The U.S. in the Middle East: a Brief History 

by Martin Charwat

Talk delivered at First Presbyterian Church

Poughkeepsie, NY 12601

2/22/04

The Countries:

Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait.

Not included but important regional players: Turkey, Iran. 

History of the Region:

Major 20^th Century & Present Themes of American Involvement: 

I see 9 major themes: 

1. Anti-colonialism and reducing the influence of European powers;

2. Oil. Access to oil supplies and control of shipping lanes;

3. Support for the creation and existence of Israel as a democratic state;

4. Anti-communism and building alliances with Middle Eastern states to oppose the spread of communism and Soviet expansionism;

5. Distrust of Arab nationalism and opposition to the OPEC oil cartel;

6. Preventing the emergence of a regional power that could threaten U.S. interests;

7. Demonizing Saddam Hussein and quarantining Iraq;

8. Recognizing the danger of al-Qaeda and seeking allies against it;

9. Accepting the obligations of occupying Iraq and becoming a regional military power with a permanent troop presence in the Middle East.

I will touch very briefly on these 9 themes, after which I’ll be happy to try to answer questions. 

1. Anti-colonialism and reducing the influence of European powers reflected U.S. policy following World War I. President Woodrow Wilson sought to promote national self-determination and to limit the power of European colonial powers. But this conflicted with the interests of Britain and France, which wished to carve up the Ottoman Empire. After the War, Britain solidified its hold on Egypt and Palestine, and created Iraq and Jordan, putting monarchs on the thrones of those 2 countries. It kept its influence in the Arabian Peninsula, which it had helped to free from the Turks. France took over Syria and Lebanon under League of Nations mandates. The U.S. accepted these arrangements, even though they meant that local regimes were not created, and the European powers were dominant.

Our anti-colonial rhetoric was not matched by concrete support for nationalist movements.

2. Oil. Access to supplies has been a constant U.S. policy in the Middle East since World War I and accelerated during World War II. Before World War I, Britain secured access to oil supplies in Persia and Kuwait, and afterwards in Iraq. Oil was vital to the war effort. In the 1920’s although the U.S. was a major oil producer, it realized the importance of access to Middle-Eastern oil. During World War II, President Roosevelt met with King Saud of Saudi Arabia to improve U.S. access to that Kingdom’s oil supplies. Saudi Arabia became pivotal to U.S. oil policy and has remained so. Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest oil reserves. Iraq is #2. As Britain withdrew its naval and land forces from the Persian Gulf in the 1960’s the U.S. stepped in to provide naval protection for shipping Persian Gulf oil. Under the costly umbrella of that protection, U.S. oil companies profitably market a large percentage of the Middle Eastern oil.

3. Support for the creation and existence of Israel as a democratic state. Following World War II, during which some 6 million European Jews died in the Holocaust, efforts accelerated by Palestine’s Jewish population to create a Jewish state of Israel. While this was largely opposed by the U.S. State Department and local and regional Arabs, President Truman supported it, and the State of Israel was declared in 1948 with U.S. backing. Israel defeated invading Arab armies, and in 1949 it reached armistice agreements with most of its neighboring states. But in the process of its founding, large numbers of Palestinian Arabs became refugees, whom the surrounding Arab countries generally refused to accept as permanent residents or citizens. Their status remains unresolved. The U.S. opposed Israel’s keeping territory won in subsequent wars, but despite this opposition, Israel held onto the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights, conquered from Syria. In 1979, with the help of President Jimmy Carter, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to pursue Palestinian forces there. U.S. criticism was muted. A year later, with Lebanon in the midst of a civil war, the U.S. sent troops there, only to have nearly 300 killed in the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks – following which the U.S. withdrew its forces. While the U.S. has largely backed Israel and supported it as the only democracy in the Middle East, and President Clinton invested heavily in trying to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, there is no peace. Most Arab countries perceive the U.S. as pro-Israel and equate Israel’s policies and actions towards the Palestinians as being U.S. policy, too.

