All Arab leaders had to take some account of public opinion, which often tended towards a simplistic view of Saddam Hussein as a twentieth-century Saladin who would defy the West and unite the Arabs. The great majority of Arabs who are poor felt little sympathy for the Gulf Arabs with their vast recently inherited wealth. Demonstrators in Jordan and the Israeli-occupied territories cheered Saddam as a hero while even some Islamic militants who had known him as a ruthless secular dictator felt some response to his appeal for jihad or Islamic holy war against the Western invaders.
President Saddam acted with some guile but also made gross miscalculations, which were partly due to his ignorance of the world and partly to his insulation from the advice and criticism of his colleagues, whom he had so intimidated. He shrewdly linked the Gulf crisis with the Palestinian cause by contrasting the West’s instant reaction to his seizure of Kuwait with its failure to end Israel’s occupation of Arab lands. He made some headway with his appeal to popular Arab and Islamic sentiment, although he would never overcome the suspicion and hatred of those who had direct experience of his ruthlessness, such as the hundreds of thousands of Egyptian fellahin who were forced to leave their livelihood in Iraq. Two weeks after the invasion he took the risk of offering peace to Iran and formally abandoning all the aims for which he had gone to war, in order to ensure Iran’s neutrality. This enabled him to withdraw vital troops from the Iranian border and reinforce his Kuwait defences. The Iraqi people seemed to accept the necessity for this drastic action.
Saddam’s efforts to win over opinion outside the Middle East were grossly misconceived. Outrage was caused by his detention of hundreds of foreigners as hostages, mostly Westerners caught in Kuwait or Iraq; some were used as human shields by being confined close to potential military targets. Bad feeling was not assuaged by the release of selected groups of women, children, the sick and aged in a charade of humanitarian gestures. As news trickled out of the Iraqi troops’ pillage of Kuwait and atrocities committed against the remaining third of the Kuwaiti population that had not fled, there were calls in the West for Saddam to be tried as a war criminal and for Iraq to pay war reparations.
In spite of the overwhelming array of force deployed against Iraq, the United States and its allies were faced with an acute dilemma. Their prime objective was clear: to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait to enable the legitimate government to be restored. But from the outset it was clear that other decisions would be necessary. There was a question whether, even in the event of an Iraqi withdrawal, it would be reasonable to leave Saddam with his formidable military machine intact (including chemical weapons) and with the continuing capacity to threaten the Middle East with his power. It also had to be considered whether the destruction of this power would not drastically unbalance the region. A more immediate decision had to be made as to how long it would be possible to wait to see if the sanctions decreed by the UN would be enough to weaken Iraq and force its withdrawal, before using military force. There was a danger that, as the weeks stretched into months, the motley coalition of the international force opposing Iraq would break apart – especially if Iraq were to offer a compromise such as a partial withdrawal from Kuwait or propose that the Palestine problem should be solved simultaneously with that of the Gulf. But the unity of the international force might be even more strained if a lightning strike to destroy Iraq’s air force and cut off its forces that were dug in behind formidable defences should fail in its objective and lead to a prolonged and costly campaign.
However, none of these immediate fears was realized. Saddam miscalculated the determination of his opponents and overestimated his own military power and ability to inflict on them unacceptable losses. When the US obtained UN Security Council authorization for the use of force if he failed to evacuate Kuwait by 15 January, he continued to prevaricate. He suddenly released all foreign ‘guests’ (i.e., hostages) but still gave no hint of leaving Kuwait. Shortly after the deadline the coalition launched a devastating air assault on Iraq and its forces in Kuwait. With its air force grounded or in refuge in Iran, Iraq was unable to respond except by firing Scud missiles against Saudi and Israeli targets. These caused some damage but failed in their chief objective of involving Israel in the war to split the West from its Arab allies.
The land attack launched after five weeks’ bombing outflanked the 42 Iraqi divisions in the Kuwait field, and these were destroyed or immobilized. Before fleeing, the Iraqis sabotaged 90 per cent of Kuwait’s oil wells in revenge, seriously damaging the Gulf’s ecology. Saddam Hussein seemed doomed by his catastrophic defeat. Iraq’s Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south rose in rebellion, seizing control of many towns. But they lacked strategy and heavy weapons, and with the remaining half of his armed forces Saddam brutally suppressed the uprisings. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites fled for refuge to the Turkish and Iranian mountain borders.
