A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The defection of Hussein Kamil to Jordan could have landed American officials with just the military alternative to Saddam Hussein they seemed to be looking for. But Kurds and Shiites were loath to pay homage to a man remembered for his brutal suppression of the 1991 rebellion. Distrusted by his foreign patrons and fellow-Iraqis alike, a dejected Hussein Kamil incredibly fell for his father-in-law’s offer of amnesty, and in February 1996 donned military fatigues and drove back to Baghdad. Three days later he was dead, in what Iraqi TV described as a family vendetta. ‘We have cut off the treacherous branch from our noble family tree,’ said his uncle General al-Majid beside footage of his bloodstained corpse.

  As Saddam Hussein’s family recovered its unity, loyalty in the opposition ranks tottered. Their momentum was sapped by the failure of a series of clumsy coup attempts and a wave of inner-city bombings that backfired. An INC attempt in 1995 to co-ordinate an offensive while British and American jets patrolled the no-fly zones ended in failure with hundreds of deaths, and one of many army purges. In an attempt to re-energize the rebel force, the US Congress in 1998 passed the Iraq Liberation Act, injecting almost $100 million dollars into military training. But instead of fighting Saddam Hussein, the opposition increasingly fought itself. Kurdish elections in the safe haven exacerbated the rivalry between the landowning Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) led by Masud Barzani and its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a self-styled left-wing peasant-based movement under Jalal Talabani. Together, the two leaders could have mustered 40,000 troops, and constituted the main armed threat to Saddam Hussein. But rival external backers increasingly wedged them apart. Iran armed the PUK while Iraq and Turkey supplied the KDP both with weapons and smuggling dues from the supply of cheap Iraqi fuel trucked by road to Turkey. Pitched battles erupted in the late spring of 1994, igniting a Kurdish internecine war that was to rage for the next four years. Only in September 1998 did the US finally broker a truce.

  But by then, Saddam Hussein had reaped the benefits of his bickering foes. When the PUK routed the KDP, Barzani solicited the help of an eager Baghdad. In mid-1996 400 Iraqi tanks forged into the safe haven and within thirty-six hours had replaced the PUK flag over the Kurdish parliament in Irbil with the two emblems of the KDP and the tricolour of Iraq. Horrified at the advance, the CIA and INC fled their nearby base at Salahuddin and evacuated their 5,000 agents, leaving American plans for a bridgehead from which to topple Saddam Hussein in tatters. In what smacked of a parting shot, President Bill Clinton lobbed cruise missiles on southern Iraq – a revealing indication of where Washington’s concerns really lay – and raised the southern no-fly zone to the perimeter of Baghdad. Iraqi tanks withdrew, but Saddam Hussein had proved that despite his Gulf War defeat, he remained a formidable military power commanding 380,000 men. International tears for the Kurds proved largely of the crocodile kind. As long as the Kurds had proved useful, the US had trumpeted their rights in Iraq. But it had long dismissed the Kurdish movement in Turkey, the PKK, as terrorists even though it was resisting a Turkish policy of cultural annihilation far more pervasive than that of Baghdad. In pursuit of the PKK, Ankara’s troops and F-16 bombers invaded the safe haven in May 1997 with barely a whisper of criticism from Washington. US military aid continued to flow to Ankara, as did its supply of arms used in the killing of an estimated 23,000 people in Turkey’s war with the Kurds.

  With the Iraqi opposition an apparent spent force, Washington relied on sanctions and the United Nations to maintain the pressure. The UN Sanctions Committee in New York, which controlled all Iraq’s imports and exports, banned the entry of textbooks, journals, newspapers and business mail in what the head of the UN aid agency in Baghdad, Hans von Sponeck, called a policy of ‘intellectual genocide’. Even pencils were prohibited from what had been one of the most literate societies in the Arab world on the grounds that the graphite might be used for nuclear reactors. The food ban was similarly punitive. A widely circulated UN survey of Greater Baghdad claimed that over a quarter of children under five were ‘severely malnourished’ – a figure higher than in most African states. By 1997 some 7,000 children were dying each month of hunger and disease. The death toll was on a par with some of the worst post-war atrocities: according to UN estimates, sanctions cost the lives of over one million Iraqis.