4. Anti-communism and building alliances with Middle Eastern states to oppose the spread of communism and Soviet expansionism. During the ‘50’s and ‘60’s the U.S. forged a series of alliances with Middle Eastern states, principally Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Israel to oppose the spread of Soviet influence in the area. We helped overthrow the nationalist regime of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, on the grounds that it threatened western oil interests and was becoming pro-communist.  During the 1980’s following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. funded the training and arming of Arab “mujahedeen” – Islamic fighters who fought the Soviets there. These fighters, who came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab countries, were quite effective. Following the end of the Afghan war, many of them returned home with military skills, arms, and a burning anti-western ideology. What started as a jihad, a holy war against godless Communism would morph into a jihad against the United States, pro-western governments, and moderate Muslims in the Middle East.

5. Distrust of Arab nationalism and opposition to the OPEC cartel. After World War II, Arab nationalism led to the independence of Syria and Lebanon, and rioting against the British in Egypt. The creation of Israel was a painful shock to Arab nationalists, who saw it as confirmation of Arab weakness. Some viewed it as a punishment for not being sufficiently faithful to Islam. In either case, this led to a re-examination of why the Arab nations were now so weak. Nationalists such as Nasser of Egypt and Assad of Syria promised a rebirth of Arab greatness. Nasser tweaked the west by nationalizing the Suez Canal. The U.S. accommodated him but hoped for his overthrow. Following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, OPEC, the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries, comprised largely of Middle Eastern states, declared an oil embargo to punish the U.S. and European countries that had supported Israel. The so-called “oil shock” that followed, led to a quadrupling of oil prices and long lines at gas stations. The U.S., which had viewed OPEC as a “paper tiger” realized its power and began publicly to call for the development of alternative energy sources and to diversify its sources of oil supply. Despite these expressed desires and much political rhetoric, the U.S. has grown even more dependent on Mid-East oil, which today accounts for over 50% of U.S. oil imports. This figure is expected to increase over the decade.

6. Preventing the emergence of a regional power that could threaten U.S. interests. This explains U.S. involvement in the longest Middle-Eastern war of the last century: the brutal battle between Iran and Iraq that began in 1980 and ended in a stalemate in 1988. The U.S. did not want either Iran or Iraq to emerge as a dominant power in the Persian Gulf region, and we did our best to prevent such an outcome. We supported Iraq throughout much of the conflict with food, arms, and military intelligence that permitted it to withstand the Iranian counterattack. The war killed nearly ¾ million people, exhausted both Iraq and Iran, and was a proximate cause of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, since Iraq was bankrupt and wanted Kuwait to forgive Iraq loans which it had taken to fight the war. Kuwait refused, so Iraq invaded. To prevent Iraq from becoming the dominant power in the Gulf, controlling both its own oil and Kuwait’s and posing a danger to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait. When it refused, the U.S. assembled and led a coalition to oust it in 1991.

7. Demonizing Saddam Hussein and quarantining Iraq. Following Iraq’s defeat by the U.S.-led coalition, the U.S. expected that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown by his elite Republican Guard, which had been bloodied in the war. We miscalculated. Those forces were purged, and Saddam loyalists managed to crush revolts of the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north, both of whom incorrectly thought they could count on American support. The U.S. increased pressure on Saddam’s regime through a series of ever tighter economic sanctions, the establishment of aerial “no-fly” zones from which Iraqi aircraft were barred, and an effective United Nations’ run weapons inspection system that destroyed the bulk of Iraq’s missiles and much of its biological and chemical weapons stockpiles.