Iraq was forced to agree to heavy and stringent peace terms, which included elimination of all its potential for weapons of mass destruction and payment of heavy reparations. The US and Britain insisted on Saddam Hussein’s departure before the removal of UN sanctions and Iraq’s resumption of normal relations with the world. But the motley Iraqi opposition groups failed to remove Saddam and no internal coup succeeded; Western powers were not prepared to occupy Baghdad. Promising to liberalize his regime, a weakened but still inadequately chastened Saddam seemed able to survive for a time the consequences of his colossal errors.
13. Pax Americana
The devastation of Iraq was proof – if proof were needed – that the collapse of the Soviet Union had left the United States as the unassailable global power. The struggle for the region had lasted about forty years – or a similar period to the Anglo-French interregnum which preceded it. But with the end of the East–West conflict, those Middle East leaders long seen as Russian clients rushed to realign with Washington, before they succumbed to the fate of their fellow-dictators in Eastern Europe. Those that refused to submit to the American yoke – Libya, Iraq and Iran – were punished with UN or US sanctions. The Soviet satellite in South Yemen, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, was wiped from the map altogether, and swallowed by its North Yemen neighbour.
The vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union impelled Washington to a new activism in the region. For the next decade, the key official decisions affecting the Middle East would be taken either in Western capitals or at the UN headquarters in New York. In his victory address to Congress in March 1991, President George Bush unveiled a four-point plan to bring his new world order to the Middle East. The United States, he said, would strengthen its military ties to the Gulf, rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, end the Arab–Israeli conflict on the basis of land for peace, and embark on a drive for ‘economic freedom’ and ‘human rights’.
Buttressing what amounted to a programme for reformatting the region was the most powerful show of foreign armoury the Middle East had seen since the height of the British Empire. Bush had claimed that Washington’s mobilization of half a million troops to the Gulf ‘did not mean stationing US ground forces in the Arabian Peninsula’ for the long term, but there was no rush to decamp. One decade after the Gulf War, the US still kept 25,000 troops in the region, 10,000 of them based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Stashes of hardware were stockpiled in other Gulf emirates ready to equip an army ten times the size. In addition, the Pentagon positioned an armada in the Persian Gulf comprising two aircraft carrier groups armed with 15 warships and 350 fighter-jets. Several thousand more US troops and a squadron of US fighter planes were stationed in south-eastern Turkey at Incirlik Base, which for the next decade was to be one of the most strategically important footholds for the US in the Middle East. Incirlik lay in striking distance not only of Iran and Syria, but also the oil- and gas-rich former Soviet republics. In addition, Washington oversaw the supply of billions of dollars in military aid and arms to Israel, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf states. In short, the United State
s had the Middle East encircled.
Initially, the prospects for Pax Americana looked good. In the absence of superpower rivalry, regional conflicts were widely predicted to crumble away. North Africa’s Cold War rivals, Algeria and Morocco, embarked on a United Nations-administered peace process to end a twenty-five year conflict over control of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara (with the expectation that Morocco’s sandwall dividing the territory would wither as fast as the Berlin Wall). Arab and Israeli leaders took their seats round a negotiating table in Madrid. And across the Middle East, cafés bubbled with talk of the onward march of democracy, state accountability and human rights. But Middle Easterners quickly discovered that the readjustment from a bipolar to a unipolar world would not inaugurate the promised utopia. And from 1995 onwards, the history of the Middle East is of a clear pattern of uncoordinated but manifest dissent at US hegemony – from defiance in Iraq and resistance in Palestine, to the wildfire spread of militant Islam across the Sunni world.
Humbling Iraq
To the evident relief of Iraq’s neighbours, the United States immediately set about neutering the Arab world’s most powerful military. Before the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had presided over a million-man army and an arsenal that outstripped Egypt and Turkey. Some 30,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the 1991 allied air bombardment. Tens of thousands more were slain as the Iraqi army retreated on the road back to Basra. The bulk of the country’s oil infrastructure, its refineries and pipelines, was pulverized by air strikes. Iraqi oil production plummeted from a high of over 5 million barrels a day prior to its war with Iran in 1980 to a few tens of thousand barrels after its retreat from Kuwait. The Arab Monetary Fund put the damage caused by the US-led bombing at $190 billion.
