A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  Within the Arab world, the shift in weight and influence from the traditional political power centres of Cairo and Damascus eastwards to the Arabian peninsula, which was already perceptible in the 1960s, now became fully apparent. Not only manual workers but also those with high skills and professionals from the Levant states and Egypt looked to the eldorado of the Arab Gulf countries as a means of transforming their living-standards.

  However, it was their enhanced role in the world economy which gave the oil-producing states their new international status. The decisions of OPEC – in which the Middle East countries were overwhelmingly dominant – were headline material; the investment of the ‘petro-dollars’ of its members’ huge and growing surpluses affected not only international currency markets but the business climate in many of the advanced industrial countries.

  There was a reverse side to all this. In the first place the oil states – invariably personified in the Western media as ‘the Arabs’ – became the target of widespread hostility and resentment. The wealthier industrialized countries blamed them for the global inflation of the 1970s; Third World states without oil of their own saw their development plans shattered by the huge increase in the price of imported fuel. Where the Arab oil states were able to use their increased influence to secure some improved international appreciation of the Arab position on Palestine, those hostile to their cause attributed this to ‘oil blackmail’. Israel understandably did everything to encourage this view.

  The OPEC states soon discovered the limitations to their power. At the time of the 1973 war the Arab states declared that they would continue their embargo of Western countries supporting Israel until Israel had withdrawn from all occupied Arab lands. But the real fear that the United States and its allies, faced with disaster to their industrialized economies, might invade and occupy their oilfields forced the Arabs to lift the embargo in March 1974. As this fear receded, it became apparent that the quadrupling of prices was leading to a reduction in the rate of consumption and that this, combined with the increase in output, would soon result in a world oil surplus. The industrialized countries, having been startled into awareness of the dangers of dependence on cheap oil, began to seek to conserve their own resources and to exploit alternative sources of energy such as coal, nuclear power or oil-bearing shale deposits. The threat of a collapse in oil prices showed that OPEC was far from being a monolithic bloc – there was a huge difference in outlook between those countries such as Iran or Algeria whose needs exceeded their revenues and those such as Kuwait, Libya or Abu Dhabi, with small populations, which could afford to cut back production in order to maintain prices. This placed additional responsibility on Saudi Arabia as the OPEC ‘swing’ producer, responsible for one-third of OPEC’s output and, with its immense spare capacity, capable of doubling or halving its production in order to reduce or raise prices on the international market.

  As a sharp and sometimes acrimonious debate continued within OPEC, it seemed at times that the organization might break up, and its demise was regularly foretold by some international economists. But this did not happen. When disaster threatened, the necessary minimum agreement on the sharing of output was reached. Much of the credit for this was due to Saudi Arabia’s willingness to use its power to stabilize the market. OPEC even survived a new and potentially disastrous surge in oil prices in 1979–81 caused by a panic among consumers on the outbreak of the Iraq–Iran war. The artificial boom, which took prices as high as $34 a barrel, was followed by a prolonged glut in the 1980s, during which OPEC with difficulty maintained prices at around $18 a barrel.

  OPEC’s share of world oil exports fell from its height of 90 per cent when the organization was founded to about 40 per cent as production from non-OPEC sources such as the North Sea, Alaska and Mexico was stepped up. Faced with increasing budget deficits, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had to begin drawing on their foreign reserves. The enormous material losses caused by the Gulf War meant that Iran and Iraq could no longer be regarded as among the more affluent of Third World countries. However, the underlying fact remained that more than 60 per cent of all the proved reserves of crude oil in the world were in the territory of the states bordering on the Persian/Arabian Gulf, easily accessible and cheap to produce. Hence the relative decline of these countries’ importance in the world economy from its high point in the 1970s was likely to be temporary. The creator of the universe gave Arabs and Persians an instrument of power which was discovered and realized in the twentieth century and will no doubt continue to be wielded in the twenty-first.

