The Shah and the Iranian Revolution
Iranians have been predominantly Muslim since the seventh century. But over the course of time, they turned increasingly to the Shiite form of Islam, officially so for the past few hundred years. They were also never part of the Ottoman Empire, albeit their ruling dynasties were Turkic in origin. In 1925 Reza Khan rejected the republican option that Kemal Ataturk had taken in Turkey, and so was succeeded on his death by his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
The new Shah’s hold over his throne was initially shaky – the Second World War followed by the threat of the Soviet occupation of northern Iran saw to that. Then, in 1951, came two years of crisis, caused by the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, who nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). This caused a major rift with the British, since the company’s British government links went back to before the First World War. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had taken a major government shareholding in it because he realized that the future fuel of the Royal Navy would be oil, and that the Government ought to be able at all times to have access to such fuel. Iran was therefore of crucial geopolitical importance to the British over several decades, even though it was never formally conquered by Britain or any other Western country.
Because of the earlier threat to Iranian territory by the Soviets, the Americans were worried that Iran could go in a Communist direction. In what was, in the long term, to be a foolish move, the CIA under Kermit Roosevelt (a distant relative of Franklin Roosevelt) organized a coup that restored the Shah to power and removed Mossadeq. Iran, as we saw, joined the British-inspired Baghdad Pact two years later in 1955 and became a crucial American ally, keeping an eye, along with Turkey, on the Soviet Union to the north. It received millions in military aid from the USA, and the US– Iranian relationship became very close.
Unfortunately, the Shah used his restoration to rule as a dictator, introducing a dreaded secret police force, the SAVAK, to enforce his will. He inaugurated in 1963 what he called the ‘White Revolution’, a series of moves designed to modernize the country and increase Iran’s power and prestige. Much of this comprised what we would consider good ideas – the enfranchisement and empowerment of women, modern technology and literacy being among the key goals. But all this was introduced, not through democracy as in neighbouring Turkey, but by an absolute monarch who did not really share his power with the ordinary people.
Consequently the reactionary forces in the country – in particular, the bazaar merchants, and the Shiite clergy – were able to use dislike of the Shah’s autocracy to oppose his modernization reforms. He also made the major error of forgetting the country’s strong Islamic roots. He looked back to Iran’s golden age, under rulers such as Cyrus the Great and Xerxes, all of whom predated Islam, and were therefore looked on askance by devout Muslims (in the same way that they also reject Pharaonic civilization in Egypt). One of the Shah’s key reforms was land redistribution, again a laudable goal as millions of ordinary Iranians were able to own land for the first time. But some of the major expropriated landowners were Shiite religious foundations, who had used their extensive landholdings to support religious learning and the mosques.
One of the Shah’s key critics was a Shiite Grand Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini. Based in Qom, the Shia theological centre, Khomeini did everything possible to oppose both the Shah’s changes and his despotic rule.
Khomeini was initially exiled in 1964 to Iraq, with its very large Shiite population, and then, after Saddam Hussein expelled him in 1978 from the Shia holy city of Najaf, to Paris. From both places he used recent technology – the cassette tape especially – to spread his message: the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, to be replaced by a proper Islamic state based upon Quranic principles, with religious leaders not a hereditary despot in charge.
Oil, some now argue, can be a curse, not a blessing. The revenues often go straight to the capital city to be used by the ruling elite, rather than being spread generously among all the populace. Iran under the Shah is a classic example of this. While the state earned billions, ordinary Iranians saw precious little benefit, with the money going to the Shah’s Pahlavi Foundation, which became richer and even more powerful, and to the increasingly Westernized and deracinated upper-middle-classes, many of whom were educated in the West. Other related issues also rankled; for example, Americans working in the oil and similar industries were often exempted from Iranian law, which ordinary Iranians found humiliating.
So while the Shah was modernizing, and making the lot of some Iranians much better – especially well-educated women, for example – others were feeling worse off than before. This was especially true of the new urban poor, the millions who came to the big cities – Tehran, for example, rose from one million people in 1945 to five million thirty years later. Corruption also became rampant, again with the middle-classes gaining and the poor feeling resentful. The classic example of hubris by the elite came in 1971, when the Shah decided, without any strong historical evidence, that the Iranian monarchy was 2,500 years old. The celebrations – yet another reminder of Iran’s pre-Islamic past, with many of the soldiers dressed up in Achmaenid-period costume – cost around 
200 million, at a time when many ordinary Iranians were living in dire poverty.
