Counter-productive schemes such as these were hardly positive examples of the benefits of closer co-operation with the west and with the US in particular. They also provided fertile ground for critics to exploit. None was more adept at doing so than a Shīa scholar, Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini, who caught the mood of a population that was increasingly disgruntled by low wages, the lack of economic progress and the conspicuous absence of social justice. ‘Your Excellency, Mr Shah, let me give you a piece of advice,’ the ayatollah declared in one particularly fiery speech in the early 1960s. ‘You miserable wretch, isn’t it time for you to think and reflect a little, and ponder where all this is leading you?. . . Mr Shah, do you want me to say that you don’t believe in Islam, and kick you out of Iran?’55 It was enough to get him arrested, upon which riots broke out in the centre of Teheran, with crowds chanting ‘Khomeini or death’. As CIA intelligence reports noted, even government employees joined demonstrations against the regime.56
Rather than heeding the warnings, the Shah responded by antagonising his critics still further. The clergy of Iran, he announced with an astonishing lack of tact on a visit to the holy city of Qom, were ‘ignorant and withered men whose minds have not been stirred in centuries’.57 Instead of offering concessions or instigating whole-hearted reforms, energy was focused on tightening controls. Khomeini was forced into exile, settling for more than a decade in Najaf in neighbouring Iraq, where his passionate denunciations of the Shah and his regime were not just welcomed but positively encouraged.58
Substantial resources were also spent building up the Savak, the Iranian secret police force, which quickly developed a fearsome reputation. Imprisonment without trial, torture and execution were used on a large scale to deal with critics of the Shah and those close to him; in a few rare cases, fortunate opponents whose high profile kept them visible – like Khomeini – were placed under house arrest and exiled to remove them from the scene.59 The use of such tactics in the Soviet Union was the subject of vocal criticism by the US, denounced as the antithesis of democracy and a tool of totalitarianism; in Iran, it was passed over in silence.
To maintain the support of the Shah and cement his position, funds continued to pour into Iran from Washington, building a 1,500-mile highway system linking the Persian Gulf with the Caspian, helping the construction of a major deep-water port at Bandar Abbas, allowing the power grid to be expanded and upgraded, and even providing capital to set up prestige projects, such as the creation of a national airline. Throughout the process, most western policymakers ignored the realities on the ground, choosing to see only what they wanted to see. To many US observers, Iran seemed to be an unmitigated triumph. The economy of ‘one of the United States’ staunchest friends in the Middle East was surging forward’, stated a report prepared for President Johnson in 1968. Iran’s GNP was rising so quickly that it was ‘one of the notable success stories’ of recent times. The same conclusion was reached even more emphatically four years later. Following the end of the Second World War, the American embassy in Teheran noted, the United States had been forced to take a gamble on Iran and shape the country after its own image. ‘That gamble has paid off handsomely – probably more so than in any other developing country which has benefited from similar US investment.’ Iran was on track, the report confidently predicted, to become ‘the most prosperous country in Asia after Japan’ – and on a par with many countries in Europe.60
Those who were more sceptical were in a distinct minority. One such was the young academic William Polk, who had been called in by the Kennedy administration to advise on foreign affairs. There would be violence and even revolution if the Shah did not reform the political process, he warned; when that unrest broke out, it would only be a matter of time before the security forces would refuse to fire on protesters. Opposition to the Shah was now uniting under ‘the powerful Islamic institution of Iran’.61
Polk was exactly right. At the time, however, it seemed more important to continue shoring up an ally against Communism than to press him to loosen his grip on power. And the Shah developed increasingly grandiose plans that made matters even worse. Vast amounts were invested in the military, with Iran’s military spending rising from $293 million in 1963 to $7.3 billion less than fifteen years later. As a result, the country’s air force and army became among the largest in the world.62 Iran funded this extraordinary escalation thanks in part to military aid and soft loans from the US (which profited in turn because much of the hardware was bought from American defence contractors). However, Iran also benefited from the continuing rise in oil revenues – and from the mechanism that had been set up by the world’s leading producers to act as a cartel, and in doing so maximise returns.
The creation of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 was designed to co-ordinate the release of oil supplies on the open market. The aim was to allow the founder members – Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela – to combine their interests and boost their incomes by controlling supply, and therefore controlling prices.63 It was the logical next step for resource-rich countries which had an eye on wresting power away from the western corporations while receiving political and financial backing from western governments.
OPEC effectively marked a deliberate attempt to curtail the influence of the west, whose interests in providing cheap and plentiful fuel for its domestic markets were distinctly different to those of the countries that were rich in deposits of oil and gas, and who were keen for the revenues they brought in to be as high as possible. Unlikely as it seems, therefore, OPEC was the spiritual protégé of an already unlikely cast of characters made up of defiant leaders like Mossadegh, the populist demagogue Nasser, the hardliner Qasim and increasingly anti-western figures in Iran typified by the Ayatollah Khomeini. All were linked by their concerted attempts to detach their states from overpowering outside attention. OPEC was not a political movement; but aligning a range of countries and enabling them to talk and act with a single voice was a key step in the process of transferring political power away from Europe and the US to local governments.
