often rigorously excluding Russia and China, and still treating as pariahs major Middle Eastern powers like Syria and Iran.23
Even when the United States did act in a more multilateral fashion as in these cases, however, its new policies often went along with others emerging from the strong ideologically grounded drive of the Bush administration. Thus, while U.S. undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns was sent to meet with the Iranians together with European envoys in July 2008, the first such high-level contact since the Iranian Revolution, the Bush administration continued to try to weaken, isolate, and destroy those Middle Eastern forces, such as Hamas and Hizballah, that it defined as “terrorist” and thereby as irreconcilable enemies, and that were seen as proxies for Iran and Syria. At the same time, there was no halt to efforts by the administration to free its actions abroad of any limitations, whether legal, congressional, or international.
How little had changed in the Bush administration’s single-minded pursuit of the Moby Dick of Middle Eastern terrorism was demonstrated with crystal clarity in early August 2006 over Lebanon. Then, in rejecting an immediate UN cease-fire in its support of an expansion of the Israeli offensive against Lebanon, this administration’s isolation and unilateralism, and its unheeding stubbornness, were as great as at any time in the past. Indeed, the Bush administration’s go-it-alone tendency in the face of expert advice and common sense has rarely been more in evidence than over its obsession with Hizballah in Lebanon, then and later. The shambles of its wrongheaded policy over Lebanon culminated in 2007–8. A confrontational American approach unwisely supported by Saudi Arabia and Egypt (together with the dangerous brinkmanship of other regional actors like Iran and Syria) gravely inflamed the situation in that country to the point that it appeared by mid-2008 as if Lebanon were headed toward a renewal of its civil war in the midst of spiraling regional rivalries. Thereupon, as ominous sectarian clashes in Beirut and other parts of the country escalated in May 2008, almost overnight the hard-line American approach was effectively sidelined. The United States was left mutely and helplessly on the margins, as Qatar and the Arab League eventually won the support of all regional actors (notably Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) and brought about an accord between all the Lebanese factions. This produced a coalition government that included Hizballah, seen in Washington as the terrorist arch-villain of the piece.
Irrespective of the ultimate success or failure of this Qatari peacemaking effort, the very fact that it took place against the wishes of the superpower that had been trying for years to impose its preferred outcomes in Lebanon at the expense of its regional enemies was striking. Equally striking was the unconcern of both Israel and Syria for American wishes as they began negotiations around the same time via the intermediary of Turkey, while Israel engaged in similar indirect negotiations over prisoner exchanges and other issues with Hizballah and Hamas, and France in July 2008 made an effort to broker the inauguration of Syrian-Lebanese diplomatic relations and to further Israeli-Syrian negotiations.24 All of this was in direct contravention of Bush administration dogma about not negotiating with terrorists or their state supporters.
Even if those observers who perceived a somewhat greater willingness to coordinate American policy with that of other states were correct, however, the Bush administration’s grudging and sporadic acquiescence to multilateralism in its waning days did not by any means amount to its acceptance of the idea that an international community truly exists, let alone its willingness to allow American actions to be constrained in any way by such a community or by international legal norms. This was visible in the stubborn resistance of the top ranks of the administration (but not the U.S. military) to the Supreme Court decision that it must apply the norms laid down by the Geneva Conventions and by relevant U.S. laws to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Indeed, the Bush administration’s entire approach conformed perfectly to the words of Henry Cabot Lodge speaking in the Senate against the League of Nations treaty in 1921, as quoted by Alan Brinkley: “I would keep America as she has been—not isolated, not prevent her from joining other nations for … great purposes—but I wish her to be master of her own fate.”25 Not isolationist like Lodge, but rather aggressively interventionist, the Bush administration had an utterly unilateral vision of the international order. This was anything but a communal vision. It was one deeply congenial to George W. Bush and those who were closest to him, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The Bush administration’s abhorrence for the very symbol of the international community, the United Nations, was shown by one of the president’s choices as ambassador to that body, John Bolton. Bolton expressed his utter contempt for the United Nations in saying that it would not matter a bit if its headquarters lost several stories (imagine the outcry if someone were to say the same thing about the Pentagon or any other U.S. government building). In this respect, Bolton perfectly and brutally reflected the real attitude of his masters in Washington. It was to the credit of the Senate, in an exceedingly rare assertion of its constitutional prerogatives in the face of the Bush administration’s expansive interpretation of presidential powers, that it refused to confirm Bolton when he first came before that body, although he eventually took up this post for the duration of a congressional session under the terms of a presidential “recess appointment.”
To conclude, the international order in the post–Cold War Middle East appeared to be in a shambles in the wake of the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. This was the case whether in regard to Iraq, Lebanon, or what is still quaintly called the Middle East “peace process.” Use of the latter term primarily serves the purpose of obfuscating reality, since no negotiating process of any sort went on for the better part of six years while the junior Bush sat in the White House. Indeed, during this time neither the United States nor Israel was willing to allow any serious negotiations to take place at all over any issue of substance between the two sides. Thereafter, although the Bush administration made halfhearted last-minute efforts toward peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, it was not surprising that they produced little in the way of results. In all of these areas of crisis in the Middle East, a determined effort was made by the Bush administration to monopolize all decision making in Washington, and to prevent peacemaking efforts at the United Nations, or by the so-called Quartet—the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations.26 Insofar as the UN played any role in these and other Middle Eastern matters, it appeared to be one of pathetic eagerness to win the approval of the United States by hastening to do its bidding, as in Iraq after the American occupation was a fait accompli. Otherwise, the UN simply waited until the United States came around to accepting an international consensus, as with regard to the imposition of a cease-fire during the July–August 2006 conflict in Lebanon. Insofar as any tensions were defused in the Middle East during the last year of the Bush presidency, this was largely thanks to the good sense of the regional parties and to the credit of local mediators like Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, and France, all of whom acted in the teeth of American opposition and simply ignored the aggressive noises emanating from Washington.