Above all, average Iranians felt that their country was a pawn of the United States, and therefore not controlled by its own people.
The fall of the Shah in 1979 was, like so many events in history – the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 being a good example – not predicted by the experts. All the expensive intelligence in the world often fails to forecast major world changes before they happen, and the coming to power of the world’s first Islamist regime in Iran in 1979 is among such failures. Analysts in the CIA and elsewhere worried about Iran’s Communist Tudeh Party, while ignoring the portents of the real revolution about to happen.
(Western media experts similarly confessed in 2005 that they all failed to spot the huge groundswell of support for the hard-line Mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who won the Iranian presidential elections in June of that year. This was, they reflected ruefully after the event, in no small way because his voters, the poor, do not move in the same elite, English-speaking social circles as journalists from the West.)
In his book The Modern Middle East: A History, James L. Gelvin makes the important point that historians, sociologists and political scientists are not agreed on one overarching cause for the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But does this matter? As Gelvin reminds us, the closer we are to events, the more difficult it is to see them in perspective.
Consider histories of the Cold War written as late as 1988: all are written from the viewpoint that the Cold War was a permanent phenomenon, and that Soviet/American rivalry would continue indefinitely. It was fear of the Soviets to the north, Gelvin shows, that was the prime reason that the USA supported a regime as despotic as the Shah’s. Yet in 1989 the Iron Curtain fell peacefully and in 1991 the USSR, seemingly so invincible, collapsed from within.
It is the same point, Gelvin argues, with Iran. Writing in 2005, he felt that Iran – to use a French Revolutionary analogy – was going through its ‘Thermidor moment’, namely, that part of the revolution’s history when moderates take over after early excesses. But at the same time as the book was published Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran. At the time of writing, the issue of the production of nuclear material by Iran has become one of the most pressing of the day, its resolution not helped by remarks by the new president on other items, such as his wish to see the state of Israel destroyed. As always, the Middle East remains as unpredictable as ever.
One of the paradoxes of revolutions is that the regime which takes power is often far worse, and considerably more repressive, than its predecessor – for example, one only has to compare Stalin with Tsar Nicholas II, and Robespierre with King Louis XVI.
The dictum was soon to prove itself in Iran. By early 1979 it became apparent even to the Shah that his despotic rule was no longer working. He finally installed a more genuinely reform-oriented prime minister, Shapur Bakhtiar, but it was too late. The strikes and riots that had begun in 1978 now escalated beyond the Shah’s control. On 16 January 1979 the Shah fled, never to return. The following month, Ayatollah Khomeini returned in triumph from Paris. The army refused to protect the old regime any longer, and Bakhtiar’s government collapsed. Moderation and a secular solution for the problems of Iran thereupon ended too, although this was not immediately realized until October of that year.
On 1 April 1979 Iran was proclaimed an Islamic Republic following a referendum the previous month. One wonders if most people knew what they were electing, but if any had qualms it was now too late. Initially, as can happen, a moderate prime minister took office – an engineer called Mehdi Barzagan, who had worked in the past with Mossadeq. The calm was short-lived. Strict Islamic dress codes were introduced, alcohol banned and links with the West reduced. Then in October came the coup that enabled the hard-line Shiite theocrats to take control.
The Shah was dying, and was obliged, now that he was a powerless international pariah, to go from pillar to post in search of effective medical treatment. Many in Iran were worried that since he had been reinstalled by the CIA after he had fled in 1953, history would repeat itself. Others in Iran noted with concern the Israeli–Egyptian peace process, which, like their fellow Muslims in the Arab world, they viewed as a betrayal. Then in October, at the urging of Henry Kissinger, the Shah was admitted to the USA for medical treatment, despite Carter’s strong misgivings.