  If Western powers had intended that sanctions would feed popular unrest, they were disappointed. In fact, sanctions merely nourished Saddam Hussein’s grip on Iraq. Far from breaking its backbone, the pauperization of Iraq aroused a revival of national consciousness and a collective determination to survive. Almost all the 134 bridges destroyed in the Gulf War bombing were restored within three years. Baghdad’s soaring television tower, flattened in a cruise missile attack, resurfaced twelve metres taller than the original, crowned with a restaurant called Babil. Sanctions did spur a million Iraqis into exile, and in a remarkable reversal of urbanization, hundreds of thousands abandoned the cities for the land in a drive for food self-sufficiency. But the byproduct was that the middle class, which formed the rump of civil discontent, was more dispersed, impoverished and powerless than ever. Furthermore, the rationing of staples gave the Iraqi leader the ultimate tool of power: control over his people’s bellies.

  The result was that despite the Gulf War rout, Saddam Hussein’s personality cult grew ever more Orwellian. Even the inner sancta of Shiite shrines bore his image, carefully refashioned from secular Baathist to religious martyr. And while a shortage of paper forced civil servants to ravage the files to reuse the blank side of old documents, the state printing press went into overdrive, churning out a nineteen-volume biography of Saddam Hussein. At the same time, in 1996 he went some way to alleviating his people’s hunger by finally acceding to a UN proposal to allow Iraq to sell its oil through a UN-controlled bank account in Paris. Under the ‘oil-for-food’ deal, the UN became the effective proprietor of Iraqi oil and the spender of its revenues. Half the proceeds went on the Kurds, reparations for Kuwait and UN expenses, and the remainder on food and medicine for Iraq. After nearly five years of refusing to sign a deal that ‘violated its sovereignty’, Iraq buckled and accepted the terms. It took a further year for their food to arrive, but Baghdadis danced in the streets.

  For Iraq, weapons inspections amounted to a further intrusion of sovereignty. Just when UNSCOM’s chief, the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, had agreed a formula to complete its mission, the UN Security Council replaced him with a bullish and confrontational Australian, Richard Butler. He began his tenure by demanding no-notice inspections of the headquarters of Iraqi Special Security and the presidential palaces. Initially Iraq responded by submitting an 800-page document on its biological weapons programme, and then when its gesture of goodwill was spurned, declared 100 sites, including eight presidential palaces, off bounds to UNSCOM. After the UN Security Council demanded unconditional access to any and all Iraqi sites, Baghdad upped the ante, refusing to countenance further inspections until the UN set a deadline for lifting sanctions. In protest, in November 1997 Butler ostentatiously withdrew his staff from Iraq.

  Shuttle diplomacy by the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, postponed the threat of American bombing, and UNSCOM returned to Iraq. But the UN agency had lost all pretence of neutrality and increasingly resembled an instrument of Western intelligence gathering. Under UN resolutions, American unmanned U-2 spy planes flew over Iraq on behalf of UNSCOM. Inspection teams, packed with American personnel, pried inside the country’s most sensitive military positions. UNSCOM’s cameras and sensors monitored 300 sites. Americans manned key positions in the UNSCOM hierarchy, most notably the deputy chairman Charles Duelfer and the chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, an aggressive former US intelligence officer who on his own admission repeatedly liaised with Israeli intelligence. Israel, as well as the US, was party to UNSCOM’s U-2 imagery, and provided surveillance equipment to tap communications from the office of the presidential secretary. Armed with the findings, President Clinton was able to lob cru
ise missiles with increasing accuracy, and avoid the embarrassment of the sort of ‘collateral damage’ that in earlier raids had blown up Baghdad’s al-Rashid Hotel, the favoured lodging of visiting journalists. In an interview five years after stepping down as UNSCOM chief, Rolf Ekeus admitted that attempts were made to provoke crises that could ‘form the basis for direct military action’.