The sheer abundance of oil in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi combined with rising global demand meant that the mid-twentieth century was marked by a fundamental rebalancing of power. The extent of this began to become clear in 1967 when Nasser launched a surprise attack on Israel. Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait, supported by Algeria and Libya, two countries in North Africa where production was taking off, suspended shipments to Britain and the United States as a result of their perceived friendliness to Israel. With refineries being shut down and pipelines closed, a nightmare scenario loomed large, with the prospect of substantial shortfalls, sharp price rises and a threat to the global economy.
As it happened, the impact was minimal – because Nasser’s assault failed on the battlefield, but above all because it failed quickly: the ‘six-day war’ was over almost as soon it began, and Nasser and dreams of Arab nationalism were delivered a reality check. The Israeli military, backed by western technology and political support, proved to be a formidable adversary. Neither the west nor its supposed puppet state in the Middle East was ready to suffer a decisive blow just yet.64
For two centuries, the great powers of Europe had struggled and fought each other for control of the region and of the markets that linked the Mediterranean with India and China. The twentieth century saw the recoil of western Europe’s position, and the passing of the baton on to the United States. In some ways, it was entirely appropriate that it was a nation forged from the competition between Britain, France and Spain that took up the mantle of trying to maintain control over the heart of the world. It would prove to be a tough challenge – not least since a new Great Game was about to begin.
23
The Road of Superpower Rivalry
The war of 1967 was a warning shot, a case of muscles being flexed. It was a sign of things to come. Retaining power and influence in the heart of the world was to become increasingly diffic
ult for the west. For Britain, it became impossible. In 1968, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, announced that Britain would withdraw from all its defence commitments east of Suez, including from the Persian Gulf.1 It was now up to the US, itself a vestige and heir of the great age of European empire, to take on the mantle of retaining influence in the Middle East.
A complicated background of intense pressure from all sides meant that this was not easy to achieve. In Iraq in 1961, for example, large areas that were part of the concession granted three decades earlier to the consortium of western producers that made up the Iraq Petroleum Company were nationalised on the basis that they had been left unexploited. Attitudes in Baghdad stiffened further after Prime Minister Qasim had been ousted and then executed in front of television cameras ‘for the whole world to see’. The new hardline regime declared that it was leading ‘the broader struggle to free the Arab nation from the domination of Western imperialism and exploitation by oil monopolists’, and raised transit fees on the Banias pipeline overnight.2
The Soviets watched on with glee. The changes in the Middle East and the rising tide of anti-western sentiment had been followed carefully in Moscow. Since the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, one CIA report noted, the USSR ‘has followed a consistent course . . . seeking, as opportunities arose, to extend its political and military influence into a region of traditional Russian concern’.3 The Soviet Union now looked to exploit openings enthusiastically, setting about building its own network of relations stretching from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush, from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf.
This was partly the result of political brinkmanship between the two superpowers. Small successes were magnified into major propaganda victories, as was clear from the case of Soviet financial and technical support for the Rumaila oilfield in Iraq. The newspaper Izvestiya was ecstatic in its coverage, trumpeting a new benchmark in the positive co-operation between ‘Arab and socialist nations’, pointedly remarking on how keen the USSR was to develop ‘a national oil industry for the Arabs’. In contrast, the paper went on, western ‘plans to control the oil of the Arabs are falling apart’.4
The 1960s was a period when there was a distinct ramping up of the horizons of the superpowers – and not only in the centre of Asia. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union’s support for revolutionary Cuba, which included a planned programme to station nuclear warheads on the island, almost resulted in war. Following a tense showdown at sea, Soviet ships were finally recalled rather than break through a perimeter set up by US Navy vessels. Confrontation that had flared up in the Far East in the Korean peninsula at the end of the Second World War broke out again, this time in Vietnam with effects spilling into Cambodia and Laos, where the US became embroiled in an ugly and costly war that appeared to many Americans to be a battle between the forces of the free world and those of totalitarian Communism. The full-blooded commitment of substantial numbers of ground troops did not convince others, and rising disillusionment with Vietnam became a rallying point for the emerging counter-culture movement.
As the situation in South-East Asia worsened, there was a flurry of activity as Moscow sought to take advantage of the growing disenchantment with the US, which was so strong that Ayatollah Khomeini could declare in 1964: ‘Let the American President know that in the eyes of the Iranian people he is the most repellent member of the human race.’5 This disenchantment was not limited to opposition figures, clerics and populist demagogues. The President of neighbouring Iraq was prepared to refer to British and American oilmen as ‘bloodsuckers’, while mainstream newspapers in Baghdad started to describe the west as imperialist, Zionist or even imperialistic-Zionist.6
Despite the hostility of such statements and the fertile ground they fell on, attitudes to the west were not all negative. In truth, the issue was not that the United States and to a lesser extent Britain were reviled for their supposed interference in the affairs of the countries sprawling from the Mediterranean eastwards and for being willing to line the pockets of a corrupt elite. Rather, the rhetoric masked the imperatives of a new reality where a region that had become peripheral over the course of several centuries was re-emerging as a result of the natural resources lying in its soil, the plentiful supply of customers willing to pay for them and rising demand. This fuelled ambitions, and in particular the demand not to be circumscribed by outside interests and influences. It was ironic, then, that a new battleground now emerged where the superpowers jostled for position as part of a new Great Game, seeking to exploit each other’s weaknesses.
Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan were delighted to be awarded soft loans to buy Soviet weapons and to have highly qualified advisers and technicians dispatched from Moscow to build installations that might prove useful to their wider strategic ambitions. These included the deep-water port at Umm Qasr on the Persian Gulf, but also six military airfields in Iraq, which US intelligence quickly realised could be used ‘to support a Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean’.7
This was part of Moscow’s attempt to build its own series of contacts and alliances to rival that of the Americans. Not surprisingly, then, Soviet policies were identical to those that had been pursued by Washington since the Second World War, whereby the US established a number of locations that allowed them to keep one eye on the security of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean and another on either monitoring Soviet activities or creating forward attack bases. This was now replicated by the USSR. Soviet warships were redeployed to the Indian Ocean at the end of the 1960s to support new revolutionary regimes that had taken power in Sudan, Yemen and Somalia following years of careful cultivation by Moscow. This gave the Soviets an enviable series of footholds in Aden, Mogadishu and Berbera.8 The USSR therefore acquired the capability to throttle access to the Suez canal, something that US policy planners had feared for years.9
The CIA watched carefully as the Soviets systematically assisted the fishing, agricultural and other industries across the Indian Ocean area, including East Africa and the Gulf. This included training fishermen, developing harbour facilities and the sale or rental of fishing vessels at highly competitive prices. Such gestures of goodwill were reciprocated with free port access in Iraq, Mauritius and Somalia, as well as in Aden and Sanaa.10 The Soviets also devoted considerable efforts to cultivating Iraq and India. In the case of the latter, the USSR supplied armaments that accounted for more than three-quarters of all New Delhi’s military procurement imported from abroad in the 1960s – in quantities that rose throughout the following decade.11 Sales included some of Moscow’s most sophisticated weaponry, including Atoll and Styx missiles, MiG-27 and MiG-29 fighters, and state-of-the-art destroyers, while India was also favoured with a licence to produce military aircraft that had been denied to the Chinese.12
Looking to the left and the right came naturally to peoples in this part of the world, and it continued to prove rewarding. In Afghanistan, a word was coined for the practice of seeking support from both superpowers: literally meaning ‘without sides’, bi-tarafi became a tenet of a foreign policy that sought to balance the contributions made by the USSR with those of the US. As one shrewd observer put it in a classic account published in 1973, Afghan army officers who had been sent on formal training programmes in the Soviet Union and the United States that were designed to build ties and develop relationships with future leaders would compare notes when they returned home. One thing in particular stood out for officers who had been talent-spotted: ‘neither the USA nor the USSR turned out to be the paradises painted by their respective propaganda’. Rather than evangelising new converts, then, the overwhelming response of those sent abroad was to return home convinced that Afghanistan should remain independent.13
Similar impulses were at work in Iran where the Shah was telling anyone who would listen that he was his country’s saviour. ‘My visions were miracles that saved the country,’ he told one interviewer. ‘My reign has saved the country, and it has done so because God was on my side.’ When asked why no one dar
ed even to mention his name on the streets of Teheran, he did not seem to consider that this might be because of the terrifying apparatus of the police state that kept him in power. ‘I should suppose’, he said, that they do not talk about the Shah ‘from exaggerated respect’.14
If this was a case of self-delusion, then so too was the posturing about Communists. ‘Communism is against the law,’ the Shah told his interviewer defiantly. ‘It follows that a Communist is not a political prisoner but a common criminal . . . they’re people we must eliminate.’ In almost the next breath, however, he declared proudly that Iran enjoyed ‘good diplomatic and trade relations with the Soviet Union’.15 This said everything about the delicate balance across the spine of Asia that had to be sought during the Cold War. The Shah had learnt from experience that antagonising his powerful neighbour to the north could have serious repercussions. It was in his interests, therefore, to take support from the United States and the west while at the same time sweetening relations with Moscow. As a result, he was perfectly happy to enter into a series of agreements to buy rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-aircraft guns and heavy artillery from the USSR, and to allow Soviet technicians to help expand the major steelwork plant in Isfahan.
But while this was entirely understandable realpolitik, it demonstrated the difficulties of the position which the countries of this region found themselves in. Any alignment with one of the superpowers prompted a response from the other; any attempt to keep at a distance could have disastrous consequences and could easily create openings for opposition figures. In 1968, yet another coup in Iraq gave the Soviet Union the chance to strengthen ties that it had worked hard to develop over the previous decade. These now bore fruit with a fifteen-year Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation, signed in 1972, which was seen in London as being as good as a formal ‘alliance with the Soviet Union’.16
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Page 55