Carter’s doubts proved well-founded, and this decision probably cost him his presidency. The Iranian government had blocked an earlier attempt by revolutionary students to seize the American Embassy in Tehran – now all restraint was removed. In November 1979 militant students captured the Embassy (except the consulate, whose officials were able to escape disguised with fake Canadian passports), and took the entire diplomatic staff hostage. The siege lasted 444 days, and the hostage diplomats were not released until the day Reagan took office in 1981.
(I was told at the time that the Soviets threatened dire action if any of their diplomats were similarly kidnapped – whether or not this is true I have never discovered.)
But not only were the diplomats held hostage – so too, in effect, was the USA, and its hapless president, Jimmy Carter. Khomeini proclaimed the USA as the Great Satan, and Barzagan was replaced as prime minister by a Khomeini loyalist. The Shah’s death in 1980 made no difference and American attempts to rescue their diplomats ended in military humiliation.
Then on 21 September 1980 Saddam Hussein launched a war against Iran. This was to last eight years, with nearly a million eventual casualties, many of them either civilians, or soldiers of child age. It was a savage struggle, with numerous suicide missions only worsening the carnage. The West took Saddam’s side on the basis that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend. Not surprisingly, after 1991, and especially after 2003, the West’s decision to arm Iraq came back very strongly to haunt it, and with good cause. The war ended in stalemate with no side the true victor, millions bereaved and the two despotic regimes as firmly in power as ever.
In 1980 President Carter publicly underlined the importance of the Persian Gulf and its oil to US strategic interests. Ironically, it was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in late 1990 that saw it implemented, rather than any action by the Iranians.
Meanwhile, the threat of outside invasion greatly reinforced the power of Ayatollah Khomeini, whose rule as Supreme Leader, or interpreter of the Quran, the Faqih, enabled him to have jurisdiction that, as Bernard Lewis has pointed out, was unknown in Sunni Islam and, until then, in Shiite Islam as well. In 1980 the theocrats were able to take control of the Majlis, or Parliament, and the rule of the Western-educated Bani-Sadr as president lasted only until 1981, when Ayatollah Ali Khameini became president. (He succeeded Khomeini as Supreme Leader in 1989 and is still very much in power.)
Both sides in the war wanted greatly to increase their firepower and advantage over the enemy. Both sides therefore tried to gain nuclear weapons. Iraq’s attempts failed when the Israelis bombed the Osiris nuclear power plant, and Saddam was unable, as we now know, to effectively resurrect his programme after being defeated in the Gulf War in 1991, although he always tried to make it seem as if he had. With Iran the attempt is still with us, since President Ahmadinejad has made it clear that Iran is still on track to become a nuclear power in the twenty-first century.
Revolution and religion: theories, lessons and implications
How much did the Revolution change? Here again it is surely too early to tell. Much depends on how one sees the issues examined in the final chapter – the return of religion as a major player in world affairs. Are religious revolutionaries of the Iranian kind innately different from what went before? Or are writers like Gelvin correct in saying that while the style of revolution is different, in reality Shiite zealots are no different from their secular counterparts elsewhere in the world? On this there is no consensus – academic or any other kind. The issue upon which experts disagree is known as secularization theory, and it affects substantially the perception of both the Middle East, and issues such as Islamic terrorism.
According to the theory, people should be becoming increasingly less religious as the world progresses with science, innovation and similar processes rendering people more secular. This is essentially a Western concept, tracing its origins to sociologists of religion such as the Harvard academic Harvey Cox. In Western Europe it uses as proof the massive decline in any kind of religious adherence in the twentieth century. In the USA, academics such as Cox argued for much the same phenomenon being seen in North America as well, until the Reagan era of the 1980s. Then other thinkers, such as Peter Berger, noticed the start of the massive return to religious values that led to Moral Majority, and the decision of millions of Evangelicals to support the Religious Right.
However, all these are Western examples, and what Peter Berger, George Weigel and former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan all noted is that the West is very different from the rest of the world when it comes to the continuing importance of religion.
When the Iranian Revolution happened and militant Islam received a shot in the arm, the results were completely counter to what the secularization theorists were saying. Suddenly, millions of people were becoming more religious, rather than less! Iran, for example, had been Muslim since the seventh century, but now, in the late twentieth, the ordinary citizens of one of the most technologically advanced Muslim states were making Islam the core of their national identity.
