PROBABLY THOSE THINGS indeed were in the future; we have good reason to believe so. But even as the Cold War ended another global problem was arising: a many-sided crisis in the Middle East. As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first began, this crisis flared, smoldered, flared again. At this writing, we’re so enveloped in its smoke that we cannot see it whole. But we shall try to sketch its outlines.
The Middle East requires defining, yet defies it, because it isn’t this or that. It isn’t one coherent region. It stretches from the eastern Mediterranean to the western side of India, and includes about two dozen nations in Africa and Asia. Among the more important (going from west to east) are Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. What do these six have in common? Three are Arabic-speaking; the others aren’t. Three are rich in oil; the others aren’t. Two are democracies; the others aren’t. Five are Muslim; one is not.
As their crisis started to be global, nearly all the Middle Eastern states were ruled by tyrants, whether they were kings in robes or “presidents” in well-cut suits. Tyranny is the one thing that they had in common. Despotism was perhaps the major cause of turmoil. Like many tyrannies, these governments were fragile. To change regimes important people used assassinations, not elections.
Israel, in Palestine, was also a source of trouble, but for other reasons. Unlike the Muslim countries, Israel was Jewish and hectically democratic, not despotic. As Arabs saw it, Israel’s Jews were intruders in an Arab, Muslim land. Yes, the Hebrews-Israelites-Jews had once ruled Palestine, but that was two thousand years ago. Arabs had lived there ever since; the land was theirs.
This was the background to this Israeli-Arab problem: After World War I, Jews from elsewhere had settled in Palestine, joining a minority of Jews already there. They viewed the region as their homeland. More Jews came there after World War II and their sufferings in the Holocaust. The Jews declared themselves a nation, Israel. They fought a war against the Palestinian Arabs, other Arab nations, and Britain, which had governed Palestine since World War I. Despite the odds, Israel won the war. Later it had “occupied” the West Bank region between Israel and the Jordan River. Meanwhile, many of Israel’s defeated Arabs fled to dismal camps for refugees. West Bank Arabs stayed where they had always lived, discontented subjects in a place they knew as home.
As the twentieth century ended, the Palestinians and other Arabs hated Israel not only because it had taken Arab land, but for another reason as well. For Muslims, as for Jews and many Christians, Palestine was sacred soil. For Jews to rule it was an abomination. And so, because of both real estate and religion, Israel and its Arab neighbors repeatedly waged brief wars against one another.
In the meantime Middle Eastern oil production had been rising, and oil became another factor in the crisis. After World War II, geologists made major finds, especially in the Muslim, mostly Arab, countries around the Persian Gulf. Among these nations were Iraq, Iran (which is Muslim but not Arab), and above all Saudi Arabia, which turned out to have stupendous oil reserves. At just this time the booming industrial countries elsewhere in the world began to use more oil than ever for their cars and air conditioners. The oil-producing Arabs found that the rising demand of others nicely matched their rising supply. So they raised the price.
Sales of oil transformed the lives of ordinary desert sheikhs who once had slept in tents and gauged their wealth by counting wives and camels. Now they dwelled in marble halls and flew in private planes. Even more luxurious were the lives of presidents and kings. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein reportedly had 60 cars, 50 palaces, and somewhere between $1 billion and $40 billion. The oil-rich despots spent some of their money on things their countries needed — highways, clinics, schools — but not enough.
Certainly the rising tide of oil didn’t raise all boats. In several countries — most of them, perhaps — the gulf between the hungry many and the oil-rich few became enormous. The former were like shabby sailboats floundering in the wake of new gigantic tankers. The ignorance and low horizons of the poor ripened them for harvesting by demagogues.
And then came Islamism. Not Islam but Islamism — the suffix makes a difference. Islamism was the name that non-Islamists gave to the rising trend among some Muslim clerics and their crowds of devotees to battle all things new. No, Islamists said, to democratic government, since only clerics (that is, Islamists), enforcing the Qur’an, may rule. No to schools that teach their students any subject but Islam. No to Muslims who refuse to do as Islamists demand. No, of course, to Israel. No to Moscow and to Wall Street, since both are enemies of holy truth.
Another actor figured in the Middle East. The powerful United States, though far away, tried to influence events. The major reason for its interest was its ever-growing appetite for oil. Anxious to preserve its access to the Arab (Muslim) countries’ oil, the United States grew concerned about their independence. While the Cold War lasted, nearly fifty years, America sometimes scented Russian Middle Eastern plots where none existed. In later years it worried over dangers that some Arabs raised for other Arabs.
America’s demand for oil conflicted with another need. Despite its oil suppliers’ hatred for it, America wanted Israel to survive. U.S. politicians liked the country’s democracy and valued it as an ally. What mattered more, they craved the votes of U.S. Jews, often Israel supporters, who could swing elections in important U.S. states. For all these reasons America gave Israel weapons for defense and money for survival.
So much for the different factors in the crisis in the Middle East. Now: the way they intertwined.