What war left unfinished, the armistice was designed to complete. One month after Iraq’s surrender, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 687 assigning a UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to search out and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and stipulating that sanctions should not be lifted until its mission had been completed. Fear of the Iraqi weapons programme was not without foundation – Iraq had repeatedly dropped chemical bombs on both its Kurdish rebels and Iranian troops. But the effects of sanctions on a country dependent on oil revenues to buy food were appalling. All imports, including food, were subject to a blockade by land and sea, as were pesticides and the fertilizer Iraq required to grow its own basics. Within months, inflation in Iraq had reached 2,000 per cent and average earnings had collapsed to a tenth of their pre-war level, roughly equivalent to the wages of Bangladesh. A teacher’s monthly salary was barely enough to buy a kilo of meat. The UN reported that ‘the majority of the population live on a diet of semi-starvation’. Because of a ban on chlorine, sewage was discharged untreated into the Euphrates. Cholera and typhoid, diseases Iraq had stamped out in the 1970s, returned.
At first, the pressure proved effective. The day UNSCOM began work, Baghdad admitted to a stockpile of over 1,000 tons of liquid nerve gas, and 11,000 chemical warheads. Anticipating UNSCOM’s mission would be over in a matter of months, Iraq stood aside as the weapons inspectors uncovered the existence of an advanced nuclear programme replete with several kilograms of highly enriched uranium. One year into its work, UNSCOM declared it had destroyed all Iraq’s medium- and long-range missiles (most of them supplied by Europe), and plentiful stocks of mustard gas. The problem was that the more UNSCOM’s scientists exposed, the more questions their revelations begged: indications of a biological weapons programme, for instance, posed the possibility that Iraqi medical laboratories were doubling as plants to nurture germ warfare. And as the investigations became protracted, Iraq used armed protestors to block UNSCOM’s work: on occasion Iraqi soldiers fired over their heads. Sometimes the shots were merely intended as delaying tactics to give Iraqi officials enough time to scurry documents away. Other times, they forced the UN’s biologists and chemists to scarper altogether.
Several times it seemed that UNSCOM inspectors were on the verge of declaring their mission accomplished. After four years, UNSCOM informed the UN Security Council that Iraq’s nuclear and chemical arsenal had been destroyed, but that the elimination of its biological weapons programme remained incomplete. Lured by the prospect of a speedy lifting of sanctions, Iraq confessed to concealing production of nearly half a tonne of anthrax and 1.7 tons of VX nerve gas, a poison ten times more potent than the sarin it had unleashed against Iranian troops. Baghdad claimed all its stockpiles of biological weapons had been destroyed in the Gulf War; UNSCOM demanded proof. The UN agency’s doubts proved well-founded when in August 1995 Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law defected to Jordan armed with crate-loads of military documents, which he promptly delivered to his UNSCOM and CIA interrogators. Hussein Kamil Hassan had variously served as Iraqi minister of oil, defence, arms procurement, and commander of the presidential guard, but most importantly, he was widely believed to be the architect of Iraq’s biological weapons programme. He further testified that since his Gulf War defeat, Saddam Hussein had assigned his second son, Qusay, to conceal his weapons of mass destruction.
Hussein Kamil’s defection was motivated less by a belated pang of conscience, than by a family feud. His standing as Saddam Hussein’s most decorated relative had spurred the Iraqi leader’s jealous eldest son, Uday, to fits of pique – following the Mamluke custom of eliminating family rivals he had shot his uncle, the minister of the interior, earlier that summer. Faced with the implosion of the presidential family (Hussein Kamil had also absconded with Saddam Hussein’s two daughters), the Iraqi leader admitted that at the time of the Gulf War Iraq had twenty-five warheads primed with biological weapons with a range of 360 miles, and had embarked on a fast-track programme to manufacture a nuclear bomb within a year.
Despite the setbacks, five years after the Gulf War Saddam Hussein’s grip on Iraq seemed firmer than ever. Immediately after the Gulf War, he had thwarted simultaneous popular uprisings by Shiites in southern Iraq and Kurds in the north after President Bush called on Iraqis ‘to take matters into their own hands’. Shiites, who comprised a majority of Iraq’s population, rose up with all the pent-up fury of decades of Sunni subjugation and seized control of the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, butchering their Baath party officials in the process. As testimony to their Iranian sympathies, if not outright support, the rebels tore down murals of Saddam Hussein and pinned posters of the late Ayatollah Khomeini in their place. Meanwhile, Kurdish militiamen, or peshmergas (literally, ‘those who face death’) swept in an arc from the north towards Baghdad. Together the rebels controlled fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Sandwiched in central Iraq between Kurds and Shiites, Saddam Hussein sent his Republican Guard in helicopter gun-ships to re-establish central control.