(It should be said that, like Malaysia, or a Gulf State such as Dubai, a nation is fully able to be both Muslim and highly technologically advanced at the same time. Furthermore, the 120 million Muslims in India are playing a full part in that country’s recent technological renaissance, including the nation’s current president, Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam who, as well as being a Muslim, is also the inventor of India’s nuclear weapons programme and Azim Premji, the Chairman of Wipro, the multinational Indian IT company and the richest man in the country.)
Gilles Kepel described the Iranian example above in his book The Revenge of God, which looks at the resurgence of religion in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (It is vital to remember that plenty of other religions have their hard-line followers, not just Islam.) Likewise, as mentioned previously, the American sociologist Peter Berger has written in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics that secularization theory is being proved wrong by the day. In many parts of the world, Islam and Christianity are growing more rapidly than ever before, in both cases mainly at the expense of the ancestral tribal religions. This is occurring – as Philip Jenkins indicates in his book The Next Christendom – in places like parts of Indonesia and central Nigeria. All this has been very puzzling for the experts, many of whom have found the phenomenon disturbing, since the reality on the ground often contradicts the deeply held personal, secular and sometimes anti-religious views of academic specialists.
Gelvin (and, for example, the African writer Lamin Sanneh, in Piety and Power) are right to say that what dramatically increased secularism in Western Europe was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the nearly 200 years of warfare that followed as a result of it.
First, there were two completely separate kinds of Christianity – Catholicism and Protestantism – within Western Europe, with belief differences that exceed those of the Sunni and Shia (except for Wahhabi Sunnis, most Sunni would recognize a Shiite as a fellow Muslim). Second, they went into active spiritual competition with each other, and third, there were long periods of active warfare on religious grounds. Eventually by the eighteenth century, the era of religious war was over – some would argue by 1648 in the seventeenth – and in time the ability to choose one kind of Christianity over another led to many deciding not to choose any religion at all. This, Gelvin points out, made the West different from other parts of the world, whose history, religious and otherwise, is not at all similar.
However, even Gelvin and other writers such as the American academic Benedict Anderson who wrote Imagined Communities do not seem fully to recognize that religious belief is different from holding a political ideology – being, say, a socialist or nationalist. When the Middle East was dominated, as in Nasser’s time, by Arab nationalism, and by state socialism, secular theorists in the West could understand this, since nationalism and socialism are Western secular concepts. But since 1979 the world has witnessed the outbreak of a wholly new religious phenomenon, which is completely outside the comprehension of most cultural commentators.
In fact, as Peter Berger points out, only Western Europe is almost entirely secular in outlook. (Even countries that were once devoutly Catholic, such as Spain, are becoming increasingly as secular as their European neighbours to the north.) What is surprising about the USA is not that it is religious, since most of the world is profoundly religious, but that it is unlike Western Europe, which is not. Therefore Iran looked at from a global perspective is far from unusual.
Unfortunately, in the USA religion, especially Christianity, is highly partisan and politicized in a way not prevalent elsewhere, such as in Latin America, whose growing number of Protestants hold a wide variety of political beliefs, with many Brazilian Evangelicals, for example, being on the left not the right. Much religious analysis is therefore strongly linked to the American culture wars, which, as we saw earlier, is something unique to the USA. Since the Al Qaeda attack of 9/11, the way in which people consider Islam has also become part of the struggle, so that issues such as political correctness and the like are not seen on their own merit but through the prism of the proponent’s stance within America’s internal domestic cultural debate.
This polarization is highly regrettable, since it means that much of the world is therefore seen through a prism of internal American cultural conflict. Middle East policy too, for example, has in recent years become part of this secular/ religious culture war in the USA, and in a way that is very puzzling to those of us watching the debate from inside. It is sadly easy, to take another example, to find a commentary piece in newspapers which says that those who have religious beliefs are somehow primitive. Political correctness then makes this an awkward statement if applied, for example, to Muslims, since it is wrong to call those of other ethnic backgrounds savage or backward in any way. But then, as we saw in looking at the Crusades, there are others in the USA who defend the Crusades, and who do not hesitate to attribute to all Muslims the views of a small number of extremists.