In 1987 Palestinians in a refugee camp threw rocks at Israeli soldiers. A riot started — not the first. An Israeli soldier shot and killed an Arab boy. In no time Palestinians everywhere were burning tires, hurling rocks, and shouting insults at Israelis. Wisely, they did not use guns against a foe who could have crushed them with tanks.
The Arabs named this mutiny the Intifada. The word means “shake” or “shudder” but implies a shaking off or getting rid. Israelis answered them with tear gas and with plastic bullets — sometimes real ones — and they broke some arms and legs and locked up many Arabs. But these measures had no effect. To Palestinians, their prison terms and broken bones were only proof of their devotion to their cause. The Israelis who were fighting them were often torn by half-admitted guilt: should you shoot a man who wants the land that once was his?
Step by step, the Intifada grew more bitter. Palestinian terrorists (or “martyrs”) set off bombs in Israel’s markets and cafés. They killed Israelis by the dozens — and themselves. Israel struck back, razing homes and shooting those who gave the bombers bombs.
But the center of the Middle Eastern crisis wasn’t Israel. It was farther east, in the oil-rich countries on the Persian Gulf. Before the Intifada started, two major oil-producing countries went to war. This is how it happened: In Iran in 1979 an unlikely mix of Islamists and reformers drove the shah (or king), who was both a tyrant and reformer, from his Peacock Throne. Fierce, unbending Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamist, replaced the repressive shah. He and other clerics made Iran another kind of tyranny, run by men convinced they knew the will of God. The ayatollah urged the people of Iraq, next door, to overthrow Saddam Hussein and found an Islamist regime like his. For that and other reasons violent Saddam attacked Iran in 1980, certain of an easy win. Instead the fighting lasted for eight years. Khomeini and Saddam poured missiles on each other’s cities, and Khomeini drove hordes of teenaged boys into suicide attacks. Both of them used poison gas. Saddam employed it even to kill his own Iraqi Kurds, who, he claimed, had helped Iran. The war changed nothing and consumed a million lives.
In 1991 Saddam, scarcely pausing after fighting with Iran, attacked a weaker neighbor. His target this time was Kuwait, a tiny Arab country floating on a sea of oil. He wanted its enormous wealth to pay his many debts. For his army, then fourth largest in the world, the conquest of Kuwait was just an easy stroll.
But this time a Mid
dle Eastern war became a global one. Saddam had reckoned that America would not take part, but here he blundered. The U.S. president, George H. W. Bush, decided to protect the U.S. oil supply and curb the price of gasoline by fighting for Kuwait. U.S. leaders worried that Saddam might march right through Kuwait and conquer Saudi Arabia, an even greater prize. Beside protecting oil supplies, the United States had another motive. It wanted to destroy the weapons that it thought the virulent Saddam possessed: poison gas, deadly microbes of disease, and maybe nuclear weapons. With its allies, Britain, France, and others, the United States began a “Gulf War” against Iraq.
Although Saddam predicted he would win this “mother of battles,” he didn’t have a chance. In recent decades America had invented arms so “smart” that U.S. cannoneers (if all went well) could send a missile down a chimney miles away. The United States and its allies first destroyed Saddam’s communications and his airplanes. Then, in a hundred hours, it smashed his tanks and routed the Iraqi troops. For reasons that are still unclear, the victors did not try to capture Baghdad and arrest Saddam.
Although the mother of battles had become the mother of defeats, Saddam advised his people to “Applaud your victories…. You have faced the whole world, great Iraqis. You have won. You are victorious. How sweet is victory!”
In the meantime, the movement we are calling Islamism had become in some respects a worldwide threat. More and more, Islamists saw the outside world, and most of all America, as “Satan.”
Except in Iran (and later in Afghanistan), Islamist extremists had no armies, hence no chance of winning wars. They resolved instead to steer their enemies by planting fear. It’s possible that acts of terrorism elsewhere in the world at just this time revealed to Islamists how to kill en masse and win attention. In America, for example, home-grown terrorists blew up a U.S. office building, killing many. In Japan a religious cult called “Supreme Truth” released a poison gas in a subway. In the same way Islamists now began to use dramatic acts of terror, especially against America. They downed an American airliner over Scotland, bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, blasted a U.S. warship, and exploded a bomb beneath an office building in New York. They also slaughtered tourists in an Indonesian nightclub.
A guiding spirit of these terrorists was Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arab in his middle forties. Bin Laden’s father had made his fortune as a builder who enlarged the mosques of Mecca and Medina. Osama may have learned his Islamism first from Saudi teachers of Islamic studies. Later he was shocked and angered during the Gulf War when “infidel” U.S. troops were stationed on his country’s sacred soil. He decided that the Saudi kings, who claimed to be protectors of the Muslim holy places, were really traitors to Islam. Later he would preach against American support of Israel. He left his country, built a league of terrorists, and put them to work. They performed several of the bloody deeds described above.