That Saddam Hussein was defending his own rule was not surprising. That the Kurds and Shiites were left to his mercy after President Bush had called on them to revolt was. From the first the United States had declared that ‘regime change’ would be its price for the lifting of sanctions. But it soon became apparent that Washington was less than ready to see the immediate fall of its foe. State Department strategists in Washington warned that without the ‘iron fist’ of Saddam Hussein, Iraq would fragment into three: a Kurdish north, a Sunni middle and a Shiite south. Added to such concerns was pressure from Washington’s two regional allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, chary of the United States’ apparent penchant for dismemberment of Soviet satellites in the aftermath of the Cold War (in the USSR, Yugoslavia and Ethiopia). Ankara, already engaged in a guerrilla war with its own Kurdish rebels, the PKK, feared the emergence of the nucleus of a Greater Kurdistan on its southern flank. The prospect of democracy – which would hand power to a pro-Iranian Shiite majority – was even less appealing to the staunchly Sunni Saudis, whose own marginalized Shiite population bordered Iraq. Asked what he thought of the uprising, the US National Security Advisor, Brent Snowcroft, was unambiguous. ‘We would have preferred a coup,’ he sai
d.
Accordingly, the US watched while Saddam Hussein counter-attacked. Some US troops used force to deny the rebels access to the arms depots in southern Iraq. Some 100,000 Iraqis died in Saddam Hussein’s onslaught. Seventy thousand Shiites took refuge in Iran and 1.5 million Kurds – a full half of the Kurdish population – fled into the snow-capped mountains on the borders.
In a bid to stem the outcry over the humanitarian tragedy, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 688, sanctioning a 16,000-man US-led force to carve out a Kurdish – though pointedly not a Shiite – safe haven. The US further demanded Iraq withdraw its troops from its Turkish border, and Saddam Hussein obliged by vacating three provinces, including the northern cities of Irbil and Suleimaniya. Without seeking UN authorization, the United States, Britain and France also declared a ban on Iraqi aircraft flying north of the 36th parallel. Shielded by the air umbrella, Kurds returned to re-establish a Kurdish autonomous zone and rebuild towns razed by Saddam Hussein’s military onslaughts over the previous two decades. Shiites had to endure a further year – and another cull of their clergy (reduced from 10,000 in 1979 to a few hundred by 1993) – before the Western powers declared a second air-exclusion zone in the south. Iraqis were not alone in suspecting that while the justification for the no-fly zones was humanitarian, their purpose was distinctly strategic: to box Saddam Hussein into the provinces surrounding Baghdad. As its name suggests, Operation Southern Watch offered Saudi Arabia and Kuwait a protective shield, while to the north Operation Provide Comfort gave the CIA and Iraqi opposition groups a northern safe haven from which to scheme against Saddam Hussein.
Washington chose Ahmed Chalabi, a rotund London-based Shiite businessman convicted in Jordan of embezzlement, to lead the Iraqi opposition. In June 1992 Chalabi, under CIA tutelage, brought twenty opposition groups to Vienna to launch the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, which, modelled on the PLO, declared itself the sole legitimate representative of the Iraqi opposition. It was a motley, quarrelsome crew of intellectuals, Kurds and Shiites, but its most powerful component was the Iraqi National Accord, a movement embracing up to a thousand dissident army officers, including some Sunnis from Saddam Hussein’s home province of Tikrit. The INC’s only glue was a common desire to topple Saddam Hussein, but in Vienna its constituent parts agreed on a charter to form a liberation army to fight for democracy. The INC made a base in Salahuddin, a safe-haven town, and began broadcasting anti-Saddam Hussein propaganda across Iraq. At its height, its Salahuddin headquarters had a staff of some 5,000 Iraqis and was a magnet for deserters from the Iraqi army. The United States, in the words of Saddam Hussein’s highly critical biographer, Said Aburish, seemed intent ‘on turning the clock back and acting as arbiters of the fate of Iraq in the manner of the victorious powers in 1917’.
A History of the Middle East Page 43