Much of this debate was caused by the events of 1979 in Iran. In so far as the USA is concerned, it was exacerbated by the capture of American diplomatic staff as hostages, something that had a traumatic effect on the USA, and which has profoundly influenced how many have seen Islam ever since, especially after 2001.
We should always look at other people in the light of how they see themselves, not as we think they are or should be. For many Iranians, it is about religion, and the same is true of millions of other Muslims around the world. If we are to understand the Middle East properly, we need to accept that billions of our fellow humans out there have a world view dissimilar from our own.
The 1980s and the First and Second Gulf Wars
In the 1980s, President Assad of Syria was busy killing his own people. The Ba’ath Party there was principally secular, and led by people, like Assad, from the Alawite minority sect of Shiite Islam – most Syrians being Sunni. Assad was worried by the threat posed, both spiritually and politically, by the Muslim Brotherhood. They represented mainstream Sunni Islam, which threatened him as an Alawite. They also posed a specifically Islamic threat to someone as innately secular and nationalist in outlook as Assad.
He attacked the town of Hama in 1982, killing between 10,000 and 20,000 people. In 1988 Saddam Hussein similarly butchered tens of thousands of innocent Kurdish civilians, gassing many of them to death, with results that became infamous worldwide.
No massacre of Jews by Palestinians or of Arabs by Israelis has even approached such carnage. From the 1980s onwards, there was a major increase of Palestinian attacks on Jews, often directed as much against civilian targets as military, especially after the first major Palestinian uprising, the 1987 Intifada.
Yet none of the atrocities committed by Middle Eastern leaders upon their own people has ever received the global publicity or moral outrage that has come from attacks related to the Palestinian–Israeli struggle. Ten people in a pizza parlour achieve far more publicity and create far more anger than the death of 10,000 equally innocent civilians. Why is this?
We saw that, Jordan apart, the Arab states did not give citizenship to Palestinian exiles, however deeply they felt about Israel’s actions. As Arafat reportedly said to a friend as far back as the 1950s, the Palestinians would have to achieve liberation themselves, since no one would do it for them. While that might be unfair, it also has a strong element of truth.
However, it is also true that for the Arab world the Palestinian issue is in many senses a defining one. First, Arab states have consistently opposed Israel, and Palestine is the key to the ongoing hostility even if, as with Egypt after 1979, that animosity has been non-violent. Second, more controversially, it has been the perfect way to channel rage against an external enemy, rather than on one within. Most regimes in the Middle East are autocracies of some kind or another, with varying degrees of freedom permitted or denied the inhabitants. The Egyptian elections of 2005, for example, were regarded as not fully democratic by outside observers.
Diverting hatred away from local despotic rulers to Israel is a classic example of what psychologists call projection theory, the best-known example being the Nazi use of the Jews as scapegoats for all that had gone wrong in Germany. Some almost Nazi-like propaganda against Israel has been freely permitted in the Middle East for many years – it is only very recently that Egyptian schools have ceased to teach the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hate Israel and it is easy to forget that you are being repressed by a ruler of your own nationality and religion. Furthermore, as Gelvin points out, the conflict with Israel has seen the permanent militarization of many Arab societies – up to 30 per cent of the world’s arms sales are in Arab countries. Egypt has continued in a state of emergency for decades, even though it has been at formal peace with Israel since 1979, and, as Gelvin writes, many Arab societies use the excuse of the struggle for internal repression. It would be ironic if the Palestinians were to gain political freedom while those countries that spoke out on their behalf remained repressed.
In 1982 the Palestinian struggle became internationalized. To get rid of PLO emplacements in Lebanon which were being used as bases to attack Israel, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) invaded Lebanon, taking much of the south. While this incursion achieved its immediate objectives, it also worsened the already terrible Lebanese civil war. Bashir Gemayal, the Maronite Christian warlord and President of Lebanon, was assassinated, by whom is still disputed by some. In revenge the Lebanese Christian Maronite Phalangist militia slaughtered hundreds of innocent Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila.
(Those knowing Spanish history will know that Franco’s fascist/nationalist forces in the 1930s used the adjective Phalangist as well – the Maronites were strongly influenced by such developments.)