  It was little surprise then that Annan’s intervention had merely delayed not resolved Iraq’s standoff with UNSCOM. Amid ever more rancorous divisions among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the Anglo-Saxon couple, the United States and Britain, pitted against the trio of China, Russia and France), Iraq again ordered UNSCOM out. In December 1998, without waiting for UN approval, President Clinton responded with a seventy-hour bombardment of Iraq named ‘Operation Desert Fox’ after a Nazi general. In the eyes of the American media, the timing had less to do with Iraq than with Clinton’s cynical attempt to deflect attention from the impeachment debate in the US Congress over his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The raid failed either to prevent the debate or to force Iraq to allow back the inspectors. Bombings intensified twenty-fold over the following year, with the US and Britain flying two-thirds as many missions as the far more public NATO raids on Milosevic’s former Yugoslavia. In December 1999, the UN Security Council voted to replace UNSCOM with a new body, UNMOVIC, the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. But despite a mandate sanctioning the use of force to implement its terms, come mid-2002 UNMOVIC had still not embarked for Iraq.

  What US policy did achieve was a marked rise in Arab antipathy towards Washington. Asked on American television whether the starvation of 500,000 people was justified, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared it was ‘worth it’. The response evoked an outpouring of anger at the longest siege in modern history. To assuage popular sentiment, Saudi Arabia’s new de facto leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, reopened its Iraqi border after a decade of closure and Egypt reappointed an ambassador to Baghdad. ‘Iraq will soon be integrated into the Arab fold,’ said President Hosni Mubarak. ‘It is only a matter of time.’ Following Russia’s lead, one former Arab foe after another flouted the air embargo, dispatching planes to the newly opened Saddam International Airport, without notifying the UN Sanctions Committee. Syrian planes flew from Damascus to Baghdad for the first time in twenty years. So too did an Iranian airliner, bringing the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, the highest-ranking Iranian official to visit Baghdad since the Iranian Revolution.

  Iraq’s escape from isolation was not quite complete. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait still provided US planes a base from which to bomb Iraq. But by the millennium’s end, Iraq’s improved regional relations had pushed the level of smuggling through Turkey, Syria and Iran up to 800,000 barrels of oil per day in revenue beyond UN control. With France and Russia disguising their own economic interests in moral indignation, the UN Security Council more than doubled Iraq’s oil sales allowance back to its pre-Gulf War OPEQ quota of 3 million barrels a day. To boost production, it also allowed Iraq to spend $500 million repairing its wells.

  Even the United States appeared resigned to Iraq’s oil sector revival. Rapid growth in the global economy was pushing demand for oil and prices higher, and Washington was hunting for new sources of oil. Located atop known reserves of 100 billion barrels of oil, the second largest reserves in the world, Iraq made a tempting object of investment. Several of the companies engaged in multi-million contracts to rebuild the oilfields were American subsidiaries. And by 2001, Iraq had emerged as the fastest-growing supplier of American oil. The Clinton administration, which in its first term had derided the Iraqi regime as irredeemable, had by its close become a discreet business partner.

  In drawing up a balance sheet ten years on from the Gulf War, Baghdad had much to celebrate. By the end of 1999, it had secured Security Council approval for a surge in oil exports, healed some of its shattered ties with its neighbours, including Kuwait, defeated two rebellions, and rid the country of its UNSCOM surveillance. Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme had been seriously depleted, but many of the scientists responsible remained in their labs, and his conventional forces, on paper at least, remained the largest in the Arab world. Above all, sanctions had failed to unseat the regime. Saddam Hussein had challenged the world’s only superpower and survived. By 2001, he even found the time to write a novel, Zabibah and the King, in which the king, representing Saddam, falls in love with a poor, married woman, symbolizing Iraq, and defends her from the other kings who become jealous and plot against him.