Saddam was described variously as a Hitler or a madman by U.S. spokespersons, based in part on his use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds. When U.N. weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq in 1998 after allegedly sharing information with U.S. intelligence agencies, the U.S. bombed Iraq for several days. But Saddam resisted the U.N.’s demands for renewed inspections. Following the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the U.S. sought to link Saddam to that attack and alleged that his regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to us and to his neighbors. After obtaining a U.N. resolution authorizing force if Saddam did not submit to new, highly intrusive inspections, the U.S. attacked Iraq in March, 2003 and defeated it. Months later, Saddam was captured by U.S. forces and is now being held and interrogated. Efforts to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have yet to locate significant numbers of them.

8. Recognizing the danger of al-Qaeda and seeking allies against it. An Islamic terrorist group known as al-Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, the son of wealthy Saudi family, claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks against the United States that resulted in the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the loss of almost 3,000 American lives on U.S. territory on 9/11/01. Even before then al-Qaeda had attacked U.S. embassies in Africa, and the navy ship, Cole, in Yemen. Al-Qaeda is an organization formed in discrete cells, financed by contributions from Muslims throughout the world, comprised of thousands of men (and probably some women) who received military training in camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere, dedicated to killing Americans and Jews and expelling the United States from the Middle East, and overthrowing regimes that are viewed as our puppets, corrupt, or insufficiently devoted to Islam.

The 9/11 attacks caught the U.S. by surprise. We quickly responded by articulating what came to be known as the Bush doctrine: anyone whom we classified as an international terrorist or who rendered aid or comfort to such persons or to terrorist organizations henceforth would be viewed as an enemy of the United States and subject to pre-emptive attack by us. Soon thereafter we attacked Afghanistan, whose Taliban-led government had hosted al-Qaeda training camps. With the help of local allies, we overthrew the Taliban and killed many of the al-Qaeda forces there or drove them into exile. Under our tutelage, a new government was installed in Kabul. Taliban and al Qaeda attacks continue. We have also sought the help of friendly governments in the Middle East and elsewhere to close off the sources of funding for terrorist groups and have expanded intelligence sharing with other nations to apprehend al Qaeda and other international terrorists, disrupt their networks, and abort planned attacks. Little is known about the effectiveness of these efforts, but to date there has not been another attack on the magnitude of 9/11.

9. Accepting the obligations of occupying Iraq and becoming a military power with a permanent troop presence in the Middle East is the final theme. Although the conquest of Iraq went more smoothly than most expected, its occupation has proved more difficult. Looting, widespread street crime, armed opposition, and demands for quick elections all pose challenges to the U.S. that were either inadequately anticipated or for which sufficient trained personnel were not made available on a timely basis. We expected to be treated as liberators. While most Iraqis are grateful that we released them from Saddam’s terror, they do not want to be occupied by us. This is especially true for the Sunnis, who enjoyed a privileged status under Saddam, but also for the Shiites, who experienced torture and discrimination at his hands. Only the Kurds seem somewhat willing to accept a continuing U.S. role, since they view us as having belatedly protected them from Saddam and the Turks, and gave the Kurds the opportunity to develop a decent economy and meaningful political autonomy. Both would be at risk in a strong unified Iraq or if Turkey were to send its Army in to take over the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. 

U.S. forces are likely to remain in Iraq well beyond the announced June 30, 2004 date for the turnover of sovereignty to Iraqi officials. What the role of U.S. troops will be then is less clear. They will probably help Iraq’s fledgling army and police cope with challenges and will also be available to U.S. planners as a regional force that can be deployed as needed to neighboring countries, to act against hostile regimes or al-Qaeda-like forces attacking those regimes. This represents the first time that the U.S. will have such a large force on-the-ground in the Middle East.  How it will be received, whether as friend or foe, remains to be seen.

Like it or not, the U.S. seems committed to continuing its major military presence in the Middle East. Why? Because 3 of the themes are still very much operative: Oil, Israel, and al-Qaeda. All are likely to continue to pose major challenges for U.S. policy-makers in the upcoming decades.

Now, if any of you have questions or comments, I’d be happy to try to address them.