I visited these camps a few years later: the atmosphere was still tense. The IDF had been very close by, but did nothing to prevent the massacres, and an Israeli inquiry not long afterwards strongly censured their own forces, including the commander, General Ariel Sharon, who later became prime minister of Israel until serious ill health felled him in late 2005.
In 1983 the American peacekeeping forces in Beirut were also massacred, when a suicide bomb hit their barracks. Jacob Fellure in The Everything Middle East Book recommends his readers watch the Robert Redford and Brad Pitt film, Spy Game, to get a picture of what Beirut was like at the time. From my own memories of being in Lebanon during the civil war, the film gives a superb impression of the sheer chaos in the city.
In 1985 the Israelis withdrew, since they now had local Christian Lebanese forces to carry out much of the security work in the border region. By 1990 the civil war was over, but Lebanon swiftly became a Syrian dependency, until the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Harari in 2005 led to what some hopefully called the ‘Cedar Revolution’, in which people power compelled the withdrawal of Syrian troops.
But 1990 is better remembered as the year in which Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, under what seems to have been the false impression, gained in a misunderstood conversation with an American diplomat, that the West would not interfere. From his point of view, this turned out to be a highly costly mistake.
(Countries facing similar threats in the 1990s but which did not have oil, such as Croatia, Bosnia and Rwanda, felt understandably aggrieved that the West did not form a coalition to help them as well, but such, alas, are the realities of international politics.)
Saddam’s misreading of the situation meant international involvement to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi attack – and also, perhaps even more important, prevent a further invasion of Saudi Arabia, holder of the world’s greatest oil reserves. President George Bush Sr was a firm believer in international coalitions and diplomacy, and was soon able to assemble a powerful group that contained Arab nations as well as Western, Egyptian and Syrian troops in addition to British and American forces. The coalition was known as Operation Desert Shield and, after the invasion of Kuwait in January 1991 as Operation Desert Storm.
Bush’s diplomacy meant that it would be more difficult to see the war as one of Western imperial aggression. For example Syria – who in common with Iraq had a Ba’athist regime – was hardly an ally of the West, had close links with the weakened, soon-to-be-dissolved USSR and remained implacably opposed to Israel and the peace process. In spite of this, President Assad sent troops to fight alongside those from the UK and America. The USSR did not intervene – by the end of 1991 it would no longer exist – and this meant that Iraq like Syria had no powerful Soviet ally to whom it could turn. The losers were the PLO who supported Saddam, and Jordan, which did too, though in the latter case to avert internal strife as the government knew how deeply unpopular support for the US would be, given that so much of the Jordanian population was and is of Palestinian origin. (Yemen also supported Iraq.) The Arab Street also strongly and vociferously supported Saddam. For many ordinary Arabs he became the great champion of the Arab cause against what many regarded as Western imperialism, in spite of widespread Arab government support for the coalition.
The nature of the coalition also meant that there were severe limitations on what the Desert Storm forces could accomplish, and here began a debate that, in the USA at least, has been going on ever since. For once Western troops and their Arab allies, principally Saudi Arabia, had liberated Kuwait in 1991, the war stopped.
Before fighting started, tales of large coalition casualties at the hand of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard units proved to be untrue – more British soldiers were killed by accidental American friendly fire than by Iraqis, and while coalition casualties were very low, the Iraqi army was swiftly defeated.
Some therefore, especially neoconservatives in the US administration such as Paul Wolfowitz, advocated going all the way to Baghdad and removing the Ba’athist regime. But removing Saddam was not an option for the Arab members of the coalition, who feared that a post-Saddam regime would be unacceptable, however much they disliked the Iraqi dictator. In particular, it is unlikely that Sunni Saudi Arabia, with its Wahhabi brand of Islam that does not even recognize Shiism, would have wanted a democratic and predominantly Shiite regime to the north. Kurdish separatism together with possible demands for an independent Kurdistan was also unacceptable to the local regimes. In addition leading US soldiers, such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, were keen to have a limited war with clear objectives and minimum casualties – the Powell Doctrine. So Saddam Hussein remained in power.