In light of the stubborn unwillingness of the Bush administration to change its confrontational policies in the Middle East, or to allow other major actors or the UN to play an independent role, what emerged in its waning months in office was a growing willingness of actors in the region, including close U.S. allies, to attempt to resolve issues without the United States, and often against its expressed wishes. The Qatari/Arab League effort in Lebanon was one example. Another was the Turkish mediation between Israel and Syria, initiating the first serious negotiations between the two sides in eight years and directly contravening the Bush administration’s rigid policy of isolating Syria. Similarly, Egypt brokered a lengthy negotiation between Israel and Hamas to reach a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, while Israel and Hizballah negotiated successfully via European intermediaries for the exchange of prisoners and human remains. It may well be that none of these efforts will ultimately succeed, and it is certainly not possible to argue that they represent the beginnings of a new international order in the Middle East. If anything, they show the degree to which the failed policies of the Bush administration have led to the self-inflicted marginalization—perhaps temporary—of the greatest superpower in world history. What is remarkable about this outcome, even if it is a temporary one, is that it has eventuated after the United States appeared to stake its post–Cold War claim to international dominance largely on the basis of its actions in the Middle East.
The Middle East has been and remains a crucial testing ground for theories about the organization of an international community, about the nature of the international system, about the role of international law and norms in interstate relations, and about the place in the world of what is currently, and will probably for a considerable time remain, its dominant actor, the United States. Are we in a new imperial era, and if so, what kind of empire is being erected?27 How, if at all, did the vision of the world of George W. Bush and those who advised him differ from those of previous administrations?28 Is this a period of growing or declining hegemony of the United States?29 Is there more or less likelihood of other powers coalescing to hinder the sole hegemon, and are new powers rising to challenge it? Will the kind of regional efforts to find solutions to regional problems just described be more than a temporary interruption of the process of domination of the Middle East by external powers as outlined in this chapter? All of these questions are posed particularly acutely in the Middle East, which is still a crucial arena for the demonstration of global power, and for the waning rivalries of the past, as well as for the nascent ones of the future. I will consider answers to some of these questions in chapter 6.
The statements and writings of key figures in and around the Bush administration indicate that in their actions in Iraq, in Palestine/Israel, in Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as in Afghanistan and central Asia, U.S. policymakers were fixated on the international system that they saw evolving in the future rather than that of the present. Basing themselves on approaches that developed and matured during the Cold War, they appeared to perceive that because of the strategic position and the energy reserves of the Middle East and central Asia, in the coming century both will be vital arenas in view of the potential revival of Russia and the emergence of new powers in Asia, most notably China and India.30 These leaders clearly intended to avoid as much as possible any inhibitions or limitations on America’s freedom of action in these regions.
At the same time, at their behest and in furtherance of this long-term vision of an imperial America dominating Eurasia and its resources into and through the twenty-first century, the United States engaged in the expensive process of digging in for the long haul with an extensive military presence in both the Middle East and central Asia, irrespective of public statements to the contrary.31 Numerous “enduring bases”32 have sprung up all over the larger region, notably in Iraq, the neighboring countries of the Gulf, and the Caspian and Transcaucasian area. The financial and political costs of such a massive long-term military presence seem to have provoked little reflection in Washington, whether among Democrats or Republicans, and little was said about it in the 2008 presidential campaign. Simultaneously, in the waning years of the Bush administration, the United States involved itself more deeply in the internal affairs of countries of this area, notably Lebanon and Palestine, but also including Syria, Iran, Libya, and several Gulf and central Asian states. It did so in a variety of new and radical ways, whether under the pretext of support for “democratization,” or on the basis of old-fashioned realpolitik backing for pliant and useful local despots, or covert intervention against regimes described as hostile. The failure of most of these efforts did not appear to slow down the Bush team’s ideological fervor right up to the end of the president’s term.33
It remains to be seen how long it will take for reality to catch up with these boundless and in some cases delusional ambitions in Iraq and elsewhere in this vast and complex region, many of whose countries, from Afghanistan to Iraq, are characterized by a long-standing and rich history of fierce resistance to external domination. It also remains to be seen whether and how long such ambitions, acknowledged or not, will continue to animate the United States under a new administration. Notably, both U.S. presidential candidates in 2008 made a point of stating that the United States had to reinforce its presence in Afghanistan. However great the raw power of the United States, and however potent the ability of politicians to manipulate the media to obscure much of what actually happens in the Middle East and its environs, we can assume that irrespective of whoever takes office as president in January 2009, the cold reality of the unwillingness of most Middle Easterners and their neighbors the Afghanis to relinquish control of their hard-won sovereignty or their oil will eventually assert itself in the face of these unrealistic and unrealizable ambitions.
What seems clear, however, is that after many decades of efforts to foster an international community, and to establish legal norms for the behavior of states, the evidence, from the Middle East at least, is not terribly encouraging about the success of this endeavor. The Bush administration’s activist and unilateral policy, relying largely on force and driven by a blend of old-style balance-of-power politics, and an even larger dose of old-style ideological messianism (ironically quite Wilsonian in some respects, with a touch of Trotskyite “permanent revolution” thrown in), was entirely at odds with any approach based on the idea of an international community of nominal equals, or of an international order grounded in law, which amounts to much the same thing. For the foreseeable future, and until it is explicitly disavowed and dismantled in its specifics by a successor administration starting in 2009, in 2013, or thereafter, this approach seems likely to continue to prevail in the Middle East, perhaps even more than elsewhere in the world, due to the extraordinarily extensive involvement of the United States in that region over the past few years.