  Egyptian Initiatives

  In 1970 the death of Nasser, who had dominated Egypt’s political life for sixteen years, left a vacuum. However, when, in declining health, Nasser had left Egypt for an Arab summit meeting in Morocco in 1969, he had appointed Anwar Sadat as his sole vice-president to manage the country’s affairs in his absence. Sadat was the same age as Nasser and a former fellow-officer and conspirator (although a civilian at the time of the 1952 revolution); he came from a similar moderately prosperous village background. Although Sadat had been a member of the original Revolutionary Command Council, Nasser never appointed him to ministerial office but he made him the speaker of parliament after 1956 and occasionally used him on important diplomatic missions. The public did not regard him as a political heavyweight; he was the butt of many of the famous Cairene political jokes. However, as the sole vice-president, his election as president was a foregone conclusion under Egypt’s constitution.

  Initially Sadat promised only to follow in Nasser’s footsteps, but a change of emphasis towards more ‘Egypt first’ policies soon emerged. Relations with Turkey, Iran and some European states which had long been hostile were repaired and improved. There was a perceptible relaxation in the atmosphere of public life.

  In April 1971 Sadat made more decisive moves to stamp his mark on the regime. He dismissed his vice-president, Ali Sabry, formerly one of Nasser’s closest aides, who had challenged his policies in the Arab Socialist Union, and when, two weeks later, seven ministers and officials resigned en bloc he had them arrested and charged with attempting a coup. They had been hoping to maintain a collective leadership with Sadat as little more than a figurehead, but Sadat was popular with the general public, who wanted firm leadership, and he had the support of the army.

  Sadat was announcing that the Sadat era had begun. In his speeches he increasingly denounced the errors of the Nasser period. He promised that the police-state apparatus would be destroyed, that the rule of law would be restored and vigorously applied, and that genuinely free parliamentary elections would be held. He called this his Corrective Movement.

  But although these moves enhanced his popularity, he was threatened by the lack of any progress in the Arab–Israeli dispute. The US government showed no willingness to follow up the Rogers Plan of 1970 by enforcing an Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Sadat’s offer in February 1971 to reopen the Suez Canal in return for an Israeli withdrawal to the Mitla and Geddi passes in central Sinai received no response. On the other hand, the Soviet Union rejected Egypt’s repeated appeals to supply the types of arms that made the crossing of the Canal a feasible alternative. The two superpowers were becoming increasingly interested in their own détente. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were not unhappy that a closed Canal should hamper communist supplies to North Vietnam. On the other hand, Secretary-General Brezhnev did not want to risk another Middle East war on the very doubtful assumption that it would mean Egypt’s recovery of the Canal and of Sinai. Israel was naturally content with the status quo.

  At home Sadat had to face an increasingly restive people. Left-wing students demonstrated against the impasse. The morale of the army, paralysed on the Canal, sank lower. Sadat’s repeated promises that action would shortly be taken to recover lost territory aroused increased scepticism.

  In July 1972 President Sadat made what seemed like a desperate throw to restore his popularity when he ordered the wi
thdrawal of all the 15,000 Soviet military advisers and service personnel from Egypt. The move was popular because the Soviet presence was widely disliked, especially by the army, but at that stage Egypt had no real alternative to Soviet aid. The West’s relations with Egypt were improving but not to the extent of providing arms. Popular impatience exploded in fiercer rioting in January 1973, raising doubts as to whether the Sadat regime could survive.

  In fact by this time Sadat had already decided that he had no alternative but to launch against Israel a war of limited objectives which would oblige the West and the Soviet Union to reassess the situation. The risks were enormous, but inaction was no longer possible and he was helped by the fact that Israel and the superpowers contemptuously assumed that he could not possibly succeed.