  But Saddam’s defence of his woman had come at a terrible price. Iraq was crisscrossed with air-exclusion zones extending as far as Baghdad, and subject to regular bombing and sanctions. Nor had Saddam Hussein reckoned on the restoration of America’s Gulf War cabinet. In December 2000, the United States returned its Gulf War leaders to power, with the election of George W. Bush, the son of Saddam Hussein’s nemesis. Dick Cheney, the Gulf War defence secretary, became vice-president, and the 1991 chief-of-staff, General Colin Powell, secretary of state. Denouncing the Clinton years as the age of appeasement, the Bush administration returned to the unfinished business of the 1991 Gulf War and vowed to unseat the Iraqi leader by force.

  Umpiring the Arab–Israeli Conflict

  America’s enforcement of UN resolutions on Iraq set the standard by which the Arab world judged international treatment of the region’s other leading manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction and occupier of Arab land, Israel. Washington’s round-the-clock air cover for Iraq’s rebellious Kurds was contrasted with its reluctance to provide international peacekeepers to protect the Palestinians. And its readiness to use force to implement UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq was measured against its indulgence of Israel’s continued occupation. Saddam Hussein himself had first made the link between Iraq and Israel a few days after his invasion of Kuwait when he offered to withdraw if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories, and Syria pulled out of Lebanon. The Bush administration rejected the proposal, but the secretary of state, James Baker, did recognize that come the end of the Gulf War, Arab allied support for ending one occupation might require US support for ending another.

  In US eyes, the Gulf War created new possibilities. For the first time, Israel and Syria were publicly on the same side in a conflict; peace negotiations could take place unencumbered by Soviet bloc interests and power-games of superpower rivalry; and the Gulf War had shown that Arab states, not Israel, could defend US vital interests. Six months after the Gulf War, Baker announced the staging of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid, using language markedly less sentimental than any of his predecessors. Negotiations, he said, would be based ‘on total withdrawal from territory in exchange for peaceful relations’. Anxious to build on their nascent alliance with the world’s sole superpower, Syria and Lebanon readily accepted. So, too, did the Jordanians and the Palestinians, both eager for an opportunity to return to favour with Washington after their perceived flirtation with Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, even though the conference terms stipulated the exclusion of the PLO. Only Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s truculent prime minister, differed. In an attempt to scupper the talks, he drafted into his cabinet Rehavam Zeevi, a hardline Israeli general who advocated the forced deportation of Palestinians, and unveiled a programme to double the Jewish settler population in the West Bank and Gaza. President Bush responded by threatening to withhold loan guarantees vital for Israel to absorb a flood of Soviet Jews. Shamir buckled. On 30 October 1991, fourteen years after President Carter had first floated the idea of a Middle Eastern Versailles, Israel sat down to negotiate an end to its occupation of Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian land.

  The opening was hardly auspicious. The Syrian foreign minister, Farouq al-Shara, reminded delegates Israel was led by a terrorist once wanted in Britain for killing Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator to Palestine in the 1940s. ‘This man,’ sa
id Shara, holding aloft a poster of the young Shamir, ‘killed peace mediators.’ Shamir directed the same charges at the Palestinian delegation, unlikely suspects given that its team was comprised of medics and academics. Shamir made it clear he was negotiating for negotiation’s sake to buy time for more settlement building. ‘I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years,’ he later admitted with remarkable presience, ‘and meanwhile we would have half a million people in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].’

  If Shamir believed that time was on Israel’s side through its continued West Bank colonization, his left-wing opponents were convinced the demographic clock was ticking against them. The collapse of the Soviet Union had resulted in a mass influx of Russian Jews, but even so the Jewish state stood to lose its Jewish majority if it held on to what Shamir called ‘Greater Israel’. According to the widely circulated figures of an Israeli academic, Arnon Soffer, by 2002 Jews were already a minority in mandatary Palestine. By 2020, he estimated the combined Arab and Israeli population would have increased from 10 million to 15.5 million, of which Jews would comprise 40 per cent.