On September 11, 2001, Bin Laden’s network carried out their most destructive attack. The murderers were mostly Saudi Arabs and Egyptians whom Bin Laden’s group had planted in the United States. On September 11 they hijacked four U.S. airplanes on domestic flights and killed the pilots. Then they steered the airplanes into well-known buildings. One plane hit the west side of the Pentagon in Washington, the command center of the American armed forces. The captors of another airplane probably had planned to strike the White House, but the passengers resisted and the airplane crashed, killing all aboard.
Two other airplanes struck the World Trade Center in New York, two giant office buildings. The heat from burning airplane fuel disintegrated girders near the tops of both the towers. Nearly three thousand office workers, and police and firemen who had tried to save them, were trapped above the fires or failed to flee in time. They telephoned their families to say good-bye. Some jumped to certain death. As countless millions watched on television, first one and then the other building crumpled and collapsed.
America’s response to “9-11” was to carry out a “War on Terror.” (The name was misleading, suggesting that the enemy was a tactic, rather than those who used it.) The U.S. president, George W. Bush (a son of George H. W. Bush), waged a lightning war in bleak Afghanistan, whose Islamist leaders had given refuge to Bin Laden. Once again, Britain allied itself with the United States. Relying heavily on Afghan rebels, the allies crushed Bin Laden’s Afghan friends, but the planner of so many murders vanished in the rugged mountains.
Then Saddam Hussein’s familiar face appeared again on TV screens around the world. The United States apparently had grown to like its role of global sheriff, and it declared Saddam a black hat. It gave at least four reasons: he owned and might use weapons of mass destruction, he aided international terrorists, he was a barrier to peace in Israel, and he oppressed his own Iraqi people. America and Britain, aided by some friends, went to war against Iraq again despite UN opposition. They swiftly conquered it and then began the thorny task of helping it rebuild.
By now the Middle Eastern crisis had replaced the Cold War as a focus of concern. What A-bombs, ideologies, and superpower ambitions had been to the Cold War, despotism, zeal, and oil were to the Middle East. Like charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter they formed a deadly mix, and could explode. In the early 2000s no one could predict what damage they might do.
IT’S OFTEN SAID that humans never were as violent as in our age. It’s true that the 1900s had their share of evil: two world wars, tanks, machine guns, poison gas, labor camps, slaughter by starvation, Hitler, firestorms, A-bombs, H-bombs, the Holocaust, apartheid, the Cultural Revolution, Korea, Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq war, exploding airplanes, blown-up buildings. Other evils happened that this book hadn’t space to mention: nerve gas, napalm, anthrax, massacres, killing fields, serial killings, and murderers whose very names will cause a shudder: “the Jackal,” Idi Amin, Pol Pot.
But is it true that humans had never been so violent? We don’t know that, and we never will. (History’s sources aren’t complete.) We should not forget the events of ages past that we do not know about: Assyrians castrating and impaling captives, Mongols slaughtering whole populations, at least a quarter of the Chinese dying in civil wars in the 1600s, the horrors of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, and the enslavement of Africans.
This is suggestive: when Europeans first encountered other peoples, they often found them making war. When Marco Polo’s father and uncle detoured into China they found an emperor who was always making war. Cortès, in Mexico, found the Aztecs fighting with their conquered peoples. Pizarro likewise, in Peru, found the Incas waging civil war. Magellan, when he reached the Philippines, found the islanders at war. Unrecorded wars on every continent may once have been quite common. We just don’t know.
Even as we humans slaughtered one another in the past one hundred years, we also made some gains in ending war and other violence. The League of Nations, and later the United Nations, dealt with crises and they sometimes helped to end them. The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union may have ended Europe’s custom of a major war or two in every hundred years. Trials of war initiators (as in Germany after World War II) gave their victims a sense of justice done, revenge not needed. If democracies are less belligerent than tyrannies, it was encouraging that in the year 2000, 140 of the world’s nearly 200 nations — seven out of ten — held multiparty elections.
Atomic bombs have not been used since 1945. We hold our breath.
Chapter 24
We do the unbelievable.
IN 1939, the year when World War II began in Europe, America’s biggest city held the New York World’s Fair. On a marshy piece of land (once called Corona Dumps) rose a stunning group of buildings, several in the shapes of prisms, spheres, and cones. Here the visitors, who came from all around the world, could see “The World of Tomorrow.” What the planners of that fair foresaw, what they thought the future held, gives us some perspective on the triumphs of technology since then.
The planners made some big mistake
s. They thought that medicine would conquer cancer soon. Machines would run on liquid air. Everyone would live in cheap and almost weightless houses that you threw away when you no longer needed them. But the planners also got a few things right. They predicted long, sleek, air-conditioned autos speeding over cities on freeways fourteen lanes across. They prophesied that television, only recently invented, would have a place in every home. (Visitors to the opening of the fair watched on tiny black-and-white TVs as U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech.) The planners foresaw rockets, but they thought that they’d be fired from cannons and would carry travelers around the earth.
But here’s the point. The planners of the fair did not foresee — in fairness who can blame them? — amazing things that World War II would bring about within the next few years. These included radar, penicillin, helicopters, and atomic bombs. Much less did they imagine later wonders: nuclear reactors, transistors, fiber optics, organ transplants…on and on.
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