However, the West encouraged local groups to rebel. The rebellion duly broke out, with catastrophic and near-genocidal consequences for those who were brave enough to revolt against the dictator. In the Kurdish areas north of the coalition-imposed no-fly zone, much of the region was able, after a while, to become semi-independent, albeit in unusual circumstances. But the rebellion in the Shiite areas led to major disaster. Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Marsh Arabs, who had lived for centuries in the southern marshes of Iraq, were killed or displaced and their ancient habitat destroyed in what became a simultaneous human and ecological catastrophe. The rebellion was duly suppressed, and although it had been encouraged by the West, no Western state went to the aid of the hapless rebels, who were butchered unaided. Better the devil you know, reckoned the Arab governments, than a disruptive new regime that might unsettle yours.
For as Goldschmidt reminds us, most Middle Eastern regimes have no popular legitimacy with their own people. They are therefore particularly vulnerable, and Arab unity is difficult to maintain. A post-Saddam regime with legitimacy or an Iraq split into its three component parts could have been highly destabilizing, and thousands of Shiite Arabs and Kurds therefore paid the price.
Should the allied forces have gone all the way to Baghdad? Such a decision remains highly controversial to this day; Lady Thatcher notoriously stated that if she had still been in power they would have conquered Saddam! The decision was regretted by American neoconservatives, who subsequently wrote an infamous memo when back in opposition saying that the conquest of Iraq was Western unfinished business. Since many of its authors, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, took influential positions when George W. Bush took office in 2001, and since Iraq was then invaded under his leadership in 2003, this view has become yet more controversial still.
On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive today if coalition forces had continued to Baghdad. Not only would there have been no massacre of the Shiites and Kurds in 1991, but the huge numbers that died as a result of the economic sanctions against Iraq then imposed by the UN – and manipulated by Saddam against his own people – would also be alive as well. Democracy might then have come earlier.
But on the other hand, the Arab dictatorships would never have agreed to topple Saddam since they would have feared for their own regimes, and it would have been virtually, if not totally impossible for Western forces to have proceeded under such circumstances. Although the decision caused countless deaths and enormous human suffering to innocent people, it was, alas, the only one realistically possible.
The disappearance of the USSR, which left the USA as the only remaining superpower, or hyper-power (to borrow a French phrase), soon made another major impact on the Middle East. This was the Israeli–PLO agreement of 1993, sometimes called the Oslo Accords, since the peace process was begun in secret negotiations by the Norwegian government, and only ratified by the USA when the clandestine discussions became overt. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, the foreign minister, and Yasser Arafat of the PLO were all awarded the Nobel Prize the following year, sadly prematurely, since the peace for which everyone longed did not break out.
Writing more than twelve years later, the great hopes of 1993 remain tragically unfulfilled. There is still no real peace in Palestine, and, if anything, the situation has worsened, with suicide bombing becoming the weapon of choice of the Islamic terrorists.
(Specifically Islamic terrorism will be examined in the next chapter – I consider it different from the essentially secular, nationalist terrorism of the PLO. Christian Palestinians can want a Palestinian state. However Hamas, and similar Islamic organizations seek a Muslim state, which is therefore religious as well as nationalist – a seemingly small, but nonetheless vital distinction.)
Of the Nobel Laureates, only Peres is still with us. Arafat died in Paris in 2004 after becoming gravely ill. Rabin, by contrast, was assassinated in 1995 at a peace rally, and not by a Palestinian terrorist but by Yigal Amir, a fellow Jew. Amir was part of an extremist group that regarded any deal with the Palestinians as treachery, and therefore punishable by death. Rabin’s murder was a tragedy in many ways. He had been a highly successful general, and had impeccable pro-peace credentials. Without his presence the peace process suffered accordingly. The rise of Jewish terrorism was demonstrated, for example, by the massacre of innocent Muslim worshippers in Hebron by an Israeli extremist. Jews have killed Arabs, Arabs have similarly killed Jews, and the fight has been, to some extent, internationalized – some of the Islamic suicide bombers were British Muslims, for example.
(Interestingly, they were from upper-middle-class homes and privately educated – thus as far as possible from the usual picture of an impoverished Palestinian with nothing to lose in death.)