  In preparing the ground, his objective was to secure Syria as his military ally and Saudi Arabia as his diplomatic and financial ally. Relations with the Saudi kingdom had been transformed for the better since Nasser’s death, but Syria presented greater difficulty. Its leader, Hafez Assad, was twelve years younger than Sadat and came from Syria’s Alawite minority, the sub-Shia sect of Islam which had traditionally formed the Syrian underclass but was disproportionately represented in the armed forces. Assad had risen rapidly in the ranks of both the air force and the Baath Party, in which he belonged to the radical wing in opposition to the more moderate elements such as the veteran Baathist leader Salah Bitar who favoured conciliation of the Syrian middle class. When the radicals or neo-Baathists ousted their opponents in a coup in 1966, Hafez Assad became defence minister. Salah Bitar and Michel Aflaq, the original founders of the Baath, went into exile.

  The new regime survived the Palestine catastrophe of 1967 with difficulty. But the experience served to broaden Assad’s horizons, and he began to show his masterly aptitude as a political strategist. Seeing that the somewhat faceless men of the regime who belonged to the civilian wing of the Baath were leading the country to disaster by stridently rejecting all political solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict without being capable of any military initiative, he moved in 1970 to impose the authority of the military wing, secure in the support of the Syrian armed forces. He became prime minister, and in 1971 he took over the presidency with a revised constitution which gave him supreme executive power. Despite the drawback of being an Alawite in predominantly Sunni Syria, he succeeded in creating a highly personified rule which was not under serious challenge. Briefly he became Anwar Sadat’s ally, but he would soon become his most formidable opponent. The two men mistrusted each other, and there was a fundamental difference in their war aims. Assad hoped to drive Israel out of Syrian territory and to inflict a sharp military defeat on the enemy. Sadat wanted victory for the essential purpose of obliging the West – especially the United States – to revise its view of the Middle East conflict; he hoped that Washington would take Egypt as seriously as it took Israel.

  The Syrians and Egyptians co-ordinated their plans during the summer of 1973 and launched their attack simultaneously on the night of 6 October, the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur. Their initial success was stunning. Within twenty-four hours the Egyptians had put 90,000 men and 850 tanks across the Suez Canal, seized Israel’s fortified Bar–Lev line and established bridgeheads along the Canal. Israel lost some 300 tanks. At the same time, three Syrian divisions and an armoured brigade broke through Israel’s defences in the Golan Heights and were poised to descend on to the plains of Galilee.

  The Arabs’ strongest weapon was the element of total surprise, which was helped by Israel’s complacency. In the Egyptian forces improved training and officer–men relationships and the high quality of logistical planning helped to maintain morale. Israel’s qualitative advantage in air power and armour over Egypt was partially neutralized by the Soviet-supplied missile defence system and by anti-tank ‘suitcase missiles’ capable of being held by a single infantryman.

  Egypt and Syria had deliberately excluded Jordan from joining the offensive because, lacking Soviet missile air defences, Jordan would have been unable to prevent a potentially disastrous Israeli thrust through its territory into southern Syria. But Jordan did send two armoured brigades to Syria after the war began. Iraq contributed three divisions and three fighter squadrons, which suffered heavy casualties on the northern front, while 1,800 Moroccan troops were involved in bitter fighting around Mount Hermon on the first day. The main contribution of the Arab oil-producing states, led by Saudi Arabia, was the use of the oil weapon in declaring an immediate cut in production and a boycott of countries supporting Israel. However, this could not affect the military outcome.

  Israel’s military recovery was swift, helped by an immediate and massive airlift of the most sophisticated arms from the United States. Israel struck first at Syria, which directly threatened its territory, and by 12 October had pushed the Syrian forces back to their main defensive lines until the front was stabilized some thirty miles from Damascus. (It is possible that Israel feared Soviet intervention if it tried to advance on the Syrian capital.) It was now able to turn its full weight against the Egyptian forces in Sinai, where its initial counter-attacks had been thrown back with further heavy losses. Shortly after the American aid to Israel, the Soviets began an airlift of arms to Egypt. However, on the night of 15 October an Israeli force led by General Ariel Sharon succeeded in crossing to the west bank of the Canal in a gap between the Egyptian armies and establishing a bridgehead. The Egyptian high command, reluctant for reasons of prestige to withdraw forces from Sinai to deal with the threat, reacted too slowly. The Israelis broke out of their bridgehead and came within fifty miles of Cairo. Egypt’s Third Army was surrounded and cut off in Sinai.