Ever since 1995 countless attempts have been made, often with the help of the USA, to broker a peace deal in Palestine. Up to and including the time of writing, none has been successful, although, with new Palestinian leadership following the death of Arafat, things might possibly change for the better. In 2000, President Clinton felt he came close, with talks arranged between the then-Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak – also a former general – and Arafat. But even though Barak conceded much, it was still unacceptable for Arafat, and the stalemate continued. In 2005 the right-wing Likud prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yet another former soldier, was able to make Israeli settlers withdraw from Gaza. But large settlements remain, as of 2006, on the West Bank.
It is very difficult to write about a conflict in which we are still mired, with no end in sight. Of course, one could have said the same about the Cold War, even as late as January 1989. When that conflict ended, the demise was very swift, and equally total.
So details about the many ups and downs in the negotiations over the past decade, accounts of deaths on both sides, and lists of meetings and bombing raids, would in a sense just be retelling the same story without the perspective that a known conclusion, on the lines of 1989 in Europe, can give us. Nothing of real substance has changed.
One possible good sign from the Israeli side is a realization that if they are to remain a democracy they have to do something drastic, otherwise they will either have to be a dictatorship or withdraw to territory that is overwhelmingly Jewish. Gaza and the West Bank apart, there is – as Ehud Olmert told a group of us in London – also the question of the growing Arab population within Israel, including those within the old pre-1967 borders. Olmert, who wishes to preserve Israel as a genuine democracy, is very aware of this and it is the rationale both of the withdrawal from Gaza and for the construction of the wall between Israel and the Palestinian Authority area. Since the person saying this was later a co-founder of the new Kadima political party and now prime minister, it might augur well. But it would be a brave person who could predict the future of so long-standing a conflict.
The building of the wall has been likened to the construction of the equally notorious Berlin Wall in the 1960s. But the Berlin Wall did not work and nor, I suspect, will this new one. It might make terrorism slightly more difficult, but those determined enough to commit atrocities against civilians will, alas, find a way around it, in the same way that those zealous enough at escaping Communism always managed to get out somehow.
The other dramatic event of the Middle East was the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. This is a story very much in progress at the time of writing before the long-term consequences of the late 2005 referendum on the constitution is known. In 2006 we have a majority Shiite government with a Shia Arab prime minister, al-Maliki, elected for a full term of office, but with the internal conflict still very much in full flow.
Here again, people have often taken sides not on the basis of the issues themselves, but on how they view the power of the USA. In Britain, some on the socialist left did support Anglo-American intervention, notably the Labour MP Ann Clwyd and Nick Cohen, the radical journalist and columnist. Some on the political right, such as the prominent Conservative MP Kenneth Clarke, opposed the war. What is interesting about the pro-war left was that they included people who had been involved in supporting the human rights of the Kurds, hundreds of thousands of whom had died at the hands of Saddam’s secret police. In this case, the deaths were indisputable, with countless bodies being discovered to prove that the massacres, unlike the legendary ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were genuine.
In my book on Churchill’s creation of Iraq, and in the London Sunday Times on 26 December 2004 I have written about the very artificial nature of Churchill’s creation of 1921. While the future of Iraq is as deeply unclear as that of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute, it is evident that old allegiances – to tribal or religious groups – are more powerful for many Iraqis than patriotism for a unitary Iraqi state. The Sunnis who ruled, often despotically, for the first eighty-two years of the country’s existence now find themselves excluded, an inevitable result of sectarian rather than ideological voting. It is clear that the hard-line elements in Iran are doing their best to support similar factions in Iraq and perhaps also to destabilize their newly democratic neighbour. Whatever the future of Iraq will be, the idealism of the right-wing neoconservatives in the USA who so keenly supported the invasion prior to 2003 now seems rather misplaced, as a repentant Francis Fukuyama admitted on changing from his original hawkish position on invading Iraq. In early 2006, military analysts to whom I have spoken think that the current alliance between secular Ba’athist Sunni Arab nationalists and hard-line Islamic (and also Sunni) extremists might eventually break up, since their visions of a future Iraq – one still secular, the other profoundly religious – will eventually conflict. But we shall see …
Whatever the future of the Middle East, the Cradle of Civilization will be at the centre of global attention for a very long time to come.