  The United States and the Soviet Union jointly sponsored a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, the implementation of UN Resolution 242 of 1967 and negotiations for a peace settlement ‘under appropriate auspices’. This became UN Resolution 338 on 22 October 1973. Egypt and Israel accepted, as did Syria after twenty-four hours’ delay. The cease-fire was due to come into force on 22 October, but it immediately broke down. At this point the superpowers came as close as ever before to a direct clash over the Middle East. The Soviets threatened to respond unilaterally to an Egyptian request for US and Soviet troops to be sent to the Middle East to enforce the cease-fire, and the US responded by placing its forces on Defence Condition Three in the early hours of 25 October. The Soviet Union backed down and agreed instead to the formation of a UN Emergency Force in the Middle East from which the troops of the permanent members of the Security Council would be excluded.

  The consequences of this fourth Arab–Israeli war (or fifth if the 1968–70 war of attrition along the Suez Canal is included) were substantial and far-reaching, but they were not all immediately apparent and took time to have their full effect.

  Israel had snatched a stunning military victory from initial defeat, but the cost was heavy and the psychological effects were deep. Losses in tanks and planes were much heavier than in previous wars; 2,521 Israelis were killed and 7,056 were wounded – about half of them permanently maimed. Arab losses were greater but much less as a proportion of the population, and the performance of the Arab armies had been sufficient to destroy the myth of Israeli military invincibility. The Israeli public, led by the press, launched a form of witch-hunt to apportion blame, focusing on the Labour coalition cabinet of Mrs Golda Meir and especially the defence minister, Moshe Dayan, who was known to have lost his nerve on the initial surprise Arab assault. The Israeli Labour Party had effectively governed the country since the foundation of the state, with the support of the more affluent and better educated Ashkenazi Jews of European origin, but it now began a slow but inexorable political decline. The gainer was the right-wing ultra-nationalist Likud Party, led by Menachem Begin. This had previously been regarded as unelectable, but it now won widespread support from the mass of Sephardic or oriental Jews, who resented the political and social dominance of the Labour establishm
ent. In elections in March 1977 the normal Labour vote of about 40 per cent sank below 25 per cent, while the Likud won 33.4 per cent. Begin became prime minister, and the prospects darkened for any settlement of the Arab–Israeli dispute.

  The near defeat in 1973 reinforced Israel’s determination to ensure its military superiority over the combined forces of the Arabs and to use this as the main instrument of its diplomacy. With massive US aid and support, Israel’s forces by the end of 1974 were proportionately larger than in October 1973 and qualitatively much improved.

  In contrast Egypt’s near-victory in Sinai had a harmful effect on President Sadat’s diplomacy. Whether or not he totally believed it, he continued to claim that it had indeed been a glorious triumph, and this fiction weakened his hand in subsequent negotiations. On the other hand, he had achieved his most immediate aim of breaking the Middle East impasse and causing a reassessment of US policy in the region. The basis of the Egyptian president’s policy was his declared view that the United States always holds 99 per cent of the cards in the Middle East. Immediately following the war he renewed diplomatic ties with Washington after a break of seven years and established a close working relationship with Dr Henry Kissinger (who had been confirmed as secretary of state just two weeks before the outbreak of the war). Through Kissinger’s tireless mediation, Sadat secured two military disengagement agreements with Israel – Sinai 1 in January 1974, under which Israeli troops withdrew from the east bank of the Suez Canal and light Egyptian forces occupied a six-mile strip along the shore, and Sinai 2 in September 1975, which took the Israeli forces behind the key Mitla and Geddi passes in Sinai. Early-warning stations manned by US civilians were set up on the passes. The disengagement enabled Egypt to clear and reopen the Canal by June 1975, to start work on the rebuilding and repopulation of the Canal cities and to recover its oilfields in Sinai.